Quotulatiousness

February 19, 2025

HBO’s Rome – Ep 4 “Stealing from Saturn” – History and Story

Filed under: Europe, History, Media — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Adrian Goldsworthy. Historian and Novelist
Published 28 Aug 2024

Vidcaps taken from the dvd collection and copyright belongs to the respective makers and channels.
Transcript

February 17, 2025

QotD: Decisive factors in the Roman victory over the Seleucids

Zooming out even further, why Roman victory in the Roman-Seleucid War? I think there are a few clear factors here.

Ironically for a post covering land battles, the most important factor may be naval: Rome’s superior naval resources (and better naval allies), which gave the Romans an enormous operational advantage against Antiochus. In the initial phase, the Romans could get more troops to Greece than the king could, while further on, Roman naval supremacy allowed Roman armies to operate in Anatolia in force (while Antiochus, even had he won in Greece, had no hope of operating in Italy). Neutralizing Antiochus’ navy both opened up options for the Romans and closed down options for Antiochus, setting the conditions for Roman victory. It would have also neutered any Roman defeat. If Antiochus wins at Magnesia, he cannot then immediately go on the offensive, after all: he has merely bought perhaps a year or two of time to rebuild his navy and try to contest the Aegean again. Given the astounding naval mobilizations Rome had shown itself capable of in the third century, one cannot imagine Antiochus was likely to win that contest.

Meanwhile, the Romans had better allies, in part as a consequence of the Romans being better at getting allies. The Romans benefit substantially from allied Achaean, Pergamese and Rhodian ships and troops, as well as support from the now-humbled Philip V of Macedon and even supplies and auxiliaries from Numidia and Carthage. Alliance-management is a fairly consistent Roman strength and it shows here. It certainly seems to help that Roman protestations that they had little interest in a permanent presence in Greece seem to have been somewhat true; Rome won’t set up a permanent provincia in Macedonia until 146 (though the Romans do expect their influence to predominate before then). By contrast, Antiochus III, clearly bent on rebuilding Alexander’s empire, was a more obvious threat to the long-term independence and autonomy of Greek states like the Pergamum or Rhodes.

Finally, there is the remarkable Seleucid glass jaw. The Romans, after all, sustained a defeat very much like Magnesia against Hannibal in 216 (the Battle of Cannae) and kept fighting. By contrast, Antiochus is forced into a humiliating peace after Magnesia, in which he cedes all of Anatolia, gives up any kind of navy and is forced to pay a crippling financial indemnity which will fatally undermine the reign of his successor and son Seleucus IV (leading to his assassination in 175, leading to yet further Seleucid weakness). Part of this glass jaw may have been political: after Magnesia, Antiochus’ own aristocrats seem pretty well done with their king’s adventurism against Rome.

But at the same time, some of it was clearly military. Antiochus didn’t have a second army to fall back on and Magnesia represented essentially a peak “all-call” Seleucid mobilization. A similar defeat at Raphia had forced a similarly unfavorable peace earlier in his reign, after all. Part of the problem, I would argue, is that the Seleucids needed their army for more than just war: they needed it to enforce taxation and tribute on their own recalcitrant subjects. As a result, no Seleucid king could afford to “go for broke” the way the Roman Republic could, nor could the Seleucids ever fully mobilize the massive population of their realm. The very nature of the Hellenistic kingdom’s ethnic hierarchy made fully tapping the potential resources of the kingdom impossible.

As a result, while Antiochus III was not an incompetent general, he ruled a deceptively weak giant. Massive revenues were offset by equally massive security obligations and the Seleucids seem to have been perenially cash strapped (with a nasty habit of looting temples to make up for it). The very nature of the Seleucid Empire – like the Ptolemaic one – as an ethnic empire where Macedonians ruled and non-Macedonians were ruled kept Antiochus from being able to fully mobilize his subjects. It may also explain why so many of those light infantry auxiliaries seem to have run off without much of a fight. Eumenes and his Pergamese troops fought for their independence, the Romans for the greater glory of Rome and the socii for their own status and loot within the Roman system, but what could Antiochus offer a subjected Carian or Cilician except a paycheck and a future of continued subjugation? That’s not much to die for.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Phalanx’s Twilight, Legion’s Triumph, Part IVb: Antiochus III”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2024-04-05.

February 10, 2025

QotD: The Roman Republic versus the heirs of Alexander the Great

Last time, we finished our look at the third-century successes of the phalanx with the career of Pyrrhus of Epirus, concluding that even when handled very well with a very capable body of troops, Hellenistic armies struggled to achieve the kind of decisive victories they needed against the Romans to achieve strategic objectives. Instead, Pyrrhus was able to achieve a set of indecisive victories (and a draw), which was simply not anywhere close to enough in view of the tremendous strategic depth of Rome.

Well, I hope you got your fill of Hellenistic armies winning battles because it is all downhill from here (even when we’re fighting uphill). For the first half of the second century, from 200 to 168, the Romans achieve an astounding series of lopsided victories against both (Antigonid) Macedonian and Seleucid Hellenistic armies, while simultaneously reducing several other major players (Pergamon, Egypt) to client states. And unlike Pyrrhus, the Romans are in a position to “convert” on each victory, successfully achieving their strategic objectives. It was this string of victories, so shocking in the Greek world, that prompted Polybius to write his own history, covering the period from 264 to 146 to try to explain what the heck happened (much of that history is lost, but Polybius opens by suggesting that anyone paying attention to the First Punic War (264-241) ought to have seen this coming).

That said, this series of victories is complex. Of the five major engagements (The River Aous, Cynoscephalae, Thermopylae, Magnesia, and Pydna) Rome commandingly wins all of them, but each battle is strange in its own way. So we’re going to look at each battle and also take a chance to lay out a bit of the broader campaigns, asking at each stage why does Rome win here? Both in the tactical sense (why do they win the battle) and also in the strategic sense (why do they win the war).

We’re going to start with the war that brought Rome truly into the political battle royale of the Eastern Mediterranean, the Second Macedonian War (200-196). Rome was acting, in essence, as an interloper in long-running conflicts between the various successor dynasties of Alexander the Great as well as smaller Greek states caught in the middle of these larger brawling empires. Briefly, the major players are the Ptolemaic Dynasty, in Egypt (the richest state), the Seleucid Dynasty out of Syria and Mesopotamia (the largest state) and the Antigonid Kingdom in Macedonia (the smallest and weakest state, but punching above its weight with the best man-for-man army). The minor but significant players are the Attalid dynasty in Pergamon, a mid-sized Hellenistic power trapped between the ambitions of the big players, two broad alliances of Greek poleis in the Greek mainland the Aetolian and Achaean Leagues, and finally a few freewheeling poleis, notably Athens and Rhodes. The large states are trying to dominate the system, the small states trying to retain their independence and everyone is about to get rolled by the Romans.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Phalanx’s Twilight, Legion’s Triumph, Part IVa: Philip V”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2024-03-15.

January 29, 2025

QotD: Did the customary Dictatorship work in the Roman Republic?

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

Yes, frankly.

Of the roughly 85 dictatorships in the “customary” period from 501 to 202, 0% of them seized control of the state, led or participated in a major violent insurrection. […]

How could an office with such extensive powers be so apparently stable? Dictators under the customary system simply lacked the tools necessary to overthrow the state even if they wanted to. As noted, all of the other magistrates remained in office and while they were notionally subordinate to the dictator, they didn’t need to be cooperative (and surely wouldn’t be if a dictator announced he was staying on after the end of his term). Dictators couldn’t legislate on their own and so couldn’t alter the constitutional structure of the Republic itself. Moreover, one key magistracy, that of the tribunes of the plebs, remained distinctly outside of the dictator’s power and by the third century were equipped with a range of highly disruptive powers and a mandate to protect the interests of the Roman people which would justify them blocking a dictator’s efforts to seize power.

The dictator’s command of the army was likewise not an effective tool to dominate the state. The Roman army of the early and middle republics was a citizen militia, so the dictator would need to convince the Roman voting assemblies to abolish themselves. Moreover, with a mere six-month command, no dictator was likely to remain in command of his army long enough to foster the kind of iron-clad loyalty he would need to then direct that army against the rest of the state.

In terms of allowing rapid and unified response to a fast-moving crisis, the dictatorship also seems generally to have worked well, allowing the Romans to temporarily suspend whatever political gridlock might exist, but in a context that rarely allowed for one side to win the gridlock by suspending it, since the causa [the specific, named problem that triggered the appointment] of the dictator was limited and generally externally directed. In cases where a dictator was appointed to deal with internal dissent, they often still had to compromise in the face of popular discontent because they lacked the tools to coerce the political system; P. Manlius Capitolinus (dict. 368) had to push a major compromise in order to get the plebs back on board after the previous dictator, M. Furius Camillus, had attempted to strong-arm the issue. On the flipside, Manius Valerius (dict. 494), being appointed dictator in 494 to deal with a military crisis and a successio plebis, defeated the external enemy and then suggested the senate compromise internally, which it refused to do. He simply resigned his dictatorship, to the acclaim of the people.

While the powers of the dictator are often stated as being “absolute” or “extreme” (and were, compared to the power of a consul), the customary dictatorship was essentially just a unitary executive, something that quite a lot of modern governments have. Customary Roman dictators were, if anything, less powerful than most modern Prime Ministers or the modern President of the United States. Like many ancient civic governments, the Roman Republic was constructed with a lot of worry about monarchy and thus tended to keep its offices short in duration and institutionally weak and the dictatorship was no exception.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Roman Dictatorship: How Did It Work? Did It Work?”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-03-18.

January 28, 2025

“Like Sulla, [Trump]’s been taking names, and he has a list”

Filed under: Government, History, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

So-called “Sulla” (probably from the time of Augustus) after a portrait of an important Roman from the 2nd century BC.
From the Glyptothek collection via Wikimedia Commons.

The comparison of Trump to the man who prefigured Julius Caesar in the final years of the Roman Republic is, we should all passionately hope, more rhetorical than realistic. Sulla came to power in Rome after being, in his view, illegally removed from his rightful position, and he came wading through the blood of his enemies. He then created a brand new position for himself, using the old and disused title of “dictator”, but piling on far more power than any earlier dictator had held (the irregular election was held in hearing distance of where Sulla’s army was busy executing many of his captured enemies). He used his power to reconfigure and codify the rules by which the Republic was run, to “restore the Republic” to what he imagined was a purer, better nation. He set a precedent that would be followed a generation later by Julius Caesar and the end of the Republic was clearly in sight.

Trump has come again to power, from which he believes he was illegally removed, although he has not been wading through the blood of his enemies. He has been using the powers of his position very actively, but thus far seems to be staying within the bounds of the Constitution (mostly). On his Substack, Glenn Reynolds says that the second Trump presidency will be much worse for his political opponents than if he’d won his second term in 2020, and I think that’s the right analysis:

Well, if you follow me here, you probably don’t need to be told how fast Trump is moving. But I have a few other thoughts here that didn’t fit the column. The main point is that the Democrats’ over-the-top rule-breaking, norm-busting attacks on Trump have backfired bigly. I like to use the Tolkien quote, “oft evil will shall evil mar”, and that happened here for sure.

A second consecutive Trump term would have been better, from my perspective, than Biden’s sham administration, obviously. But it certainly would have been better for the Democrats than this second non-consecutive term. Trump spent the past four years not only planning his comeback, but planning what he would do after his comeback.

In his first term he was too busy running to plan, and he was naïve about how Washington and the federal government – and the Republican Party – actually work. Not so much anymore. I’ve seen people – to continue the Tolkien reference – compare him to Gandalf the White coming back after battling the Balrog, and that’s not a bad analogy.

Then there’s this one, which pretty much sums up what I’m saying here. Like Sulla, he’s been taking names, and he has a list.

And there’s this:

It really is. Trump could get carried away with this stuff at some point, but at present he seems to be settling all family business in a very measured way. Where the opening months of the first Trump Administration were confused – Omarosa in the White House? – this time around he’s realized that personnel is policy, and he’s clearly done a lot of thinking about who his personnel will be. And it’s no coincidence that he’s put a lot of people who were victims of various government agencies in charge of those same agencies. Not much danger of them going native, I think.

A second consecutive Trump term would have delayed the advance of the left/Democrat agenda, and pushed it back in some minor ways, but would probably have ultimately been no more than a bump in the road for that agenda. This Trump term will likely burn it down.

January 27, 2025

The Rise of Augustus – The Conquered And The Proud 12

Adrian Goldsworthy. Historian and Novelist
Published 4 Sept 2024

Continiung the series “The Conquered and the proud”, we come to the early days of the young Octavian, the man who would become Caesar Augustus and found the Principate, the rule of emperors — a system that would last for centuries and see the Roman empire reach the pinnacle of its prosperity and population.
Just eighteen years old when Julius Caesar was murdered, his great nephew was named as principal heir in his will. This mean that he took his name and the bulk of his property. However, this ambitious teenager took it to mean that he should also succeed to Caesar’s power. Incredibly, after fourteen years of bloody struggle, he did just that.

January 17, 2025

QotD: Foraging for supplies in pre-modern armies

We should start with the sort of supplies our army is going to need. The Romans neatly divided these into four categories: food, fodder, firewood and water each with its own gathering activities (called by the Romans frumentatio, pabulatio, lignatio and aquatio respectively; on this note Roth op. cit. 118-140), though gathering food and fodder would be combined whenever possible. That’s a handy division and also a good reflection of the supply needs of armies well into the gunpowder era. We can start with the three relatively more simple supplies, all of which were daily concerns but also tended to be generally abundant in areas that armies were.

For most armies in most conditions, water was available in sufficient quantities along the direction of march via naturally occurring bodies of water (springs, rivers, creeks, etc.). Water could still be an important consideration even where there was enough to march through, particularly in determining the best spot for a camp or in denying an enemy access to local water supplies (such as, famously at the Battle of Hattin (1187)). And detailing parties of soldiers to replenish water supplies was a standard background activity of warfare; the Romans called this process aquatio and soldiers so detailed were aquatores (not a permanent job, to be clear, just regular soldiers for the moment sent to get water), though generally an army could simply refill its canteens as it passed naturally occurring watercourses. Well organized armies could also dig wells or use cisterns to pre-position water supplies, but this was rarely done because it was tremendously labor intensive; an army demanded so much water that many wells would be necessary to allow the army to water itself rapidly enough (the issue is throughput, not well capacity – you can only lift so many buckets of so much water in an hour in a single well). For the most part armies confined their movements to areas where water was naturally available, managing, at most, short hops through areas where it was scarce. If there was no readily available water in an area, agrarian armies simply couldn’t go there most of the time.

Like water, firewood was typically a daily concern. In the Roman army this meant parties of firewood forages (lignatores) were sent out regularly to whatever local timber was available. Fortunately, local firewood tended to be available in most areas because of the way the agrarian economy shaped the countryside, with stretches of forest separating settlements or tended trees for firewood near towns. Since an army isn’t trying to engage in sustainable arboriculture, it doesn’t usually need to worry about depleting local wood stocks. Moreover, for our pre-industrial army, they needn’t be picky about the timber for firewood (as opposed to timber for construction). Like water gathering, collecting firewood tends to crop up in our sources when conditions make it unusually difficult – such as if an army is forced to remain in one place (often for a siege) and consequently depletes the local supply (e.g. Liv. 36.22.10) or when the presence of enemies made getting firewood difficult without using escorts or larger parties (e.g. Ps.-Caes. BAfr. 10). Sieges could be especially tricky in this regard because they add a lot of additional timber demand for building siege engines and works; smart defenders might intentionally try to remove local timber or wood structures to deny an approaching army as part of a scorched earth strategy (e.g. Antioch in 1097). That said apart from sieges firewood availability, like water availability is mostly a question of where an army can go; generals simply long stay in areas where gathering firewood would be impossible.

Then comes fodder for the animals. An army’s animals needed a mix of both green fodder (grass, hay) and dry fodder (barley, oats). Animals could meet their green fodder requirements by grazing at the cost of losing marching time, or the army could collect green fodder as it foraged for food and dry fodder. As you may recall, cut grain stalks can be used as green fodder and so even an army that cannot process grains in the fields can still quite easily use them to feed the animals, alongside barley and oats pillaged from farm storehouses. The Romans seem to have preferred gathering their fodder from the fields rather than requisitioning it from farmers directly (Caes. BG 7.14.4) but would do either in a pinch. What is clear is that much like gathering water or firewood this was a regular task a commander had to allot and also that it often had to be done under guard to secure against attacks from enemies (thus you need one group of soldiers foraging and another group in fighting trim ready to drive off an attack). Fodder could also be stockpiled when needed, which was normally for siege operations where an army’s vast stock of animals might deplete local grass stocks while the army remained encamped there. Crucially, unlike water and firewood, both forms of fodder were seasonal: green fodder came in with the grasses in early spring and dry fodder consists of agricultural products typically harvested in mid-summer (barley) or late spring (oats).

All of which at last brings us to the food, by which we mostly mean grains. Sources discussing army foraging tend to be heavily focused on food and we’ll quickly see why: it was the most difficult and complex part of foraging operations in most of the conditions an agrarian army would operate. The first factor that is going to shape foraging operations is grain processing. [S]taple grains (especially wheat, barley and later rye) make up the vast bulk of the calories an army (and it attendant non-combatants) are eating on the march. But, as we’ve discussed in more detail already, grains don’t grow “ready to eat” and require various stages of processing to render them edible. An army’s foraging strategy is going to be heavily impacted by just how much of that processing they are prepared to do internally.

This is one area where the Roman army does appear to have been quite unusual: Roman armies could and regularly did conduct the entire grain processing chain internally. This was relatively rare and required both a lot of coordination and a lot of materiel in the form of tools for each stage of processing. As a brief refresher, grains once ripe first have to be reaped (cut down from the stalks), then threshed (the stalks are beaten to shake out the seeds) and winnowed (the removal of non-edible portions), then potentially hulled (removing the inedible hull of the seed), then milled (ground into a powder, called flour, usually by the grinding actions of large stones), then at last baked into bread or a biscuit or what have you.

It is possible to roast unmilled grain seeds or to boil either those seeds or flour in water to make porridge in order to make them edible, but turning grain into bread (or biscuits or crackers) has significant nutritional advantages (it breaks down some of the plant compounds that human stomachs struggle to digest) and also renders the food a lot tastier, which is good for morale. Consequently, while armies will roast grains or just make lots of porridge in extremis, they want to be securing a consistent supply of bread. The result is that ideally an army wants to be foraging for grain products at a stage where it can manage most or all of the remaining steps to turn those grains into food, ideally into bread.

As mentioned, the Romans could manage the entire processing chain themselves. Roman soldiers had sickles (falces) as part of their standard equipment (Liv. 42.64.2; Josephus BJ 3.95) and so could be deployed directly into the fields (Caes. BG 4.32; Liv. 31.2.8, 34.26.8) to reap the grain themselves. It would then be transported into the fortified camp the Romans built every time the army stopped for the night and threshed by Roman soldiers in the safety of the camp (App. Mac. 27; Liv. 42.64.2) with tools that, again, were a standard part of Roman equipment. Roman soldiers were then issued threshed grains as part of their rations, which they milled themselves (or made into a porridge called puls) using “handmills”. These were not small devices, but roughly 27kg (59.5lbs) hand-turned mills (Marcus Junkelmann reconstructed them quite ably); we generally assume that they were probably carried on the mules on the march, one for each contubernium (tent-group of 6-8; cf. Plut. Ant. 45.4). Getting soldiers to do their own milling was a feat of discipline – this is tough work to do by hand and milling a daily ration would take one of the soldiers of the group around two hours. Roman soldiers then baked their bread either in their own campfires (Hdn 4.7.4-6; Dio Cass. 62.5.5) though generals also sometimes prepared food supplies in advance of operations via what seem to be central bakeries. This level of centralization was part and parcel of the unusual sophistication of Roman logistics; it enabled a greater degree of flexibility for Roman armies.

Greek hoplite armies do not seem generally to have been able to reap, thresh or mill grain on the march (on this see J.W. Lee, op. cit.; there’s also a fantastic chapter on the organization of Greek military food supply by Matthew Sears forthcoming in a Brill Companion volume one of these years – don’t worry, when it appears, you will know!). Xenophon’s Ten Thousand are thus frequently forced to resort to making porridge or roast grains when they cannot forage supplies of already-milled-flour; they try hard to negotiate for markets on their route of march so they can just buy food. Famously the Spartan army, despoiling ripe Athenian fields runs out of supplies (Thuc. 2.23); it’s not clear what sort of supplies were lacking but food and fodder seems the obvious choice, suggesting that the Spartans could at best only incompletely utilize the Athenian grain. All of which contributed to the limited operational endurance of hoplite armies in the absence of friendly communities providing supplies.

Macedonian armies were in rather better shape. Alexander’s soldiers seem to have had handmills (note on this Engels, op. cit.) which already provides a huge advantage over earlier Greek armies. Grain is generally (as noted in our series on it) stored and transported after threshing and winnowing but before milling because this is the form in which has the best balance of longevity and compactness. That means that granaries and storehouses are mostly going to contain threshed and winnowed grains, not flour (nor freshly reaped stalks). An army which can mill can thus plunder central points of food storage and then transport all of that food as grain which is more portable and keeps better than flour or bread.

Early modern armies varied quite a lot in their logistical capabilities. There is a fair bit of evidence for cooking in the camp being done by the women of the campaign community in some armies, but also centralized kitchen messes for each company (Lynn op. cit. 124-126); the role of camp women in food production declines as a product of time but there is also evidence for soldiers being assigned to cooking duties in the 1600s. On the other hand, in the Army of Flanders seems to have relied primarily on external merchants (so sutlers, but also larger scale contractors) to supply the pan de munición ration-bread that the army needed, essentially contracting out the core of the food system. Parker (op. cit. 137) notes the Army of Flanders receiving some 39,000 loaves of bread per day from its contractors on average between April 1678 and February of 1679.

That created all sorts of problems. For one, the quality of the pan de munición was highly variable. Unlike soldiers cooking for themselves or their mess-mates, contractors had every incentive to cut corners and did so. Moreover, much of this contracting was done on credit and when Spanish royal credit failed (as it did in 1557, 1560, 1575, 1596, 1607, 1627, 1647 and 1653, Parker op. cit. 125-7) that could disrupt the entire supply system as contractors suddenly found the debts the crown had run up with them “restructured” (via a “Decree of Bankruptcy”) to the benefit of Spain. And of course that might well lead to thousands of angry, hungry, unpaid men with weapons and military training which in turn led to disasters like the Sack of Antwerp (1576), because without those contractors the army could not handle its logistical needs on its own. It’s also hard not to conclude that this structure increased the overall cost of the Army of Flanders (which was astronomical) because it could never “make the war feed itself” in the words of Cato the Elder (Liv 34.9.12; note that it was rare even for the Romans for a war to “feed itself” entirely through forage, but one could at least defray some costs to the enemy during offensive operations). That said this contractor supplied bread also did not free the Army of Flanders from the need to forage (or even pillage) because – as noted last time – their rations were quite low, leading soldiers to “offset” their low rations with purchase (often using money gained through pillage) or foraging.

Of course added to this are all sorts of food-stuffs that aren’t grain: meat, fruits, vegetables, cheeses, etc. Fortunately an army needs a lot less of these because grains make up the bulk of the calories eaten and even more fortunately these require less processing to be edible. But we should still note their importance because even an army with a secure stockpile of grain may want to forage the surrounding area to get supplies of more perishable foodstuffs to increase food variety and fill in the nutritional gaps of a pure-grain diet. The good news for our army is that the places they are likely to find food (small towns and rural villages) are also likely to be sources of these supplementary foods. By and large that is going to mean that armies on the march measure their supplies and their foraging in grain and then supplement that grain with whatever else they happen to have obtained in the process of getting that grain. Armies in peacetime or permanent bases may have a standard diet, but a wartime army on the march must make do with whatever is available locally.

So that’s what we need: water, fodder, firewood and food; the latter mostly grains with some supplements, but the grain itself probably needs to be in at least a partially processed form (threshed and sometimes also milled), in order to be useful to our army. And we need a lot of all of these things: tons daily. But – and this is important – notice how all of the goods we need (water, firewood, fodder, food) are things that agrarian small farmers also need. This is the crucial advantage of pre-industrial logistics; unlike a modern army which needs lots of things not normally produced or stockpiled by a civilian economy in quantity (artillery shells, high explosives, aviation fuel, etc.), everything our army needs is a staple product or resource of the agricultural economy.

Finally we need to note in addition to this that while we generally speak of “forage” for supplies and “pillage” or “plunder” for armies making off with other valuables, these were almost always connected activities. Soldiers that were foraging would also look for valuables to pillage: someone stealing the bread a family needs to live is not going to think twice about also nicking their dinnerware. Sadly we must also note that very frequently the valuables that soldiers looted were people, either to be sold into slavery, held for ransom, pressed into work for the army, or – and as I said we’re going to be frank about this – abducted for the purpose of sexual assault (or some combination of the above).

And so a rural countryside, populated by farms and farmers is in essence a vast field of resources for an army. How they get them is going to depend on both the army’s organization and capabilities and the status of the local communities.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Logistics, How Did They Do It, Part II: Foraging”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-07-29.

January 16, 2025

Augustus and the Roman Army – the first emperor and the creation of the professional army

Filed under: Europe, History, Military — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Adrian Goldsworthy. Historian and Novelist
Published 7 Aug 2024

We take a look at Caesar Augustus, the first emperor (or princeps) of Rome and the great nephew of Julius Caesar. Ancient sources — and Shakespeare and Hollywood — depict him as politician and no soldier in contrast to Mark Antony. How true is this? More importantly, how did the man who created the imperial system and re-shaped society change the Roman army?

This video is based on a talk I gave in 2014 at the Roman Legionary Museum in Caerleon — a museum and adjacent sites, well worth a visit for anyone in or near South Wales.

January 13, 2025

The Writings of Cicero – Cicero and the Power of the Spoken Word

seangabb
Published 25 Aug 2024

This lecture is taken from a course I delivered in July 2024 on the Life and Writings of Cicero. It covers these topics:

• Introduction – 00:00:00
• The Deficiencies of Modern Oratory – 00:01:20
• The Greeks and Oratory – 00:06:38
• Athens: Government by Lottery and Referendum – 00:08:10
• The Power of the Greek Language – 00:17:41
• The General Illiteracy of the Ancients – 00:21:06
• Greek Oratory: Lysias, Gorgias, Demosthenes – 00:28:38
• Macaulay as Speaker – 00:34:44
• Attic and Asianic Oratory – 00:36:56
• The Greek Conquest of Rome – 00:39:26
• Roman Oratory – 00:43:23
• Cicero: Early Life – 00:43:23
• Cicero in Greece – 00:46:03
• Cicero: Early Legal Career – 00:46:03
• Cicero: Defence of Roscius – 00:47:49
• Cicero as Orator (Sean Reads Latin) – 00:54:45
• Government of the Roman Empire – 01:01:16
• The Government of Sicily – 01:03:58
• Verres in Sicily – 01:06:54
• The Prosecution of Verres – 01:11:20
• Reading List – 01:24:28
(more…)

January 10, 2025

Rome – Part 6, The Second Punic War, 218-201 BC

Filed under: Africa, Europe, History, Military — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

seangabb
Published 22 Aug 2024

This course provides an exploration of Rome’s formative years, its rise to power in the Mediterranean, and the exceptional challenges it faced during the wars with Carthage.

Lecture 6: The Second Punic War (218-201 BC)

• Carthaginian Expansion into Spain
• Hannibal Takes Over in Spain – War Declared
• Hannibal and the Invasion of Italy
• The Three Shattering Defeats
• Roman Strategy for Victory
• Compete and Overwhelming Roman Victory
• Rome Emerges as the Mediterranean Superpower
(more…)

January 7, 2025

Caesar’s dictatorship and the Ides of March – The Conquered And The Proud 11

Adrian Goldsworthy. Historian and Novelist
Published 31 Jul 2024

Continuing “The conquered and the proud”, this time we look at Julius Caesar as dictator in Rome, about his activities and reforms and his murder on the 15th March — The Ides of March — in 44 BC. We talk about Brutus, Cassius and the other conspirators and what motivated them.

January 5, 2025

QotD: The customary Dictatorship in the Roman Republic before 82BC

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

It’s important to note at the outset that the Romans had no written constitution and indeed most of the rules for how the Roman Republic functioned were, well, customary. The Roman term for this was the mos maiorum, the “custom of the ancestors”, but Roman practice here isn’t that different from how common law and precedent guide the functioning of something like the British government (which also lacks a written constitution). Later Roman writers, particularly Cicero, occasionally offer theoretical commentary on the “rules” of the Republic (as a retrojected, ideal version), but just as often their observations do not actually conform to the practice we can observe from earlier periods. In practice, the idea here was that the “constitution” of the Republic consisting in doing things as they had always been done, or at least as they were understood to have always been done.

Consequently, as historians, we adopt the formulation that the Republic is what the Republic does – that is that one determines the rules of offices and laws based on how they are implemented, not through a hard-and-fast firm legal framework. Thus “how does the dictatorship work?” is less a question of formal rules and more a question of, “how did the eighty-odd Roman dictatorships work?”

The basic idea behind the office was that the dictator was a special official, appointed only in times of crisis (typically a military crisis), who could direct the immediate solution to that crisis. Rome’s government was in many ways unlike a modern government; in most modern governments the activities of the government are carried out by a large professional bureaucracy which typically reports to a single executive, be that a Prime Minister or a President or what have you. By contrast, the Roman Republic divided the various major tasks between a bunch of different magistrates, each of whom was directly elected and notionally had full authority to carry out their duties within that sphere, independent of any of the other magistrates. In crude analogy, it would be as if every member of the United States cabinet was directly elected and none of them reported to any of the rest of them but instead all of them were advised by Congress (but in a non-binding manner). Notionally, the more senior magistrates (particularly the consuls) could command more junior magistrates, but this wasn’t a “direct-report” sort of relationship, but rather an unusual imposition of a more senior magistrate on a less senior one, governed as much by the informal auctoritas of the consul as by law.

In that context, you can see the value, when rapid action was required, of consolidating the direction of a given crisis into a single individual. This is, after all, why we have single executive magistrates or officials in most countries. So, assuming you have a crisis, how does this process work?

The typical first step is that the Senate would issue its non-binding advice, a senatus consultum, suggesting that one or both of the consuls appoint a dictator. The consuls could ignore this direct, but almost never did (save once in 431, Liv. 4.26.5-7). The consuls would then have to nominate someone; they might agree on the choice (which would make things simple) or one of them might be indisposed (out of the city, etc.), which would leave the choice to the one that remained. If both consuls were present and did not agree, they’d draw lots to determine who got to pick (which happens in the aforementioned instance in 431 after the tribunes got the consuls of that year to relent and pick someone, Liv. 4.26.11).

The nominating consul could pick anyone except himself; if you, as consul, wanted to be dictator, you would need your co-consul to so nominate you. There were no formal requirements; of course nominations tended to go to experienced commanders, which tended to mean former consuls, but this was not a requirement. Publius Claudius Pulcher (cos. 249), enraged when the Senate directed him to appoint a dictator (because of his own bungled military command) infamously nominated his own freedman, Claudius Glicia, as dictator (Liv. Per. 19.2; Seut. Tib. 2.2), which was apparently a bridge too far; Glicia was forced to abdicate but his name was duly entered onto the Fasti because the appointment was valid, if ill-advised (despite the fact that, as a freedman, Glicia would have been ineligible to run for any [office]). Nevertheless, dictators were usually former consuls.

Once the name was picked, in at some cases the appointment may have been confirmed by a vote of the Comitia Curiata, Rome’s oldest voting assembly, which was responsible for conferring imperium (the power to command armies and organize law courts; essentially “the power of the kings”) on magistrates; not all magistrates had imperium (consuls, praetors, proconsuls, propraetors, dictators and their magistri equitum did; quaestors, aediles, tribunes, both plebeian and military, and censors did not). We do not know of any instance where the Comitia Curiata put the kibosh on the appointment of a dictator, so this step was little more than a rubber-stamp, and may have been entirely optional (Lintott, op. cit., 110, n. 75), but it may have also reflected the notion that all imperium had to be conferred by the people through a voting assembly. It is often hard to know with clarity about pro forma elements of Roman politics because the sources rarely report such things.

The dictator was appointed to respond to a specific issue or causa, the formula for which are occasionally recorded in our sources. The most common was rei gerundae causa, “for the business to be done” which in practice meant a military campaign or crisis. In cases where the consuls were absent (out on campaign), a dictator might also be nominated comitiorum habendorum causa, “for having an assembly”, that is, to preside over elections for the next year’s consuls, so that neither of the current consuls had to rush back to the city to do it. Dictators might also be appointed to do a few religious tasks which required someone with imperium. Less commonly but still significantly, a dictator might be appointed seditionis sedenae causa, “to quell sedition”; only one instance clearly under this causa is known, P. Manlius Capitolinus in 368, but several other instances, e.g. L. Quinctius Cincinnatus in 439, also dealt with internal matters. Finally, once in 216, Marcus Fabius Buteo held the office of dictator senatus legendi causa, “to enroll the Senate”, as the Battle of Cannae, earlier that year, had killed so many Senators that new inductions were needed (Liv. 23.23).

The dictator then named a subordinate, the magister equitum (“master of the horse”). The magister equitum was a lieutenant, not a colleague, but interestingly once selected by a dictator could not be unselected or removed, though his office ended when the dictator laid down his powers. We should note Marcus Minucius, magister equitum for Q. Fabius Maximus in 217 as an exception; his selection was forced by the people via a law and his powers were later made equal to Fabius’ powers. This turned out to be a substantial mistake, with Fabius having to bail the less prudent Minucius out at Geronium – the undermining of Fabius generally during 217 was, in retrospect viewed as a disaster, since the abandonment of his strategy led directly to the crushing defeat at Cannae in 216.

One of the ways that legal power was visually communicated in Rome was through lictors, attendants to the magistrates who carried the fasces, a bundle of rods (with an axe inserted when outside the sacred bounds of the city, called the pomerium). More lictors generally indicated a greater power of imperium (consuls, for instance, could in theory give orders to the praetors). Praetors were accompanied by six lictors; consuls by 12. The dictator had 24 lictors when outside of the pomerium to indicate his absolute power in that sphere (that is, in war), but only 12 inside the city. The magister equitum, as the dictator’s subordinate, got only six, like the praetors.

It also seems fairly clear that while dictators had almost complete power within their causa, those powers didn’t necessarily extend beyond it (e.g. Liv. 2.31.9-11, the dictator Manius Valerius, having been made dictator to resolve a military problem, insists to the Senate that he cannot resolve internal strife through his dictatorial powers and instead lays down his office early). The appointment of a dictator did not abolish the other offices (Cicero thinks they do, but he is clearly mistaken on the matter, Cic. De Leg. 3.9, see Lintott, 111). In essence then, the dictator was both a supreme military commander and also expected to coordinate the other magistrates with his greater degree of imperium, though of course in practice the ability to do that is going to substantially depend on the individual dictator’s ability to get cooperation from the other magistrates (but then, on the flip side, the dictator has just been designated as the leader in the crisis, so the social pressure to conform to his vision must have been intense). Notably, dictators could not make a law (a lex) on their own power or legislate by fiat outside of their causa; they could and did call assemblies which could by vote approve laws proposed by a dictator, however.

The dictator served for six months or until the task for which he was appointed was resolved, whichever came first. There is a tendency in teaching Roman history to represent a figure like Cincinnatus, who laid down his dictatorship after just fifteen days in 458, as exceptional but while the extreme shortness of term was exceptional, laying down power was not. Indeed, Cincinnatus (or perhaps a relative) served as dictator again in 439 and again laid down his power, this time in merely 21 days. In practice, the time-limited nature of the dictatorship meant there were few incentives to “run out the clock” on the office since it was so short anyway – better, politically, to solve the crisis quickly and lay down power ostentatiously early and “bank” the political capital than try to run out the period of power, accomplish relatively little and squander a reputation for being public-spirited.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Roman Dictatorship: How Did It Work? Did It Work?”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-03-18.

December 30, 2024

QotD: The auxilia troops of the Imperial Roman armies

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

As we’ve seen, there had always been non-Romans fighting alongside Roman citizens in the army, for as long as we have reliable records to judge the point. In the Republic (until the 80s BC) these had consisted mostly of the socii, Rome’s Italian allies. These were supplemented by troops from whatever allies Rome might have at the time, but there was a key difference in that the socii were integrated permanently into the Roman army’s structure, with an established place in the “org. chart”, compared to the forces of allies who might fight under their own leaders with an ad hoc relationship to the Roman army they were fighting with. The end of the Social War (91-87BC) brought the Italians into the Roman citizen body and thus their soldiers into the legions themselves; it marked the effective end of the socii system, which hadn’t been expanded outside of Italy in any case.

But almost immediately we see the emergence of a new system for incorporating non-Romans, this time provincial non-Romans, into the Roman army. These troops, called auxilia (literally, “helpers”) first appear in the Civil Wars, particularly with Caesar‘s heavy reliance on Gallic cavalry to support his legions (which at this time seem not to have featured their own integrated cavalry support, as they had earlier in the republic and as they would later in the empire). The system is at this point very ad hoc and the auxiliaries here are a fairly small part of Roman armies. But when Augustus sets out to institutionalize and stabilize the Roman army after the Battle of Actium (31BC) and the end of the civil wars, the auxilia emerge as a permanent, institutional part of the Roman army. Clearly, they were vastly expanded; by 23 AD they made up half of the total strength of the Roman army (Tac. Ann. 4.5) a rough equivalence that seems to persist at least as far as the Constitutio Antoniniana in 212.

Of course it was no particular new thing for the Romans to attempt to use their imperial subjects as part of their army. The Achaemenid army had incorporated a bewildering array of subject peoples with their own distinctive fighting styles, a fact that Achaemenid rulers liked to commemorate […] The Seleucid army at Magnesia (189) which the Romans defeated also had numerous non-Macedonian supporting troops: Cappadocians, Galatians, Carians, Cilicians, Illyrians, Dahae, Mysians, Arabs, Cyrtians and Elamites. At Raphia (217) the Ptolemaic army incorporated Egyptian troops into the phalanx for the first time, but also included Cretans, Greek mercenaries, Thracians, Gauls and Libyans, inter alia. Most empires try to do this.

The difference here is the relative performance that Rome gets out of these subject-troops (both the socii and the auxilia). Take those examples. Quite a number of the ethnicities on Xerxes monument both served in the armies of Darius III fighting against Alexander but then swiftly switched sides to Alexander after he won the battles – the Ionians, Egypt, and Babylon greeted Alexander as a liberator (at least initially) which is part of why the Achaemenid Empire could crumble so fast so long as Alexander kept winning battles. Apart from Tyre and Gaza, the tough sieges and guerilla resistance didn’t start until he reached the Persian homeland. The auxiliaries in the Seleucid army at Magnesia famously fell apart under pressure, whereas the Roman socii stuck in the fight as well as the legions; our sources give us no sense at any point that the socii were ever meaningfully weaker fighters than the legions (if anything, Livy sometimes represents them as more spirited, though he has an agenda here, as discussed). And the Ptolemaic decision to arm their Egyptian troops in the Macedonian manner won the battle (turns out, Egyptians could fight just as well as Greeks and Macedonians with the right organization and training) but their subsequent apparent decision not to pay or respect those troops as well as their Macedonians seems to have led quite directly to the “Great Revolt” which crippled the kingdom (there is some scholarly argument about this last point, but while I think Polybius’ pro-Greek, anti-Egyptian bias creeps in to his analysis, he is fundamentally right to see the connection (Plb. 5.107). Polybius thinks it was foolish to arm non-Greeks, but the solution here to saving the Ptolemaic kingdom would have been arming the Egyptians and then incorporating them into the system of rule rather than attempting to keep up the ethnic hierarchy with a now-armed, angry and underpaid underclass. The Greek-speakers-only-club system of Ptolemaic rule was unsustainable in either case, especially with Rome on the horizon).

By contrast, the auxilia were mostly very reliable. The one major exception comes from 69 AD – the “Year of the Four Emperors” to give some sense of its chaos – when the Batavian chieftain Julius Civilis (himself an auxiliary veteran and a Roman citizen) revolted and brought one ala and eight cohorts drawn from the Batavi (probably around 4,500 men or so) with him, out of an empire-wide total of c. 150,000 auxilia (so maybe something like 3.3% of the total auxilia). Indeed, the legions had worse mutinies – the mutiny on the Rhine (Tac. Ann. 1.16ff in 14AD) had involved six legions (c. 30,000 troops, nearly a quarter of Rome’s 25 legions at the time). This despite the fact that the auxilia were often deployed away from the legions, sometimes in their own forts (you’ll see older works of scholarship suggest that the auxilia were kept logistically dependent on the legions, but more recent archaeology on exactly where they were has tended to push against this view). Indeed, the auxilia were often the only military forces (albeit in small detachments) in the otherwise demilitarized “senatorial” provinces (which comprised most of the wealthy, populous “core” of the empire); they could be trusted with the job, provided they weren’t the only forces in their own home provinces (and after 69, they never were). And the auxilia fought hard and quite well. The Romans occasionally won battles with nothing but the auxilia, was with the Battle of Mons Graupius (83 AD, Tac. Agricola 35ff) where the legions were held in reserve and never committed, the auxilia winning the battle effectively on their own. Viewers of the Column of Trajan’s spiral frieze have long noted that the auxilia on the monument (the troop-types are recognizable by their equipment) do most of the fighting, while the legions mostly perform support and combat engineering tasks. We aren’t well informed about the training the auxilia went through, but what we do know points to long-service professionals who were drilled every bit as hard as the famously well-drilled legions. Consequently, they had exactly the sort of professional cohesion that we’ve already discussed.

Why this difference in effectiveness and reliability? The answer is to be found in the difference in the terms under which they served. Rather than being treated as the disposable native auxiliaries of other empires, the Romans acted like the auxilia mattered … because they did.

First of all, the auxilia were paid. Our evidence here is imperfect and still much argued about, but it seems that auxilia were paid 5/6ths of the wages of the legionary counterparts, with the cavalry auxilia actually paid more than the infantry legionaries. While it might sound frustrating to be systematically paid 1/6th less than your legionary equivalent, the legions were paid fairly well. The auxilia probably made in wages about as much as a normal day-laborer, but the wage was guaranteed (something very much not the case for civilian laborers) and while the cost of their rations was deducted from their pay, that deduction was a fixed amount that seems to have been set substantially below the market value of their rations, building in another subsidy. Most auxiliaries seem to have been volunteers, because the deal in being an auxiliary was good enough to attract volunteers looking to serve a full tour of duty (around 20 years; this was a long-service professional army now so joining it meant making a career out of it).

And most importantly, eventually (perhaps under Tiberius or shortly thereafter) the auxilia began to receive a special grant of citizenship on finishing that tour of duty, one which covered the soldier, and any children he might have had by his subsequent spouse (including children had, it seems, before he left the army; Roman soldiers in this period were legally barred from contracting legal marriages while serving, so the grant is framed so that it retroactively legitimizes any children produced in a quasi-marriage when the tour of service is completed). Consequently, whereas a soldier being dragooned or hired as a mercenary into other multi-ethnic imperial armies might end his service and go back to being an oppressed subject, the Roman auxiliary, by virtue of his service, became Roman and thus essentially joined the ruling class at least in ethnic status. Auxiliaries also clearly got a share of the loot when offensive warfare happened and while there is a lot of debate as to if they also received the praemia (the large retirement bonus legionaries got), epigraphically it is pretty clear that auxiliaries who were careful with their money could establish themselves fairly well after their service. I should also note that what we see of auxiliaries suggests they were generally well armed (with some exceptions, which may have more to do with stereotyped depictions of certain kinds of “barbarians” than anything else): metal helmets, mail shirts (an expensive and high quality armor for the period), oval shields, a spear and the spatha – a Roman version of the classic Gallic one-handed cutting sword – are the standard visual indicator in Roman artwork for generic “auxiliaries”. That is actually a fairly high-end kit; it is no surprise that the auxilia could win battles with it.

The attentive should already be noting many of the components of the old socii system now in a new form: the non-Roman troops serve under similar conditions with the Romans, get similar pay and rations (forts occupied by the auxilia show no deviation from the standard Roman military diet), a share of loot and glory and can finally be rewarded for loyal service by being inducted into the Roman citizen body itself (which could mean their sons might well enroll in the legions, a thing which does seem to have happened, as we do see a fair bit of evidence for “military families” over multiple generations).

(For those looking for more detail on the auxilia, a lot of this is drawn from a book I have already recommended, Ian Haynes, Blood of the Provinces: The Roman auxilia and the Making of Provincial Society from Augustus to the Severans (2013). Also still useful for the history of the development of the auxilia is D.B. Saddington, The Development of the Roman auxiliary Forces from Caesar to Vespasian (1982); this is, alas, not an easy book to find as it is – to my knowledge – long out of print, but your library may be able to track down a copy.)

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Queen’s Latin or Who Were the Romans, Part V: Saving and Losing and Empire”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-07-30.

December 27, 2024

The First Triumvirate – The Conquered and the Proud 10

Filed under: Europe, History, Military — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Adrian Goldsworthy. Historian and Novelist
Published Jul 10, 2024

This time we take a look at the Fifties BC, the formation of the first triumvirate, Caesar’s consulship, Clodius and Milo’s organised violence, Caesar in Gaul, Crassus in Syria and Parthia. The context is conquest and Roman success abroad with spiralling chaos at home. A big theme is the build-up to the Civil War and Caesar crossing the Rubicon in January 49 BC. We end with a quick run through the campaigns of the Civil War.

Primary sources include Caesar’s War Commentaries, Cicero’s letters and speeches, Plutarch’s Lives, Appian’s Civil War.

December 11, 2024

Rome: Part 5 – Between Two Wars, 241-218 BC

Filed under: Europe, History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

seangabb
Published Jul 21, 2024

This course provides an exploration of Rome’s formative years, its rise to power in the Mediterranean, and the exceptional challenges it faced during the wars with Carthage.

Lecture 5: Between Two Wars (241-218 BC)

• Carthage after the First Punic War
• Carthaginian Expansion into Spain
• Rome and the East
• Rome and the Gauls
• The Emergence of Hannibal
• The Outbreak of the Second Punic War
(more…)

Older Posts »

Powered by WordPress