Adrian Goldsworthy. Historian and Novelist
Published 23 Oct 2024Today’s question asked about Lucius Cornelius Sulla, the first man to the march his legions against the city of Rome, starting the first — but far from the last — of Rome’s civil wars. He killed a lot of people, broke a lot of laws and conventions, but as dictator also introduced a very “conservative” programme of reforms. How should we judge Sulla, as a selfish, brutal murderer, or as a reluctant rebel and well-intentioned reformer?
March 9, 2025
Sulla: bloodthirsty psycho or saviour of the Republic?
March 7, 2025
QotD: Infantry combat and esprit de corps
What about the personal relationships that are formed in the context of conflict? Surely, the “band of brothers” is a truly universal experience, right (but note on the complexities of Shakespeare’s Henry V)? Surely the social bonds that held Easy Company together in 1944 and 1945 are the same as those from 1415? Or 415?
Well, no. Not quite.
We can approach this question through the idea of cohesion – the moral force that holds a group of combatants together on the battlefield under the intense emotional stresses of combat. The intense bonds that soldiers form in modern armies (particularly those in the European pattern) are not an accident, but a core part of how those armies, institutionally, seek to build cohesion. [W]e discussed briefly the emergence of the extensively drilled and disciplined “mechanical” soldier of Early Modern Europe, noting that this approach wasn’t necessary for the effective use of firearms (the Ottoman Janissaries, for instance, were quite good with firearms, but were not trained and organized in this way), but rather was a product of elite aristocratic (read: officer) disdain for their up-jumped peasant soldiers and thus the assumption by those aristocrats that the only way to get such men to fight effectively was to relentlessly drill them.
Now the funny thing about this system is that it clearly worked, but not for the reasons its aristocratic pioneers believed. It was only really after the Second World War that systematic study began to be made of unit cohesion (e.g. S.L.A. Marshall, Men Against Fire (1947), though subsequent literature on the topic is voluminous and Marshal’s work has its problems, but its conclusions are broadly accepted having been confirmed in subsequent studies) [NR: Some discussion on Marshall and his theories here]. What emerged quite clearly was that it wasn’t “the cause” or patriotism that held troops together under fire, but group cohesion born out of an intense need not to let fellow soldiers in the unit down. In short, what held units together and made them fight more effectively was (in part, there are many conclusions in Men Against Fire) the strong social bonds between comrades.
And, in fact, the drill and discipline of early modern European armies unintentionally did quite a lot of cohesion building things. Soldiers were removed from civilian society (isolation from larger groups builds unit cohesion), split into very small groups (keeping the core group that coheres below Dunbar’s number aids in group cohesion; thus why the platoon is a natural unit size) and then pushed through difficult and unpleasant training (that drill and discipline) creating a sense of unique shared experience and sacrifice. All of which doesn’t render men machines, but it does create strong social bonds within the units that will keep the men fighting even when they care little for their cause (which they generally did in this period; one does not find a super-abundance of patriotism among, say, the Army of Flanders).
And there is a tendency to point to this cohesion, its modern source in “toughening” boot camp and to say, “aha! That is the true universal about effective soldier-warriors!” Except – and you knew there was going to be an except – except it isn’t. Systems built on the use of drill and discipline for the development of unit cohesion through social bonds are actually, historically speaking, quite rare. We see systems like that in use by the Romans from the Middle Republic forward (but significantly faded by the end of late antiquity; the Byzantine army doesn’t seem to function this way), in China from the Han Dynasty onward, in Japan for the ashigaru infantry from the Sengoku period, and in Europe from the Early Modern period. That sounds like a lot, but that is relatively small minority of the historical period and even then in a relatively small minority of places. It is, for instance, a period that only covers about half of the historical period in Western Europe, the place most often associated with this very system of organization (though that association is perhaps unfair to East Asia).
Instead, most societies relied on existing social bonds formed outside of the experience of war for cohesion. Greek hoplite armies, for instance, generally formed up by polis (read: city) and then within those blocks by still smaller and smaller social divisions, so that family and neighbors would be standing shoulder to shoulder in the battle line (Sparta does this through the system of communal messes, the syssitia, but the idea that you fought alongside the men you dined with socially – your neighbors, generally – was perfectly normal in most Greek cities). That was intentional – it allowed the phalanx to cohere through the social pressure not to be seen as a coward before the men who meant the most to you, whose shaming gaze you would have to endure in civilian life. The same pressures, by the well, held together the (mostly volunteer) armies of the American Civil War (on this, see, McPherson, For Cause and Comrades (1997)).
By contrast, “warrior” classes often rely on a sort of class solidarity along with the demand of an individual military aristocrat to be individually militarily excellent. Richard Kaeuper quips of the literature of the medieval knightly class that it was filled with “utterly tireless, almost obsessional emphasis placed on personal prowess” (R.W. Kaeuper, Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe (1999)). We’ve talked a fair bit about the values of mounted aristocrats, both in their role as combatants and in their roles as generals and those values are relatively disconnected from discipline-induced forms of buddy-cohesion. Of course exactly what “good generalship” or “good officership” looks like varies wildly from place to place – Alexander was expected to command his cavalry from the front; Roman emperors rarely took the battlefield and when they did they commanded from the rear since it would be foolish to risk the “brain” of the army in personal combat and in any event someone at the front of a cavalry charge can hardly direct the rest of the army.
One of the things I find most striking about the “warrior ethos” advanced by writers like Pressfield is that it accepts as normal the unique nature of the bonds that hold soldiers together in battle, assuming this bond and its shared sacrifice to be at once unique to combat and also transcendent to all combatants. But one of the key points made very well in Sebastian Junger’s War (2010) and later Tribe (2016) is just how strange that experience is, historically. Junger notes that in earlier societies, soldiers would have returned from war into communities (often small, agricultural communities or tribal communities) every bit as close-knit as the infantry platoon – and indeed, often involving literally the same people as the infantry platoon. Instead, the intense feeling of uniqueness that modern soldiers feel about the bonds of combat is because of the historically unusual deracination produced by modern societies by the industrial revolution and the post-industrial period.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Universal Warrior, Part IIb: A Soldier’s Lot”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-02-05.
March 1, 2025
QotD: Roman Republic versus Seleucid Empire – the Battle of Magnesia
Scipio also brought fresh troops with him. The Senate authorized him to raise a supplementum (recruitment to fill out an army) of 3,000 Roman infantry, 100 Roman cavalry, 5,000 socii infantry and 200 socii cavalry (Livy 37.2.1) as well as authorizing him to carry the war into Asia (meaning Anatolia or Asia Minor) if he thought it wise – which of course he will. In addition to this, the two Scipios also called for volunteers from Scipio Africanus’ veterans and got 5,000 of them, a mix of Romans and socii (Livy 37.4.3), so all told Lucius Cornelius Scipio is crossing to Greece with reinforcements of some 13,000 infantry (including some battle-hardened veterans), 300 cavalry and one Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus.1 That said, a significant portion of this force is going to end up left in Greece to handle garrison duty and the Aetolians. Antiochus III, for his part, spends this time raising forces for a major battle, while dispatching his son Seleucus (the future Seleucus IV, r. 187-175) to try to raid Pergamum, Rome’s key ally in the region.
Once the Romans arrive (and join up with Eumenes’ army), both sides maneuvered to try and get a battle on favorable terms. Antiochus III’s army was massive with lots of cavalry – 62,000 infantry and 12,000 cavalry, an army on the same general order of magnitude as the one that fought at Raphia – so he sought an open area, setting up his fortified camp near Magnesia, with fairly formidable defenses – a ditch with a double-rampart (Livy 37.37.9-11). Unsurprisingly, the Romans, with a significant, but smaller force, preferred a fight in more confined quarters and for several days the armies sat opposite each other with minor skirmishes (Livy 37.38).
The problem Scipio faced was a simple one: the year was coming to a close, which meant that soon new consuls would be elected and he could hardly count on his command being extended. Consequently, Scipio calls together his war council – what the Romans call a consilium – to ask what he should do if Antiochus III couldn’t be lured into battle on favorable terms. The answer he got back was to force a battle and so force a battle Scipio did, advancing forward onto the ground of Antiochus’ choosing, leading to the Battle of Magnesia.
We have two accounts of this battle which mostly match up, one in Livy (Livy 37.39-44) and another in Appian’s Syrian Wars (App. Syr. 30-36). Livy here is generally the better source and chances are both authors are relying substantially on Polybius (who would be an even better source), whose account of the battle is lost.
Antiochus III’s army was enormous, with a substantial superiority in cavalry. From left to right, according to Livy (Livy 37.40), Antiochus III deployed: Cyrtian slinger and Elymaean archers (4,000), then a unit of caetrati (4,000; probably light infantry peltasts), then the contingent of Tralli (1,500; light infantry auxiliaries from Anatolia), then Carian and Cilicians equipped like Cretans (1,500; light archer infantry), then the Neo-Cretans (1,000; light archer infantry), then the Galatian cavalry (2,500; mailed shock cavalry), then a unit of Tarantine cavalry (number unclear, probably 500; Greek light cavalry), a part of the “royal squadron” of cavalry (1,000; Macedonian shock cavalry), then the ultra-heavy cataphract cavalry (3,000), supported by a mixed component of auxiliaries (2,700; medium thureophoroi infantry?) along with his scythed chariots and Arab camel troops.
That gets us to the central component of the line (still reading left to right): Cappadocians (2,000) who Livy notes were similarly armed to the Galatian infantry (1,500, unarmored, La Tène infantry kit, so “mediums”) who come next. Then the main force of the phalanx, 16,000 strong with 22 elephants. The phalanx was formed 32 ranks deep, with the intervals between the regiments covered by the elephants deployed in pairs, creating an articulated or enallax phalanx like Pyrrhus had, but using elephants rather than infantry to cover the “hinges”. This may in fact, rather than being a single phalanx 32 men deep be a “double” phalanx (one deployed behind the other) like we saw at Sellasia. Then on the right of the phalanx was another force of 1,500 Galatian infantry. Oddly missing here is the main contingent of the elite Silver Shields (the Argyraspides); some scholars2 note that a contingent of them 10,000 strong would make Livy’s total strength numbers and component numbers match up and he has just forgotten them in the main line. We might expect them to be deployed to the right of the main phalanx (where Livy will put the infantry Royal Cohort (regia cohors), confusing a subunit of the argyraspides with the larger whole unit. Michael Taylor in a forthcoming work3 has suggested they may also have been deployed behind the cavalry we’re about to get to or otherwise to their right.
That gets us now to the right wing (still moving left to right; you begin to realize how damn big this army is), we have more cataphracts (3,000, armored shock cavalry), the elite cavalry agema (1,000; elite Mede/Persian cavalry, probably shock), then Dahae horse archers (1,200; Steppe horse archers), then Cretan and Trallian light infantry (3,000), then some Mysian Archers (2,500) and finally another contingent of Cyrtian slinger and Elymaean archers (4,000).
This is, obviously, a really big army. But notice that a lot of its strength is in light infantry: combining the various archers, slingers and general light infantry (excluding troops we suspect to be “mediums”) we come to something like 21,500 lights, plus another 7,700 “medium” infantry and then 26,000 heavy infantry (accounting for the missing argyraspides). That’s 55,200 total, but Livy reports a total strength for the army of 62,000; it’s possible the missing remainder were troops kept back to defend the camp, in which case they too are likely light infantry. A Roman army’s infantry contingent is around 28% “lights” (the velites), who do not occupy any space in the main battle line. Antiochus’ infantry contingent, while massive, is 39% “lights” (and another 14% “mediums”), some of which do seem to occupy actual space in the battle line.
Of course Antiochus also has a massive amount of cavalry ranging from ultra-heavy cataphracts to light but highly skilled horse archers and massive cavalry superiority covereth a multitude of sins.
But the second problem with this gigantic army is one that – again, in a forthcoming work – Michael Taylor has pointed out. The physical space of the battlefield at Magnesia is not big enough to deploy the whole thing […]
Now Livy specifies that the flanks of Antiochus’ army curve forward, describing them as “horns” (cornu) rather than “wings” (alae) and noting they were “a little bit advanced” (paulum producto), which may be an effort to get more of this massive army actually into the fight […]. So while this army is large, it’s also unwieldy and difficult to bring properly into action and it’s not at all clear from either Livy or Appian that the whole army actually engaged – substantial portions of that gigantic mass of light infantry on the wings just seem to dissolve away once the battle begins, perhaps never getting into the fight in the first place.
The Roman force was deployed in its typical formation, with the three lines of the triplex acies and the socii flanking the legions (Livy 37.39.7-8), with the combined Roman and socii force being roughly 20,000 strong (the legions and alae being somewhat over-strength). In addition Eumenes, King of Pergamum was present and the Romans put his force on their right to cover the open flank, while he anchored his left flank on the Phrygios River. Eumenes’ wing consisted of 3,000 Achaeans (of the Achaean League) that Livy describes as caetrati and Appian describes as peltasts (so, lights), plus nearly all of Scipio’s cavalry: Eumenes’ cavalry guard of 800, plus another 2,200 Roman and socii cavalry, and than some auxiliary Cretan and Trallian light infantry, 500 each. Thinking his left wing, anchored on the river, relatively safe, Scipio posted only four turmae of cavalry there (120 cavalry). He also had a force of Macedonians and Thracians mixed together – so these are probably “medium” infantry – who had come as volunteers, who he posts to guard the camp rather than in the main battleline. I always find this striking, because I think a Hellenistic army would have put these guys in the front line, but a Roman commander looks at them and thinks “camp guards”. The Romans also had some war elephants, sixteen of them, but Scipio assesses that North African elephants won’t stand up to the larger Indian elephants of the Seleucids (which is true, they won’t) and so he puts them in reserve behind his lines rather than out front where they’d just be driven back into him. All told then, the Roman force is around 26,000 infantry and 3,000 cavalry – badly outnumbered by Antiochus, but of a relatively higher average quality and a bit more capable of actually fitting its entire combat power into the space.
The Battle
Because the armies are so large, much like as happened at Raphia, the battle that results is almost three battles running in parallel: the two wings and the center. Antiochus III commanded from his right wing, where – contrary to the expectations of Scipio who thought the river would secure his flank there – he intended his main attack. His son Seleucus commanded the left. Livy reports a light rain which interfered with both with visibility and some of Antiochus’ light troops’ weapons, as their bows and slings reacted poorly to the moisture (as composite bows will sometimes do; Livy 37.41.3-4, note also App. Syr. 33).Antiochus opens the battle on his left with his scythed chariots, a novel “gimmick” weapon (heavy chariots with blades all over them, used to shock infantry out of position). This may have been a nasty surprise for the Romans, but given the dispositions of the army, it was Eumenes, not Scipio who faces the chariots and as Livy notes, Eumenes was well aware how to fight them (Livy 37.41.9), using his light troops – those Cretan archers and Trallian javelin-troops. Deployed in loose order, they were able to move aside to avoid the chariots better than heavy infantry in close-order (similar tactics are used against elephants) and could with their missiles strike at chariot drivers and horses at range (Livy 37.41.10-12). Turning back this initial attack seems to have badly undermined the morale of the Seleucid left-wing, parts of which fled, creating a gap between the extreme left-wing and the heavy cavalry contingent. Eumenes then, with the Roman cavalry, promptly hammered the disordered line, hitting first the camel troops, then in the confusion quickly overwhelming the rest of the cavalry, including the cataphracts, leading Antiochus’ left wing to almost totally collapse, isolating the phalanx in the center. It’s not clear what the large mass of light infantry on the extreme edge of the battlefield was doing.
Meanwhile on the other side of the battle, where Scipio had figured a light screen of 120 equites would be enough to hold the end of the line, Antiochus delivered is cavalry hammer-blow successfully. Obnoxiously, both of our sources are a lot less interested in describing how he does this (Livy 37.42.7-8 and App. Syr. 34), which is frustrating because it is a bit hard to make sense of how it turns out. On the one hand, the constricted battlefield will have meant that, regardless of how they were positioned, those argyraspides are going to end up following Antiochus’ big cavalry hammer on the (Seleucid) right. They then overwhelm the cavalry and put them to flight and then push the infantry of that wing (left ala of socii and evidently a good portion of the legion next to it) back to the Roman camp.
On the other hand, the Roman infantry line reaches its camp apparently in good order or something close to it. Marcus Aemilius, the tribune put in charge of the camp is able to rush out, reconstitute the infantry force and, along with the camp-guard, halt Antiochus’ advance. The thing is, infantry when broken by cavalry usually cannot reform like that, but the distance covered, while relatively short, also seems a bit too long for the standard legionary hastati-to-principes-to-triarii retrograde. Our sources (also including a passage of Justin, a much later source, 31.8.6) vary on exactly how precipitous the flight was and it is possible that it proceeded differently at different points, with some maniples collapsing and others making an orderly retrograde. In any case, it’s clear that the Roman left wing stabilized itself outside of the Roman camp, much to Antiochus’ dismay. Eumenes, having at this point realized both that he was winning on his flank and that the other flank was in trouble dispatched his brother Attalus with 200 cavalry to go aid the ailing Roman left wing; the arrival of these fellows seem to have caused panic and Antiochus at this point begins retreating.
Meanwhile, of course, there is the heavy infantry engagement at the center. Pressured and without flanking support, Appian reports that the Seleucid phalanx first admitted what light infantry remained and then formed square, presenting their pikes tetragonos, “on all four sides” (App. Syr. 35), a formation known as a plinthion in some Greek tactical manuals. Forming this way under pressure on a chaotic battlefield is frankly impressive (though if they were formed as a double-phalanx rather than a double-thick single-phalanx, that would have made it easier) and a reminder that the core of Antiochus’ army was quite capable. Unable in this formation to charge, the phalanx was showered with Roman pila and skirmished by Eumenes’ lighter cavalry; the Romans seem to have disposed of Antiochus’ elephants with relative ease – the Punic Wars had left the Romans very experienced at dealing with elephants (Livy 37.42.4-5). Appian notes that some of the elephants, driven back by the legion and maddened disrupted the Seleucid square, at which point the phalanx at last collapsed (App. Syr. 35); Livy has the collapse happen much faster, but Appian’s narrative here seems more plausible.
What was left of Antiochus’ army now fled to their camp – not far off, just like the Roman one – leading to a sharp battle at the camp which Livy describes as ingens et maior prope quam in acie cades, “a huge slaughter, almost greater than that in the battle” (Livy 37.43.10), with stiff resistance at the camp’s gates and walls holding up the Romans before they eventually broke through and butchered the survivors. Livy reports that of Antiochus’ forces, 50,000 infantry and 3,000 cavalry were killed, another 1,500 captured; these seem really high as figures go, but Appian reports almost the exact same. Interesting, Livy doesn’t report the figure in his own right or attribute it to Polybius but instead simply notes “it is said that”, suggesting he may not be fully confident of the number either. Taylor supposes, reasonably I think, that this oversized figure may also count men who fled from the battlefield, reflecting instead that once Antiochus III could actually reconstitute his army, he had about 19,000 men, most of the rest having fled.4 Either way, the resulting peace makes clear that the Seleucid army was shattered beyond immediate repair.
Roman losses, by contrast, were shockingly light. Livy reports 300 infantry lost, 24 Roman cavalry and 25 out of Eumenes’ force; Appian adds that the 300 infantry were “from the city” – meaning Roman citizens – so some socii casualties have evidently been left out (but he trims Eumenes’ losses down to just fifteen cavalry) (Livy 37.44.2-3; App. Syr. 36). Livy in addition notes that many Romans were wounded in addition to the 300 killed. This is an odd quirk of Livy’s casualty reports for Roman armies against Hellenistic armies and I suspect it reflects the relatively high effectiveness of Roman body armor, by this point increasingly dominated by the mail lorica hamata: good armor converts lethal blows into survivable wounds.5 It also fits into a broader pattern we’ve seen: Hellenistic armies that face Roman armies always take heavy casualties, winning or losing, but when Roman armies win they tend to win lopsidedly. It is a trend that will continue.
So why Roman victory at Magnesia? It is certainly not the case that the Romans had the advantage of rough terrain in the battle: the battlefield here is flat and fairly open. It should have been ideal terrain for a Hellenistic army.
A good deal of the credit has to go to Eumenes, which makes the battle a bit hard to extrapolate from. It certainly seems like Eumenes’ quick thinking to disperse the Seleucid chariots and then immediately follow up with his own charge was decisive on his flank, though not quite battle winning. Eumenes’ forces, after all, lacked the punch to disperse the heavier phalanx, which did not panic when its wing collapsed. Instead, the Seleucid phalanx, pinned into a stationary, defensive position by Eumenes’ encircling cavalry, appears to have been disassembled primary by the Roman heavy infantry, peppering it with pila before inducing panic into the elephants. It turns out that Samnites make better “glue” for an articulated phalanx than elephants, because they are less likely to panic.
Meanwhile on the Seleucid right (the Roman left), the flexible and modular nature of the legion seems to have been a major factor. Antiochus clearly broke through the Roman line at points, but with the Roman legion’s plethora of officers (centurions, military tribunes, praefecti) and with each maniple having its own set of standards to rally around, it seems like the legion and its socii ala managed to hold together and eventually drive Antiochus off, despite being pressured. That, in and of itself, is impressive: it is the thing the Seleucid center fails to do, after all.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Phalanx’s Twilight, Legion’s Triumph, Part IVb: Antiochus III”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2024-04-05.
1. I enjoy this joke because the idea of bringing Scipio Africanus along as a junior officer is amusing, but I should note that in the event, he doesn’t seem to have had much of a role in the campaign.
2. E.g. Bar Kockva, The Seleucid Army: Organization and Tactics in the Great Campaigns (1979)
3. “A Commander Will Put an End to his Insolence: the Battle of Magnesia, 190BC” to appear in The Seleucids at War: Recruitment, Organization and Battles (forthcoming in 2024), eds. Altay Coşkun and Benhamin E. Scolnic.
4. Taylor, Antiochus the Great (2013), 143.
5. On this, see, uh, me, “The Adoption and Impact of Roman Mail Armor in the Third and Second Centuries B.C.” Chiron 52 (2022).
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February 27, 2025
Getting Elected in Ancient Rome
toldinstone
Published 8 Nov 2024The chief officials of the Roman Republic were chosen through one of history’s most chaotic electoral systems.
Chapters:
0:00 Introduction
0:33 The Roman Republic
1:33 Cursus honorum
2:08 Comitia Centuriata
2:58 Comitia Tributa
3:49 “Optimates” and “Populares”
4:22 Campaigning
6:19 Political graffiti
7:06 Romanis Magicae
7:51 Election day
9:11 The end of elections
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February 24, 2025
The Third Triumvirate?
On the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, John Carter posted an amusing thread (unrolled here courtesy of the @threadreaderapp):
JD Vance as Julius Caesar
AI image by Grok
Trump, Musk, Vance: the new triumvirate, bringing a window of stability to the troubled Republic.
Trump: the old warhorse, beloved of the people, a part of the establishment but with an uneasy relationship to it. Trump is Pompey.
Musk: the richest man in the world. Musk is Crassus.
Vance: the charismatic young upstart. Vance is Caesar.
So how does this play out?
Musk’s ambition is to go to Mars, just as Crassus wanted to conquer Parthia. Musk harnesses his wealth, launches the expedition to great fanfare. Things go horribly wrong after their arrival. Contact with the colony is lost. Musk’s grave is never found.
At the head of a private military corporation equipped with letters of marque, Vance is sent into the badlands of South America to crush the cartels and secure the Panama Canal. The war takes longer than expected. By the end of it, Vance hasn’t merely crushed the cartels – he’s conquered the entirety of Central America.
At home, Vance is beset by his enemies in the Senate, who mistrust his ambitions and intentions. It is whispered that he wishes to make himself king.
Vance’s enemies whisper in Trump’s ears. Were you not the one who built the wall? If Vance brings the Central American republics into the Union, what then of immigration? Of your life’s work? Vance will destroy it all.
And do the people, after all, not love you first and most? Are you not their hero? Why then should you fear this upstart?
With Trump’s blessing, Vance is recalled by the Senate, to face charges of corruption.
But throughout this time Vance has been building auctoritas with the people, going directly to them with his poasts, showing them his victories and their fruits. The people have come to love him more than they love Trump — for he has sent great wealth back to them, and crushed their enemies abroad.
And so the fateful day comes in which Vance returns, as summoned … but he does not demobilize his mercenary army when it crosses the Rio Grande. His forces — which now include former cartel soldiers, some of whom he has won to his side — drive straight to Washington in a blitzkrieg attack.
Washington empties out in panic.
Trump and the Senate flee to New York City, where they rally their forces. There are still many who are loyal to Trump, particularly within the military … but it turns out that Trump’s base is much older than Vance’s … and there are many, more than expected, who declare for Vance.
And so the Union cracks apart into the Civil War that was deferred when the triumvirate first seized power, so many years ago.
But this is not first and foremost a war of ideology, as it would have been — a showdown between right and left.
It is a war of personalities and personal loyalty, a war to determine a single question: who is to be king?
Obviously none of this is going to happen. History never repeats itself so precisely.
But it’s fun to think about Vance rampaging around Central America at the head of a PMC.
February 19, 2025
HBO’s Rome – Ep 4 “Stealing from Saturn” – History and Story
Adrian Goldsworthy. Historian and Novelist
Published 28 Aug 2024Vidcaps taken from the dvd collection and copyright belongs to the respective makers and channels.
Transcript
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February 17, 2025
QotD: Decisive factors in the Roman victory over the Seleucids
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.
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February 10, 2025
QotD: The Roman Republic versus the heirs of Alexander the Great
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.
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January 29, 2025
QotD: Did the customary Dictatorship work in the Roman Republic?
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.
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January 28, 2025
“Like Sulla, [Trump]’s been taking names, and he has a list”
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.
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January 27, 2025
The Rise of Augustus – The Conquered And The Proud 12
Adrian Goldsworthy. Historian and Novelist
Published 4 Sept 2024Continiung 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.
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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.
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January 16, 2025
Augustus and the Roman Army – the first emperor and the creation of the professional army
Adrian Goldsworthy. Historian and Novelist
Published 7 Aug 2024We 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.
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January 13, 2025
The Writings of Cicero – Cicero and the Power of the Spoken Word
seangabb
Published 25 Aug 2024This 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…)
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January 10, 2025
Rome – Part 6, The Second Punic War, 218-201 BC
seangabb
Published 22 Aug 2024This 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…)
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