Quotulatiousness

August 26, 2026

Octavian “found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble”

Filed under: Europe, History, Media — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

Octavian, if you’re new around here, is far better known as Augustus, the founder of the Principate. Over at SteynOnline, Tal Bachman continues his interesting series by touching on what the Roman Republic looked like to Octavian at the end of the civil wars:

Augustus of Prima Porta
Currently in the Chiaramonti Museum of the Vatican Museums (image from Wikimedia Commons).

So as Octavian thought about his grand plans for renewing Rome, he naturally thought of Virgil. He didn’t need anyone like Horace telling everyone to give up. He needed positivity. He needed the guy who might even have been prophesying about him as Rome’s savior (Octavian was only 23 when Virgil wrote about Rome’s boy-rescuer).

Besides, Virgil’s prophecy had so far proved quite correct: the oft-heralded imminent demise of Rome hadn’t arrived yet. Maybe it never would. In fact, for the first time in over a century, things were looking up. And they were looking up because of what had happened in the previous year and a half.

The most important thing had been Octavian’s victory over the traitor Mark Antony at the Battle of Actium, September of 31 BC. (None other than Octavian’s best friend, Marcus Agrippa, had masterminded the victory as commander of the navy. Over the years of tumult and civil war since Caesar‘s assassination, Marcus had revealed himself to be as much of a natural military genius as Octavian was a political genius).

With his victory over Antony, Octavian had demolished the last of the traitorous military contingents threatening Rome. Less than a year later, Antony and his lover, Queen Cleopatra of Egypt, committed suicide in Alexandria. Suddenly, after decades of bloodshed, the civil war had come to an end.

Or so it seemed. Octavian was too smart to count on that. After all, in politics, an end is never really an end; a beginning is never really a beginning. Each is only a connecting point in time between what has come before, and what will now come to pass. Above everything else, politics is the art of shaping those moments.

It was at just this sort of moment Octavian now stood. Finding himself the undisputed great man of Roman politics, he now controlled (in reality, if not always in law) Rome’s senate, all its provinces, its vast military, its vast resources, its bureaucracy and administration, its appointments, and the immensely valuable, recently-acquired grain powerhouse of Egypt. He also held great influence over the city’s religious activity as part of the sixteen member College of Pontiffs. Moreover, after Actium and Antony’s suicide, no internal or external threat remained. Octavian had spent years making war. Now, with every last foe vanquished, he needed to make — and preserve — peace. The question was how.

A full description of Octavian’s comprehensive answer to that question is beyond our scope here. But what we can explore briefly is how he pushed cultural, spiritual, religious, and even psychological renewal — particularly through Virgil’s Aeneid — and how translation can best communicate that to us.

On that note, it’s worth pointing out that Octavian’s intention wasn’t quite to Make Rome Great Again. It was far more ambitious: he wished to make Rome much greater than anyone had ever imagined it could be, and much greater than any other nation had ever been, or ever would be again. For this to happen, Rome, in a real way, had to start over.

For Octavian, starting over meant laying the right foundation in the right way. What was that foundation? Devout reconnection to the gods. Everything, he believed, would flow from this: peace, identity, cohesion, stability, lawful behavior, ethical behavior, contentment, prosperity, flourishing, valor, self-discipline, excellence, and more. Octavian would do what he could in politics to initiate this renewal; Virgil would do what he could in literature. Together with others in their circle, they would remind people what it meant to be truly Roman, starting with the very first Romans of all. They would tell, and re-tell, in a hundred different ways, the story of who they were, who they weren’t, where they’d come from, and what the gods wanted.

I’ve added links to my Roman Glossary for some of the names and events mentioned in the article.

August 25, 2026

Rome’s annona civilis

Filed under: Europe, Food, Government, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In the late Roman Republic, the rapid increase among the urban poor in Rome itself eventually led to the Senate introducing food relief for the very poorest Roman citizens, the Annona civilis. It should be no surprise to anyone who’s been paying attention that giving away free stuff attracts people happy to accept free stuff:

Rome handed out free grain to 40,000 citizens in 73 BC. By 46 BC, Julius Caesar found 320,000 people lining up for their monthly ration. That eight-fold expansion happened in under three decades, and it shows you how welfare states actually grow.

No Roman senator stood up and announced a plan to addict a third of the city to government bread. It happened incrementally, through political competition. Each magistrate who wanted votes expanded eligibility. Each expansion normalized the next one. The citizen who once considered the dole shameful eventually expected it, then demanded it, then organized politically to protect it.

This is the core mechanism free market thinkers have identified across every era: once you create a transfer program, you create a constituency for that program. Recipients vote. Administrators build careers. Grain merchants who supply the state develop a stake in keeping the contracts flowing. The political economy locks in.

Caesar, to his credit, actually cut the rolls back to 150,000 through verification audits. It was one of his more economically coherent moves, though the Senate still murdered him. His successors quietly let the numbers climb again.

What did the dole require? Massive grain imports from Sicily, Sardinia, and Egypt, organized through state logistics at state expense, funded by taxation and conquest. When the conquest revenue dried up, the obligation remained. Rome had written a check against future military success, and future military success eventually failed to arrive.

The lesson is not complicated. Distribute a benefit and you distribute dependency. Distribute dependency and you distribute political power to whoever controls the distribution. The grain dole didn’t weaken Rome overnight, but it made every subsequent reform politically impossible.

The simple-but-not-easy-fix is to only allow people not accepting the free stuff to vote. You can imagine just how well that would go down in an election campaign at any level, can’t you?

August 23, 2026

Julius Caesar’s will

Filed under: Europe, Government, History — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 06:00

At SteynOnline, Tal Bachman continues his study on “The Art of Translation”, this time touching on the unlikely and unlooked-for rise of Caesar’s grand-nephew and eventual successor Octavian — better known to history as Caesar Augustus, the founder of the Principate:

Augustus of Prima Porta
Currently in the Chiaramonti Museum of the Vatican Museums (image from Wikimedia Commons).

You’d think someone who’d just won as much power as the 32 year old Octavian would appreciate a best-selling epic poem in praise of himself. Only fourteen years earlier, in 44 BC, the then-obscure teenager still expected to live a quiet life in his hometown of Velitrae. True, he did have family connections to the political big leagues 25 miles up the road in Rome; but as things stood, a lower-key path looked a lot more likely for the frail, bookish student.

Alas, a quiet life was not to be. On Tuesday, March 15, his great-uncle, Julius Caesar — ruler of Rome — had just seated himself in the senate meeting hall when dozens of senators stabbed him to death. In the assassins’ minds, they’d done something noble: they’d protected the republic — the Roman people — from a future tyrant-king. Surely, they thought, ordinary Romans would now rise up and hail them as republican heroes.

Ordinary Romans, it turned out, thought much more highly of their favorite war-hero than the treacherous senators who’d killed him. Whatever his flaws, Caesar had at least imposed some long-overdue order on Roman life. Now that he was gone, the terrible troubles of former times would return, and probably in a form far worse than before. Shock, anger, despair, and fear filled the city.

It didn’t help that as the hours bled into the next day, it became clear the senator-assassins had no plan for what to do next. They’d eliminated the energetic, enterprising man who’d led Rome the previous five years, but the senate itself was deeply fractured, with a number of the assassins now second-guessing what they’d done. The senate wasn’t stepping up. No one was. As a result, in that moment, the city and empire had no functioning government.

Sensing the possibility of violent conflict, Caesar’s colleague Lepidus quickly ordered troops into the city to keep things stable. It worked. But a possible trigger appeared the next day in the form of Caesar’s father-in-law, Lucius Piso, who stepped forward as the custodian of Caesar’s will and informed the senate he was ready to settle Caesar’s affairs as duty demanded. The senate panicked. Not knowing what the will contained, the now-rattled group begged Piso to keep it confidential for fear its contents would provoke riots. Piso refused: Caesar was a public official, and the public deserved to know, come what may. He demanded a day be set for revealing the will.

Surveying the precarious situation, Caesar’s right-hand man, Mark Antony, called a senate meeting to figure out what to do next. In that Friday meeting, the senate and Antony agreed to let the assassins escape punishment, while still enforcing all of Caesar’s policies. This compromise, they hoped, would appease both the pro- and anti-Caesar factions, and keep Rome from convulsing in violence.

This, and much more, all happened within three days of the assassination. But what happened on the fourth day — Saturday, March 19 — would prove just about as shocking as anything else: it was on that day that Lucius Piso appeared before the senate to open up, and read aloud, the will left by his murdered son-in-law.

To put that moment in perspective, I note that by the time of his death at age 55, Julius Caesar was one of the richest men on earth. Moreover, he had no legal descendants: his daughter, Julia, had passed away at the age of 22 during childbirth, along with her child. The Egyptian queen Cleopatra claimed Caesar had fathered her son, but Caesar never felt certain the child was his, and never acknowledged him under Roman law.

In addition to all this, Caesar commanded the loyalty of tens of thousands of Roman soldiers, active and retired, along with the admiration of tens of millions of residents and citizens around the Mediterranean. Among these were many of Rome’s most influential movers and shakers.

In short, Caesar had a lot to bequeath. (This was especially true in a world in which the lifelong loyalty of others easily transferred from a deceased person to his named heir.) Surely, in the senate meeting hall that Saturday sat a number of figures who expected to receive extraordinary gifts from the man they’d served—Mark Antony in particular. Antony, after all, had fought with Caesar for years, worked side by side with him in government, and been his closest confidante and colleague.

So you can imagine the humiliation, shock, and indignation around the room as the bereaved father-in-law Lucius Piso stood reading a will which named not Antony, not Lepidus, not any of Caesar’s other comrades, but Caesar’s eighteen-year-old grand-nephew, Octavian, as his adopted legal son and heir to nearly everything he had. Octavian—whose biological father had died when he was five—would receive Caesar’s name, most of his incalculable fortune, his lands, the benefit of his status and loyalties, and the automatic approval of all those who trusted the judgment of the great-uncle who’d adopted him.

By all accounts, Octavian had no idea about any of this. Yes, he’d spent some time with his great-uncle, even visiting him during his Spanish military campaign the year before. But Caesar had kept his will entirely secret.

When Octavian — away studying in Apollonia, in present-day Albania — heard about the assassination and will a couple of weeks later, he found himself facing The Mother of All Crossroads. He could either travel to the now violent, dangerous, nearly-anarchic Rome, risking his own assassination in demanding all Caesar had left him (and accepting all the attendant obligations), or he could decline and pursue the safe, quiet life he’d always imagined for himself.

August 16, 2026

QotD: The “Marian reforms” were not a thing

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

We can then return to our list at the beginning:

  • Cohorts: Experimented with before Marius, especially in Spain. Marius uses cohorts, but there’s no evidence he systematized or standardized this or was particularly new or unusual in doing so. Probably the actual breakpoint here is the Social War.
  • Poor Volunteers Instead of Conscripted Assidui: Marius does not represent a break in the normal function of the Roman dilectus but a continuation of the Roman tradition of taking volunteers or dipping into the capite censi in a crisis. The traditional Roman conscription system functions for decades after Marius and a full professional army doesn’t emerge until Augustus.
  • Discharge bonuses or land as a regular feature of Roman service: Once again, this isn’t Marius but Imperator Caesar Augustus who does this. Rewarding soldiers with loot and using conquered lands to form colonies wasn’t new and Marius doesn’t standardize it, Augustus does.
  • No More equites and velites: No reason in the source to suppose Marius does this and plenty of reasons to suppose he doesn’t. Both velites and equites seem to continue at least a little bit into the first century. Fully replacing these roles with auxilia is once again a job for our man, Imperator Caesar Augustus, divi filius, pater patriae, reformer of armies, gestae of res, and all the rest.
  • State-Supplied Equipment: No evidence in the sources. This shift is happening but is not associated with Marius. In any event, the conformity of imperial pay records with Polybius’ system of deductions for the second century BC suggests no major, clean break in the system.
  • A New Sort of Pilum: No evidence, probably didn’t exist, made up by Plutarch or his sources. Roman pilum design is shifting, but not in the ways Plutarch suggests. If a Marian pilum did exist, the idea didn’t stick.
  • Aquila Standards: Eagle standards pre-date Marius and non-eagle standards post-date him, but this may be one thing he actually does do, amplifying the importance of the eagle as the primary standard of the legion.
  • The sarcina and furca and making Roman soldiers carry things: By no means new to Marius. This is a topos of Roman commanders before and after Marius. There is no reason to suppose he was unusual in this regard.

So the Marian reforms … were not a thing. Functionally none of what is described as happening in them was new or unique to Marius. Indeed, the most substantial reforms are either things that were already changing (and which Marius seems to have had little role in) or things which had not yet changed but which would, under Augustus. Indeed, one of the problems with the assumption of a Marian reform is that it takes a whole lot of changes which were more likely a package of reforms under Augustus and pulls them forward in time to Marius, doing some damage to our understanding of both figures.

But Augustus makes much more sense as the figure doing many of those organizational changes. For one we have sources actually telling us he did them, from the standardization of military service (Dio 54.25.6), the creation of retirement bonuses and the aerarium militare to fund them (Dio 54.25.6 again, but also Res Gestae 17), and the radical expansion and formalization of the auxilia as part of the Roman army (Tac. Ann. 4.5). The one thing missing is citizenship-for-service, which we can see emerging under Tiberius, the next emperor immediately after Augustus. And it makes sense because Augustus is, by necessity, doing a bunch of other things with the legions too. He’s instituting a whole new command structure, with dedicated legionary commanders (the legatus legionis) serving under his own provincial commanders (legati Augusti) with imperial procuratores handling the former role of the quaestors. Also, the legions get their citizen cavalry (though a quite small detachment of it) back too.

So instead of thinking, “Marian reforms” – which were, I must stress, not a thing – you ought to be thinking about a period of tactical, organizational and institutional change beginning in the second century, accelerating in the first century and then finally being instituted as a comprehensive set of reforms and formalization by Augustus, not by Marius, which codified a lot of change that had already happened over that long period. A long process with a punctuation mark at the end rather than a singular moment of reform associated with a singular Roman general.

Alright. Now one of you go and fix the Wikipedia entry.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Marian Reforms Weren’t a Thing”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-06-30.

August 10, 2026

QotD: Cleopatra’s relationship with Egypt and her Egyptian subjects

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

One of the assertions one sees about Cleopatra – indeed, it is central to the recent Netflix documentary – was that she loved the Egyptian people and Egypt. And there’s not nothing there to this point, but there’s also a bit less than you might think and more than a few reasons to doubt Cleopatra “patriotism”, as it were, and deep attachment to Egypt.

The factors usually pointed at to demonstrate Cleopatra’s attachment to Egypt are that she learned the language, engaged with Egyptian religion and represented herself in Egyptian fashion in royal artwork and commemoration meant for consumption in Egypt. And that’s true, she did those things! But the context often missing from using that as a clear indicator of Cleopatra’s cultural “Egyptianness” is that, apart from learning the language, those were common things for Ptolemaic rulers to do, despite the fact that the dynasty maintained a pronounced ethnic hierarchy in Egypt and aren’t generally regarded as being particularly attached to its people or culture. Nevertheless, there’s not nothing here in the sense that Cleopatra showed – or at least wanted to show – more than the normal Ptolemaic attachment to Egypt as a place and the Egyptians as people, which is to say almost any at all.

Let’s start with languages, because I think this fact can be presented in a somewhat distorted way. The language of the Ptolemaic court was Greek, initially Macedonian Greek (the Macedonians had a pronounced accent), though Plutarch notes that some of the later Ptolemies had lost their Macedonian accent (Plut. Ant. 27.3-4). Cleopatra, by contrast, was the first of the Ptolemies to bother to learn Egyptian (which should tell you something about the character of Ptolemaic rule; imagine if King Charles was the first English king since George I and kings from the House of Hanover to bother to learn English). The problem with this fact is that it is incomplete, presenting Cleopatra as a Greek-speaker who learned the language of her people out of sincere devotion, but that’s not what Plutarch says. Plutarch says:

    She could turn [her voice] easily to whichever language she wished and she conversed with few barbarians entirely through an interpreter, and she gave her decisions herself to most of them, including Ethiopians, Troglodytes, Hebrews, Arabians, Syrians, Medes and Parthians. She is said to have learned the languages of many others also, although the kings before her did not undertake to learn the Egyptian language, even though some of them had abandoned the Macedonian dialect.1

So let’s unpack that. This isn’t a native speaker of Greek who learned just the language of her subjects, but a spectacularly skilled linguist who learned a lot of different languages, quite regardless of if she ruled the people in question. Running through the list, she evidently learned Ethiopian, the language of the people on her southern border, the speech of the Troglodytae, the people who lived on the coast of the Red Sea (a hinterland of her kingdom). The “language of the Hebrews” here is probably Aramaic rather than Hebrew (which would also cover much of Syria), while the language of the Medes and Parthians might mean both Old Persian and the Parthian language. To which we must add Egyptian, implied by that last sentence; it also seems fairly clear Cleopatra knew at least some Latin.2 This is part of why I find arguments that use Cleopatra’s knowledge of Egyptian as strong proof either for her Egyptian ancestry or deep attachment to Egypt less than fully compelling; she was surely not Parthian and did not have a deep attachment to Parthia, but she learned their language too. Again, there’s not nothing here, but it’s not a slam dunk either.

What of Cleopatra’s role in Egyptian religion? The recent Netflix miniseries makes quite a fuss about how Cleopatra’s first action as queen – that we know of, because this is simply the first moment she is visible in the sources to us at all – is to partake in a religious festival installing a new sacred bull in a shrine at Hermonthis, close to Thebes in Upper Egypt and how this was indicative of a deep love of Egyptian religion. And it may well have been, but it’s also worth noting that Ptolemaic rulers had been taking part in Egyptian religion for a long time. Most of the massive temple complex at Philae, for instance – even farther from Alexandria than Hermonthis, I might add – was built in the Ptolemaic period, with major expansions by Ptolemy II and III. Even more relevantly to our subject, this was a [devotion] to Isis; Cleopatra was not the first Ptolemy by any means to claim that goddess for the dynasty.3

Nor had this even been a new practice for the Ptolemies. Alexander was presumably crowned pharaoh in Memphis in the traditional manner, visited the oracle of Amun at Siwa and dedicated a major set of construction works in the temple of Amun at Thebes. The Ptolemies followed this model. Ptolemy II went to Mendes to personally conduct the ritual of the process of the Ram of Mendes and then extended the temple, he presided over the inauguration of a temple at Pithom, and so on.4 And on it went with Ptolemy III and on down the line (indeed, becoming a bit more pronounced as we move into the later Ptolemies, beginning with Ptolemy V Epiphanes, potentially as a result of the increasing weakness of the Ptolemaic dynasty both internally and abroad). Ptolemaic kings were regularly in and out of Memphis, the religious capital of Egypt, building new Egyptian temples, attending Egyptian religious rituals and so on. The reason is that the job of Pharaoh was as much (if not more) a religious job as it was a political one and it was a job that only the Pharaoh could conduct. And the idea that a Ptolemaic pharaoh with a legitimacy problem might consecrate some temples to help fix that wasn’t new either; Ptolemy VIII Physcon is out doing that thing in the mid-second century. Consequently, involvement in Egyptian religion was a requirement of the position, quite apart from the question of how much the holder of that position cared.

Cleopatra, like any Ptolemaic ruler, engaged in this sort of building, though it seems striking how much of her building program was composed of Hellenistic structures in Alexandria, even as Duanne Roller admits, “the queen was not a major builder”.5 She restored the gymnasium of Alexandria, made major repairs to the Lighthouse, built a new precinct in honor of Julius Caesar called the Kaisareion, and apparently built a monumental tomb for herself, also in Alexandria. Examples of her building outside of Alexandria are fairly thin: the completion of a temple at Dendera begun by Ptolemy XII, extensions to the temple at Hermonthis (where she visited early in her reign), never entirely finished and a temple to Isis in Ptolemais Hermiou in Upper Egypt. Cleopatra could hardly be accounted the great renovator of Egyptian religion or religious sites.

Likewise the assertion that Cleopatra represented herself in Egyptian artwork in Egyptian style and dress; that too was true of all of the Ptolemaic rulers from the very beginning. Indeed, Cleopatra’s self-representation as Isis was very much not new, but in fact the normal way Ptolemaic queens were represented (to match Ptolemaic kings being represented as Osiris). Here, for instance, is Ptolemy II Philadelphos (r. 284-246) with his queen Arsinoe II represented in Egyptian style on a relief now in the British Museum.

Like all Ptolemaic rulers before her, Cleopatra presented herself in an Egyptian form, conforming to Egyptian style, in Egyptian contexts. And, like all of the Ptolemaic rulers before her, she presented herself in a Hellenistic form in Alexandria and on her coinage. While you will see people point to various busts and frescos as being images of Cleopatra, it is only her coins where we can say for certain that an effort was made to capture her likeness (her Egyptian portraiture, though labeled, follows Egyptian stylistics, not her actual likeness); we have no idea if, for instance, later Roman artists had any information about what she actually looked like or if the busts we suppose to be of her actually are. Be wary also of Greek and Roman frescos showing fair-skinned women reported to be Cleopatra; almost all women in Greek and Roman fresco are shown as fair-skinned; it’s a standard artistic convention. Coins, of course, record no skin color and neither do our sources for Cleopatra; anyone who thinks they can tell you what color her skin was is unduly certain.6

Now this isn’t to say Cleopatra is doing nothing new. She does seem to have been somewhat more involved in Egyptian religion than her predecessors, though the exact degree to which this is true is hard to see because we don’t have anything like a full accounting of their actions; if it is a difference it is a different in quantity, not kind. Certainly her building program wasn’t anywhere close to the scale of the early Ptolemies, but perhaps she took more direct personal involvement. Once again, the unknowns here are formidable. Dorothy J. Thompson in the the Cambridge Ancient History7 takes this, along with Cleopatra switching her regnal name from “philopator” (“loves-father”) to “philopatris” (“loves-homeland”8) to be indicative of a clear effort by Cleopatra to be, “indeed queen of Egypt”, particularly in the context of dynastic struggles with her brothers: outflanking them by getting the favor of the people.

The problem with this narrative is the timing: Cleopatra makes that switch in titles in 36/5 BC, which is to say in year 16 of her 21 year reign, eight or nine years after her last serious competition for the throne, her youngest brother, had died. Instead, Bingen9 argues that the homeland Cleopatra is professing love for is the greater Macedonian empire – the empire of Alexander – which she may have seemed in 36 on the verge of reclaiming.10 Antonius was just about to give her (through her children) sweeping portions of Roman Syria, Cilicia, Cyrenaica and Armenia; he would also give them titles to Medea and Parthia, which he didn’t control (though perhaps in 36 he hoped to) but would represent collectively the whole of the old Seleucid Empire near its height. Bingen notes the other change to Cleopatra’s titulature at this point was rather than just being “the goddess who loves her father” she becomes “the young goddess who loves her father and her country”; the added νεωτέρα (“young”) perhaps being intended as a link to Cleopatra Thea, Seleucid queen-consort of Syria from 150 to 126 BC and Cleopatra’s own great-grand-aunt. Cleopatra, after all, was about to achieve the long Ptolemaic dream of controlling all of Syria.

Strikingly the sources do not tell us that Cleopatra was seen as any more distinctively Egyptian than her father or that she had some groundswell of popular support in Egypt. Indeed, Cassius Dio implies the opposite (Cass. Dio 42.34-6) that the Egyptians favored Ptolemy XIII in the succession dispute and it was only the force of Caesar’s arms that turned the issue to Cleopatra. Of course we have to be somewhat skeptical of this account too: Dio is marinating in a literary tradition that is very hostile to Cleopatra and also makes no effort to distinguish between the Alexandrians and the rest of Egypt, two very distinct groups. In any case it is clear that Cleopatra achieved no groundswell of support in Egypt in those early years: she had to raise her army in Syria and in the event it wasn’t the stronger force as she and Caesar spent the winter of 48/7 besieged in Alexandria by Ptolemy XIII’s then larger army (Caesar had not brought his full field army), until the arrival of an army out of Roman Syria led by a collection of Caesar’s allies tipped the balance. Julius Caesar was never a particularly cautious commander, so if he looked at whatever force Cleopatra still had and said, “we need to wait for reinforcements”, it could not, at that point, have been very substantial. Afterwards, Caesar would leave four legions in Egypt to secure Cleopatra’s rule, which seems not to indicate her great popularity or any great faith in her ability to hold the kingdom. After 44, she’s able to rule without direct support, but of course after 44, she and her children are the only dynastic options left, her brothers and sisters all being dead (some at her hand). Finally, when Octavian comes for her, there is no major effort by anyone to stop him militarily. If Cleopatra had the love of the Egyptian people at that point, we sure don’t see it.

In my view then, it seems like an argument can be made that Cleopatra had a fairly modest propaganda effort towards presenting herself as more in touch with Egyptian religion, but the extent and quality was at most only a modest improvement over the previous Ptolemies and apart from keeping her on the throne (with Roman backing), it doesn’t seem to have achieved much.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: On the Reign of Cleopatra”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-05-26.

  1. Trans. from Jones (2006).
  2. On this, see Roller (2010), 48-9.
  3. On this sanctuary and its inscriptions, see J. Bingen (2007), 31-43.
  4. On this, see Hölbl (2001), 77-90.
  5. op. cit. 108.
  6. Though, contra Netflix, we can say something about her hair. I was rather confused when one of their talking heads posited that he liked to imagine Cleopatra with hair like his – his hair was very tightly curly and indeed that is how the Netflix documentary opted to do Cleopatra’s hair. We can see her hair on her coins and it is wavy, pulled together into a bun in Hellenistic style with short draping curls (loose, not tight) and a Hellenistic diadem. I think it is pretty fair to suppose this is how Cleopatra actually wore her hair – or at least, how she wanted people to think she wore her hair.
  7. The second edition of the Cambridge Ancient History; in this case CAH2 IX, 320-1.
  8. Literally “loves her fatherland”. To save myself some audio pain in the future, I often hear “philopator” pronounced with the emphasis on the second syllable (phi-LOPE-a-tor), but the accent is on the alpha, phi-lo-PA-tor, because that o is an omega, a long-vowel, so the accent can fall no further back.
  9. op. cit., 58-62 and 76-79.
  10. Bingen argues that in an Egyptian context, it would have been clear that Cleopatra’s patris was, in fact, Makedon – the most prestigious and useful possible patris to have in Ptolemaic Egypt.

August 4, 2026

QotD: Limits to tactical flexibility in Roman Republican armies

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

… the real reason I wanted to run through the Roman system […] is actually to demonstrate the limits of this kind of synchronized discipline. Because yes, this sort of drill and training allowed constituent units to potentially maneuver more dynamically and flexibly (when under competent leadership; it is quite striking that Roman command skill with this sort of thing was very dependent on the skill of the general (and one assumes by proxy the skill of his subordinate officers)), but only to do those things which they had practiced.

And therein lies the rub: just as the commander doesn’t have a multitude of points where he can intervene in the battle but rather a limited set of key decision points, so too he does not have an infinite set of potential orders he (or his subordinates) might give at any given moment. Instead, the commander (or his subordinates) has a McDonald’s menu worth of options he can employ. He can order anything on the menu and expect the unit to respond accordingly but he cannot order anything not on the menu, nor can he order an altered version of a menu item (no Big Mac without cheese; Sir, this is not a Wendy’s).

Now generals could and did use drilling in the early stages of the campaign to add one or two “menu items” to their drill so as to be prepared for this or that problem. Indeed the general preparing some sort of surprise of this sort and then deploying it against an enemy is a standard topos of effective ancient generalship (although in many cases we may doubt the purported gimmick was actually used (e.g. Dionysius 20.1.6, Dio 10.5)). But that is the thing: such extra “menu items” have to be prepared in advance and often well in advance of the battle. Caesar, for instance, anticipating war elephants drills his troops in anti-war-elephant tactics before the Battle of Thapsus (46 BC, Caes. Bel. Afr. 84). Alexander’s phalanx seems to have been drilled to respond to scythed chariots as well (Arr. Anab. 3.13.5-6).

That said the bulk of the menu was likely to remain constant. After all these “menu items”, while they have simple names are often actually fairly complex to do and train when you are dealing with units of dozens or hundreds. Turning back to our example of Company, Right Wheel! we can get a sense of the complexity of training that maneuver by the way they did it. The “right guide” (the man on the extreme right) adopts a set pace (nine inch steps) while the “left guide” moves at the normal regulated speed (note this requires training your soldiers not only to step in time but to step at standard lengths) and every soldier in the middle regulates his motion by maintaining elbow contact with the man to his side. That’s a good method to get the result, but it isn’t an obvious or simple method: the fellow training the company to do this needs to already know how to do this.

Now in the modern period with mass printing, you could print drill manuals that had all of the commands and instructions on how to do them, but in the pre-modern period that kind of mass printing isn’t an option (and our military texts almost never go into this kind of granular detail) so your officers have to learn to train the behavior by observing it and participating in it themselves. Which means in turn a great deal of your “package” is set before the army is even mustered at the beginning of the campaign season because you are relying on a package of culturally embedded knowledge about how armies ought to function. And if your culture doesn’t have that tradition, inventing it from scratch is going to be hard and take time; and by “time” I mean “decades”. Effective drill for volley fire (the “countermarch”), for instance, answered a need that had existed for most of the 16th century, but the embryonic ideas for it only started emerging in the 1570s, the actionable plan on how to do it in 1594 and it was only then finally deployed in a major battle in 1600 at Nieuwpoort.

However, the time available for that kind of training is limited. Remember that drill works by repeating the same set of actions over and over again until they become almost instinctive. That takes a lot of time and repetition! That both means it is going to be difficult to find space for new “menu items” (especially with green troops that still need to learn the basics) but also that synchronized discipline itself is expensive. Our ancient sources stress how Roman levels of synchronized discipline required diligent and continuous drilling to create and maintain.

Doing that in turn would demand keeping the soldiers in question under arms for training for long periods when they were not fighting. In the Middle Republic this seems to have been accomplished through rolling recruitment: Rome was essentially always at war and always raising armies so there were always a goodly number of veterans to train and “break in” the truly green new recruits in any given draft (though again – and I owe this notion to Michael Taylor – there are some signs that the less intense conflict of the mid-second-century leads to some dulling of the Roman edge). As we transition through the Late Republic into the Early Empire, that is replaced by the slow professionalization of the Roman army, culminating in the force of long-service professionals created by Augustus. Being mobilized in peacetime, professional soldiers could be drilled extensively (assuming their cultural values are going to let them drill you; also be wary here of assuming standing forces of “military settlers” are professional in this way).

But all of that is extraordinarily expensive. Keeping those soldiers under arms, after all, means that they need to be fed, clothed and paid. Even in a system like the Middle Roman Republic where soldiers provided their own kit out of their own wealth (because Roman soldiers in the Middle Republic were recruited from the modestly well-to-do smallholding class), by drafting those men you have removed them from that economic activity. The expense of doing this would have been in most cases enormous and of course those are resources that could be deployed to any number of other uses, including simply raising a larger army of less disciplined, well trained troops. For, say, a Greek polis given the choice between having 450 men under arms all year round and excellently trained or having 5,000 hoplites under arms only in the one month where there is a battle to fight the clear answer is the latter. A lot of things need to line up before producing armies with high levels of synchronized discipline makes sense: the state needs a lot of resources, year-round security challenges and a tactical system which is effective and demands this kind of investment. So while developing synchronized discipline offered an army a degree of greater control and flexibility, it was prohibitively expensive.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Total Generalship: Commanding Pre-Modern Armies, Part IIIa”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-06-17.

August 3, 2026

QotD: The Hellenistic Age

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

In the 4th century BC, the Greeks conquered the world. And that is where their problems began.

When I was a child first getting interested in ancient history, the books I read followed a smooth narrative process. The story of the Greeks began with Athenian democracy and the victories at Marathon, Salamis, and Plataea that saved Western civilization from Persian conquest. Then there was the Athenian maritime empire, and its tremendous cultural achievements: the Parthenon, Socratic philosophy, the plays of Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes. There was the Peloponnesian War and Thucydides’s chronicling of it. And then, in a tremendous climax, there were the awesome conquests of Alexander the Great, who destroyed the most powerful empire on Earth and conquered the known world by the age of 33, only to die young and have his empire swiftly broken up after his death.

… And then the story would promptly lurch 700 miles to the northwest and start over. Greeks? What Greeks? Now I was reading about the rise of a different city, Rome, and the achievements of its great republic. Instead of the Assembly and the ostracism, there was the Senate and the consuls. I would read about the Samnite Wars, the Punic Wars, the Gallic Wars, and finally the great civil wars that transformed Rome from a republic into the empire that men still think about a few times a week. In this story, the Greeks appear again, but only as enemies for Rome first to easily defeat, then be culturally influenced by. This fusion of Greek and Roman culture leads to European Christianity, the Renaissance, the cultural canon — in a word, the West itself.

Kid me didn’t think too much about it at the time. But as I grew, I and many others finally had a thought intrude: Wait a minute, what the heck was going on in Alexander’s old empire before the Romans got there?

And if you’re like me, asking that question is how you wind up reading Alexander to Actium.

Alexander to Actium is classicist Peter Green’s gargantuan tome covering the period historians now call the Hellenistic era, the 293-year span following the death of Alexander the Great during which his vast but short-lived empire was divided up and ruled by ethnically Macedonian and Greek elites who left the stamp of Hellenic culture all across the eastern Mediterranean. The era begins with Alexander’s generals (the Diadochi, “Successors”) waging an epic forty years of war as funeral games for their dead master before finally settling into a more stable system with three great kingdoms centered on Macedon, Egypt, and Syria (plus lesser monarchies like Pergamon and Bactria). These kingdoms battled one another and Rome for another quarter-millennium, gradually losing land and power before they were extinguished, one by one. The last Hellenistic kingdom, Ptolemaic Egypt, made it until 30 B.C., when the legendary Cleopatra1 committed suicide and her realm became the personal possession of Octavian, the future Caesar Augustus. Long after their destruction, the Hellenistic legacy lingers most in religion: the Christian New Testament was written not in the Hebrew or Aramaic of Judea or the Latin of the Roman Empire, but in the koine Greek that had become the lingua franca of the educated eastern Mediterranean.

The ebb and flow of this 300-year historical epic is one that really deserves a trashy big-budget TV adaptation or three. The sordid acts of the Successors and their successors are so spectacular they could easily be made into a hybrid of HBO’s Rome and a popular show about dragons that shall remain nameless. I’m a little shocked one hasn’t been made already. To give just a small set of anecdotes from Green’s work:

  • After an attempted army revolt following Alexander’s death, the general Perdiccas holds a “purification” ceremony for the army, which consists of rebel leaders being publicly trampled to death by elephants.
  • Antigonus One-Eye, the man who came closest to reuniting Alexander’s empire, was very tall, very wide, very old, and had a very good nickname. Huge in size and huge in ambition, he dies fighting in battle at over 80 years old at Ipsus, a battle featuring 25,000 cavalry, 120 scythed chariots, and almost 600 elephants.
  • Olympias, Alexander the Great’s mother, is so vindictive that when Philip II dies, she has a rival wife and her infant daughter roasted to death on a charcoal brazier even though they pose zero dynastic threat. When her own end comes during Macedon’s multiple civil wars, the soldiers of Cassander refuse to kill Alexander’s mother – so she is instead stoned to death by the families of those she had killed during past purges.
  • Seleucus I, founder of the Syria-based Seleucid Empire, is happily married to his second wife Stratonice when he notices his son, Antiochus, is deeply enamored with her. No worry: Seleucus simply divorces Stratonice and has her marry Antiochus. This is actually a happy ending and works out for everyone, surprisingly.
  • Lysimachus, king of Thrace, is happily married to his third wife, Arsinoe, when she tricks him into having his son by a first marriage executed so her own son can succeed. This sparks a war that kills Lysimachus and destroys his kingdom, somewhat botching the whole succession thing. But no worries: Arsinoe escapes to Egypt and makes out just fine by marrying its pharaoh – her brother.
  • Cassander, king of Macedon, gets so irate at clever jabs from the wily Athenian politician Demades that he finally snaps and personally chops both Demades and his son to pieces while screaming insults at them.
  • For about a decade during the various successor wars, Athens is ruled by a literal philosopher-king, the thirty-something Macedonian puppet Demetrius of Phaleron. One of his agenda items is building a gigantic mechanical snail to crawl through the streets of Athens leaving a realistic trail of slime behind; this is apparently some artful way of shaming the Athenians for being sluggish in standing up for Greek freedom.
  • After Demetrius the Philosopher King is overthrown (by a different Demetrius, long story) the new tyrant takes advantage of divine honors granted to him to house his hoes in apartments at the back of the Parthenon. He tries to seduce a teenaged boy who instead commits suicide by jumping into a tub of boiling-hot water, and another time waives a fine against a prominent Athenian citizen in return for taking his son as a catamite. When you are legally a god, they let you do it.
  • Aratus is a quite successful Greek general with the unfortunate problem of getting uncontrollable diarrhea before every battle.
  • Escaped slave and rebel Drimakos defies authorities on Chios so successfully they simply reach a treaty with him: As long as he doesn’t steal too much and only accepts new slaves into his army who were severely abused by their masters (while sending the rest back), they’ll leave him alone. Drimakos lives to a ripe old age, then has his boy lover kill him and take his head in to claim a reward. Later, Drimakos’s spirit would supposedly appear to Chians in their dreams to warn of plots by their slaves.
  • To show off their power, the Ptolemies commission a grand procession through Alexandria whose centerpiece is “a gaudily painted gold phallus, almost two hundred feet long … and tied up, like some exotic Christmas present, with gold ribbons and bows”. Green reasonably wonders how this mighty phallus was able to negotiate corners.
  • The later Ptolemies could win some kind of ghastly award for their spectacular decadence. Ptolemy VIII Physcon (“the Obese”), who resembles a 2nd century BC Baron Harkonnen, seizes power after the death of his brother (also named Ptolemy) by marrying Cleopatra, who is also their sister. He then has her son, his nephew (also named Ptolemy), murdered during the wedding feast, then proceeds to seduce and marry his pubescent niece (also named Cleopatra). A decade later, riots forced Physcon and his niece-wife into exile, and his sister-wife proclaims her son by Physcon (another Ptolemy) as pharaoh, but the heir is apparently in Cyrene at the time, allowing Physcon to capture his unsuspecting son and send his dismembered corpse to the sister-wife as a birthday present. Meanwhile, the sister-wife’s daughter by her first brother (named Cleopatra, of course) gets married off to a Seleucid king and uses her sons as a series of puppets. The first puppet, Seleucus V, proves troublesome, so his mother murders him by using him for archery practice. The second puppet, Antiochus VIII, is more canny, and when his mother tries to murder him with a cup of poisoned wine, he notices something is up and forces her to drink the fatal cup herself. Antiochus VIII then fights a long civil war against his half-brother and cousin Antiochus IX, who is not a puppet but instead has the private hobby of playing with literal giant puppets. Got all that?

If learning the above is your idea of fun, then Alexander to Actium is a rich feast, enlivened throughout with Green’s flare for delicious details and legends that are possibly fanciful but too remarkable to leave out.

Blake Neff, “GUEST REVIEW: Alexander to Actium, by Peter Green”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2025-10-20.

  1. The Seventh, it turns out.

July 27, 2026

The Total Erasure of Carthage | Part Four

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

The Rest Is History
Published 12 Feb 2026

Three decades after the defeat of Hannibal, how had the Roman Empire managed to conquer vast swathes of the known world? Why did the predatory eyes of this terrifying behemoth turn once more to Carthage? And, could this mighty city defy the odds and repel Rome one last time …?

Join Tom and Dominic as they reach the climactic, final phase of the Punic Wars; the greatest military struggle of all ancient history.
(more…)

July 19, 2026

Rome’s Greatest Enemy: Bloodbath in Africa | EP 3

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

The Rest Is History
Published 9 Feb 2026

Would the Roman general Publius Cornelius Scipio successfully march on Africa? What happened when Hannibal and Scipio — the greatest commanders of their age — came head to head at the Battle of Zama, in the ultimate showdown? And, what would be the fate of these two titans of the ancient world?

Join Tom and Dominic, as they discuss the Roman Republic’s audacious invasion of North Africa under the leadership of the dashing Scipio, and his clash with Hannibal.

00:00 Scipio’s night attack in Numidia
02:16 Hannibal as a commander
08:07 The rise of Scipio Africanus
13:05 The Roman invasion of Africa begins
21:56 The Battle of the Great Plains
25:29 Hannibal recalled from Italy
28:18 Preparing for the final showdown
33:02 The Battle of Zama begins
36:03 Could Hannibal have won?
40:25 Hannibal urges acceptance of defeat
42:40 Hannibal as a civilian reformer
44:22 Scipio after the war
46:45 Cato’s rise and the conservative backlash
49:29 Rome turns east after victory
52:32 The Hellenistic world after Alexander
56:45 Hannibal and Scipio compare great generals
58:31 Rome defeats Antiochus
1:00:18 Hannibal’s final flight and death
1:01:40 Scipio’s death and exile
(more…)

July 12, 2026

How Rome’s Survival Came Down To One 25-Year-Old General – The Second Punic War | EP 2

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

The Rest Is History
Published 5 Feb 2026

What happened at the Battle of Ibera, a totemic though overlooked battle of the Punic Wars? With the forces of Carthage closing in on a depleted Rome, would a young Roman, Publius Cornelius Scipio resurrect the fortunes of the Republic? And, could he destroy Carthage’s most crucial power base in Europe?

Join Tom and Dominic, as they discuss this next phase of the Carthaginian Wars.

00:00 Intro: Rome’s “darkest hour” + Scipio teased as the Republic’s saviour
02:26 206 BC, Atlantic coast of Iberia
04:26 What’s “up” with Scipio?
12:05 Spain as hostile “sci-fi planet”
15:30 New Carthage (Cartagena)
18:09 215 BC crisis: Hasdrubal tries to march north
19:14 Battle of the Ebro
21:25 “Two rival pairs of brothers”
24:48 Rome’s commander problem
30:36 Scipio’s bold plan
31:37 New Carthage targeted
34:57 Sack of New Carthage
39:01 Hasdrubal crosses the Alps with elephants
39:59 Italy’s crisis for Rome
44:05 Battle by the Metaurus
47:23 Ilipa (206): Scipio crushes Mago and breaks Carthage’s Spanish power
49:52 Mago’s last throws
52:14 Scipio returns to Rome as a superstar
53:05 Senate authorises Africa invasion
(more…)

July 7, 2026

Carthage at the Gates – The Second Punic War | EP 1

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

The Rest Is History
Published 2 Feb 2026

Our whole series on Rome vs Carthage can be found here: • Rome Vs Carthage

[NR: Last year’s animated episode on Cannae is here — The Bloody Battle of Cannae]

Did Hannibal march on Rome after his legendary victory at the Battle of Cannae in 216 BC? How could Rome fight on after losing so many men? And, where would their next cataclysmic clash take place …?

Join Tom and Dominic, as they discuss the beginning of the end for the once mighty city of Carthage, and her masterful general, Hannibal Barca.

00:00 Cold open
02:02 After Cannae
05:20 Carthage vs Rome: the long backstory
12:44 The Barcid dynasty
15:37 Hannibal’s invasion route
18:37 Why Hannibal doesn’t march on Rome
21:30 Roman morale collapse (and recovery)
25:01 Rome’s “Lord Halifax moment” that never happens
28:00 Fabius Maximus takes control
31:06 Early heroes and hard choices
33:39 The Fabian strategy returns
34:26 Italy fractures
36:10 The Capua turning point
37:07 “Hannibal at the gates”
39:40 The war becomes a stalemate
43:08 Syracuse at its peak
50:14 Archimedes’ war machines
51:15 Syracuse switches sides
52:06 Marcellus besieges Syracuse
56:20 The fall of Syracuse
57:25 Death of Archimedes
58:40 What Syracuse means for the wider war
(more…)

July 5, 2026

QotD: Battlefield communication in the pre-modern world

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

Let us assume, picking up our discussion of information last time, that our army is formed up into its battle array (pre-planned the night before, recall) and is advancing and our general has just now noticed something that demands a change in the plan. It could be a dangerous enemy attack (perhaps on the flank) or an opportunity to split the enemy line. Whatever it is, our general needs to make some alteration to the battle plan. It is almost certainly a fairly minor alteration, as with a battle line anywhere from a kilometer to several kilometers long, it would, for instance, take far too long to shuffle the right-to-left order of the line just due to the marching time involved. Nevertheless, the general needs to issue an unplanned, on-the-spot command; how does he do it?

The first option, of course, is shouting. The problem here is obvious: how is the commander’s command to be heard? Interestingly, there has been a fair bit of research by ancient historians looking at the question of how many people can possibly hear a short address unaided by modern loudspeakers and the like; figures vary but generally a few thousand if they are reasonably compact and quiet. That might work for a general’s pre-battle speech, delivered before the army advances, but it will not do for an army that is already in motion, much less once the chaos of battle has begun. Thousands of men marching (let alone fighting!) are noisy!

The modern solution to this problem is radio, but of course that’s hardly available to our pre-modern commander. Instead, to judge by films, the mind quickly jumps to signal flags. I am reminded of Braveheart (1995)’s rendition of the Battle of Falkirk, where Edward I uses signal flags to order his archers forward. HBO’s Rome also does this in its version of the Battle of Philippi, with flags being jostled and then pointed forward to signal the advance. Unfortunately, signal flags – as distinct from unit flags (which we’ll come back to in a moment) – have a few key problems, the most notable of which is that no one will be looking at them: after all the army is advancing, the soldiers are looking forward but signal flags (again, as opposed to unit flags) are going to be behind them, not placed out in the middle of No Man’s Land between the armies. As a result, signal flags are useful for sending information long distances (in a chain of stations or operators), for instance from one commander at distance to another, but not in battle; operational, rather than tactical tools. In practice, the use of signal flags like this is confined to the modern era; the first successful “optical telegraphs” (as iterations on things like smoke signals and fire relays) date to the late 18th century.

Unit flags – a banner or other big, obvious symbol (like a statue of an eagle on a stick) – are more useful. These can be positioned at the front of a unit, typically at its center. If it advances, then the soldiers in the unit also know to advance, following the standard they can see (because it is elevated, large and visible) even if they cannot hear the orders. There are two complications here though: first, the unit banner or flag is a relatively late innovation in antiquity, really only coming into its own with the Romans. The Achaemenids may have used some kinds of ensigns or standards, but the Greeks do not seem to have done. Instead our first really good documentation of something like a battle flag comes from the Romans: each legion had a signa (eventually standardized to the legionary eagle, the aquila), which was a shiny metal statue mounted on a pole so it could be easily seen. Units of the legion broken off to do other things might instead follow a less impressive cloth banner, a vexillum, by which such detachments became known as vexillationes. But the broader problem is that of course your general may not be particularly close to your flags (or other standards) which are generally at the front-center of each component unit of your army. The flags may allow a subordinate officer to “drive” the unit over the battlefield – and that’s good – but it doesn’t let the general tell that officer what to do.

A better option is music, but once again development seems to come fairly late in antiquity. Greek hoplites seem to have advanced to the music of the aulos, a double-reeded flute-like instrument; given the limitations of the instrument it is generally assumed it was used to keep time (so everyone marched in step) not transmit orders. Once again, a more complex system of musical signalling seems to come with the Romans, at least as detailed by Vegetius. Vegetius (2.22) notes three different kinds of horn instruments used by a legion: the tubicen was used to sound charge and retreat, the cornicen regulated the movement of the signa (so “advance” or “halt”), while the buccina was used mostly for camp signals: sounding watches or assemblies. It’s a system that is akin to later bugle calls, but note that the orders it can give are limited to a relative handful of prearranged signals: advance, halt, charge, retreat, assemble, change shift and so on.

The attentive reader here may have already noticed how developed Roman command and control is and may suspect that ties in with the Romans having a more “command” oriented culture of generalship; if so you are ahead of the game!

Of course if those instruments are sounding on a per-unit basis (and they are) that means you still have the problem of getting the order from the general to the instruments for the unit in question. And fundamentally here, the technology is – as I tell my students – man-on-horse. The particular fellow on the horse may be a dedicated messenger (if your military organization has those) or a subordinate officer or it may be the general himself.

But it is important to note now the limitations of this sort of system and we can use what we know of the Roman command and control system (as noted, one of the more developed of such systems prior to gunpowder) to get a sense of them. Let’s say the general realizes there is a problem on his flank and he needs a unit (probably here we’re talking a cohort or a maniple, not a legion) to change what it is doing. First off, the order needs to get within shouting range of the unit’s commander (in this case a senior centurion). The general can either go themselves or send a messenger; both options have their downsides. If the general goes himself he is essentially removing himself from observing or commanding the rest of the battle, but a common problem with sending a junior subordinate is that the unit commander may not respect or feel the need to obey that subordinate (written orders can help with this, but now we’re bringing in questions of literacy). Of course both a messenger or a general in transit may also well be killed, which will prevent the order from being received!

In either case, the message is going to move at galloping speed, which is around 40km/h, meaning that it may take several minutes for the general or messenger to navigate to the spot. That doesn’t sound so bad, but battles with contact weapons do not typically go for hours and hours; Pydna (168) was, as noted last week, decided in about an hour total! Of course a battle might be longer (or shorter!) than this, though much of that extra time is likely pre-battle skirmishing – the actual direct press of infantry formations in shock rarely lasts long because of the terror of it (and to a lesser extent its lethality; we’ll return to the balance of terror and lethality next time). Imagine if you were playing a Total War game and your input delay was, say, five minutes long in a battle that might only last an hour or two.

But of course galloping time isn’t the end of it. The message now has to be conveyed to the unit. In the Roman system, that means the messenger needs to find the appropriate centurion, explain the order to him and then ideally that fellow will then signal the instruments and signa to act accordingly – but even then, those instruments and signa only have a handful of prearranged signals available. Anything more complicated will need to be shouted down the line the old fashioned way (as we know, for instance, the Spartans did for lack of almost any of the rest of this apparatus of command, Xen. Lac. 13.9). Needless to say that means that giving any complex order to a unit already engaged or about to be engaged is going to mean starting by signalling retreat and then attempting to regroup the unit; regrouping an already retreating unit is one of the most difficult tasks on a battlefield and is rarely performed successfully in an unplanned fashion (even in a planned fashion it goes wrong as often as it goes right).

(This is, by the by, why reserves are so important. An unengaged unit hanging behind the lines can be given new orders far, far easier than a unit that is already engaged or about to be. And indeed, those familiar with the Roman system of fighting with its three lines of heavy infantry will note that it is a system heavy on reserves. Indeed, the manipular legion essentially assumes it will be necessary to retreat and regroup the first line of heavy infantry (the hastati) behind the second (the principes) and plans and drills for that. Note how the Roman command culture, the Roman fighting method and the actual apparatus of messengers, signa, instruments and junior officers all align here – that’s common because these sort of institutions tend to co-evolve.

By contrast we may compare a Greek hoplite army in the Classical Period. It has no battle flags or ensigns and the general is expected to fight on foot. In the past I’ve described the resulting phalanx as an “unguided missile” and this is a big reason why. That’s not to say hoplite generals never exerted command on the battlefield – better generals might keep a reserve to be rushed to important points (as Pagondas does at the Battle of Delium in 424 BC). But for the most part, once a hoplite general formed up the army and hit “go”, they had very little control over the army.

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Total Generalship: Commanding Pre-Modern Armies, Part II: Commands”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-06-03.

June 22, 2026

Sparta vs Athens – 2(b): Ostracism, Demagogues, and Why Athenian Democracy Worked (Until Rome)

Filed under: Government, Greece, History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

seangabb
Published 8 Feb 2026

Greece: A Brief History, c.700 BC – 500 AD

Athenian democracy is often dismissed as mob rule. This segment explains why that is too simple. Athens developed habits and structures that stabilised debate: frequent Assembly meetings, repeated exposure to the same issues and speakers, and a politically literate citizen body shaped by practical participation.

I also cover the darker logic: fear of tyranny, fear of dominance, and why Athens accepted instability and even injustice as the price of preventing permanent concentrations of power. Ostracism is discussed as a precautionary tool, and demagoguery as a permanent risk that the system managed rather than “solved”.

Finally, I explain how Athenian democracy ended — not because it decayed internally, but because Rome rendered the institutions meaningless. Empire does not tolerate participation.

June 20, 2026

Caesar Augustus – The man and his story

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

Adrian Goldsworthy. Historian and Novelist
Published 28 Jan 2026

An overview of the career of the man who became Rome’s first princeps (or emperor as we would call him). Heir to Julius Caesar’s private estate, he somehow managed to make himself Caesar’s adopted son and political successor, plunging himself into Rome’s violent politics at the age of just nineteen and in turn beating all his rivals. Supreme master of the Roman empire in his early thirties, he then ruled for four decades, profoundly changing Rome, its empire — and by extension shaping the modern world.

My biography of the man — Augustus: First Emperor of Rome is being released as a new edition from Basic Books in the USA on 27th January 2026.

June 10, 2026

QotD: Tiberius Gracchus, Tribune of the Plebs

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

Tiberius Gracchus’ proposal to fix this problem [the perceived loss of free farmers from whom the Roman army was raised] was the lex Sempronia Agraria. The law proposed to enforce a legal but long ignored limit on the holding of ager publicus,1 restricting individuals to holding just 500 iugera (c. 311 acres), with the state revoking the leases on the remainder and using the reclaimed land to then provide small plots for free to the Roman poor, with a rider that these plots could not be sold (to avoid them being reconsolidated into elite estates).

And here it is worth noting that kind of government the Romans had to understand the response. The Roman Republic had written laws but no written constitution – instead, the rules for office holding, for conducting the business of the Senate, for running the assemblies and so on were all customary: the Romans governed themselves in accordance with what they called the mos maiorum, “the custom of the ancestors”. In a sense then, certain practices, if practiced long enough, became a sort of law-of-tradition to themselves and of course one of those customs – practiced at this point for, at minimum around 150 years – was the continual leasing of large amounts of ager publicus to the point that the leases were treated as a form of ownership: people used that land as security for loans, they built houses on it, they buried their parents on it and so on. Because the leases were presumptively renewable and had been for decades if not centuries, under the mos maiorum, the holders of ager publicus had long considered the land theirs. And of course the upset parties are rich and powerful, so their opposition was significant and meaningful, politically.

In brief, the way this plays out is that while Tiberius Gracchus does have significant popular support for his motion (Plut. Ti. Gracch. 9.1), much of the elite are opposed. He draws up a quite conciliatory version of the law, which proposes to compensate the holders of large amounts of ager publicus for their lost leasing rights and to then give them the remainder of their leased land (so they needn’t fear a second lex agraria and a third and a fourth and so on), but according to Plutarch in the face of continued elite opposition, shifts back to a less conciliatory version of the law (Plut. Ti. Gracch. 10.3). The resistance to his law centers on another tribune, Marcus Octavius, himself a large holder of public lands, who plans to veto the law and uses his own powers as a tribune to disrupt the process (along with some fairly clear shenanigans by some of the wealthy, like trying to hide the voting urns to prevent a vote on the law and so on).

Now there are a few things to note at this juncture in the story. First, there being ten tribunes, it must never have been very hard to find a tribute willing to gum up the passage of a given law, but that, traditionally, this was a tactic of delay, rather than a hard-stop the way Octavius is using it. At the same time, with real public momentum to make this law happen, one could easily imagine simply waiting Octavius out – he only has one year in office. Except. Except that, remember, Tiberius Gracchus needs a big victory in his tribunate to get his political career [back] on track, a consideration that was clearly significant (thus the reason we’re informed of his quaestorship; we usually don’t know much about even very significant figures’ time in junior offices!). That consideration, I think, serves as important context for Tiberius’ decision to escalate every time he encounters resistance: he cannot afford to simply be the prelude to someone else passing this law: he needs to pass it himself.

The normal method for “deconflicting” two magistrates with opposing vetoes like this was to go to the Senate, which Tiberius Gracchus, hoping his influential supporters would carry the day, did. Instead, according to Plutarch (Ti. Gracch. 11.2) the Senate was merely no help, whereas Appian (BCiv 1.12) describes the Senate as openly upbraiding Tiberius, a strong negative response. Now under the mos maiorum, that would be the end of it: the authority of the Senate (the auctoritas senatus) ought to be so intense that when the Senate speaks in one voice and says, “not right now” then you desist. Remember that in the Roman conception, the Republic is a partnership of sorts between the Senate and the People (the S and the P in SPQR), rather than a situation in which the Senate is purely subordinate to the popular will: if the Senate is strongly opposed, that is supposed to be a veto point that is respected.

But remember: Tiberius Gracchus cannot, politically, desist. He must push through because his political career requires a victory this year. Note that the cause does not require a victory in 133; there is nothing to stop another tribune in 132 from trying to advance the same bill or a more limited or different version of it. But Tiberius Gracchus’ career absolutely requires success in 133. So instead of desisting, he escalates.

He now breaks clearly with the mos maiorum and plans to take his law directly to the people against the advice of the Senate. Octavius is obviously a problem – he’ll veto anything Tiberius Gracchus tries to do – so Tiberius Gracchus introduces a law to depose Octavius from office. The Roman Republic doesn’t have anything like impeachment, there is no framework to remove someone from office. Instead, the way the Republic works is that all of the offices are held for short duration (one year) and while tribunes and office holders with imperium are immune from prosecution while in office, they can be prosecuted the moment they leave office for any crimes they committed. There is no framework for booting out a tribune like this; the remedy in the customary Roman system is to make sure the next year you elect tribunes who support the idea and try to pass it then. But that remedy doesn’t work for Tiberius Gracchus.

So Tiberius Gracchus passes the law deposing Octavius and then has him dragged from the speaker’s platform (the rostra) and now we have a problem. Because of course Octavius’ supporters are going to view this law itself as illegal and invalid: tribunes are, you will recall sacrosanct, so it’s not clear they can be deposed and it is very clear they cannot be assaulted or dragged. Violating the sacrosanctity of a tribune is, at least notionally, a capital offense and a severe violation of religion and if you think that Tiberius Gracchus’ legal basis for all of this is rubbish, you think he just did it twice. Of course, Tiberius is also a tribune, so you can’t attack him now, but once his year is done, you are probably planning to haul him in to court and let a jury decide if what he did was legal or not.2

In any case, with Octavius removed, Tiberius passes his land reform bill. The law provided for a three-man commission to handle the assessment of what public land was held in excess and then to hand it out. Tiberius Gracchus names as those commissioners himself, his brother and his father-in-law (Appius Claudius Pulcher (cos. 143)). Needless to say, that is a set of commissioners which does not inspire a lot of confidence that the commission will be uncorrupted by politics, a point we’ll get back to in just a moment.

In the meantime, the Senate looked to exert its traditional prerogative over state funds (as it advised the quaestors who superintended the treasury) to hamstring the new commission, but Tiberius Gracchus took advantage of the recent death of Attalus III, King of Pergamum. Attalus had notionally willed his kingdom “to the Roman people” – he had no clear heirs and so perhaps thought by this act to get the Romans to pick one of his relatives to run the kingdom, thus avoiding a damaging civil war – but instead Tiberius, getting the news early, rushed to pass a law annexing the kingdom and using the windfall to fund his commission. The law passes, but this is a breach both of the Senate’s traditional power over state finances, but also its very important role managing Roman foreign policy.

What I want to note in this sequence which is important for understanding what comes next is that Tiberius Gracchus has just demonstrated that, so long as he remained popular, he could use the powers of the tribunate to essentially run the Roman state from the tribune’s chair. Tiberius has now forced not merely a domestic land issue, but also a finance issue and a foreign policy issue over the objection of the Senate and another elected tribune, essentially running roughshod over all of the customary limits intended to keep any one Roman politician from coming to dominate the Roman political system.

Of course if you were an opponent of Tiberius Gracchus, you could at least tell yourself that this is all bad, but at the very least, Tiberius Gracchus will be out of office next year, as it was contrary to custom to run for any office immediately after holding it. Indeed, it was unusual to hold basically any office more than once, save for the consulship (and even then, only for very successful consuls and never multiple years in a row). Those limits are customary but everything about the Roman Republic is customary; if you discounted the mos maiorum, there wouldn’t be any republic left. You’d instead expect that Tiberius would go back to being a senator for a few years while planning his shot at the praetorship – during which he’ll have to survive a series of court battles over the legality of his actions.

So even if he is doing potentially outrageous, dangerous things, at least he’ll be gone in a year, right?

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: On the Gracchi, Part I: Tiberius Gracchus”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2025-01-17.

  1. Which, again, noting the complications above, probably means applying that limit for the first time to at least some classifications of land it had not applied to before and also applying it against the socii.
  2. The Roman court system leaves questions of law – which in most modern courts would be decided by a judge – to the jury itself.
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