Now already some of you are noting a curious feature here which is that I keep using the word “Gauls” to describe these folks rather than “Celts” and you are probably wondering why. We’ve actually addressed this question before, but we ought to revisit it here, because I think any approach to “Celtic Warfare” is already potentially begging some pretty important questions (assuming it hasn’t stopped to address them) and, alas, begged the wrong answers (unless it has defined “Celtic” very narrowly). The problem, entirely unaddressed in the original video, is that there is a pretty big gap between what the Greeks meant by the word keltoi, what the keltoi may have meant by the word keltoi and most important what people today understand by the word “Celts”. Instead everyone gets smashed together, with all of the Celtic-language speakers mashed in under the label of “Celts”, a practice that hasn’t been acceptable in serious scholarship for at least 30 years. Let’s talk about why.
From antiquity we have two standard terms. On the one hand, the Greeks encountered a people in the Mediterranean and called them keltoi. From Caesar and Strabo we know that at least some peoples called themselves keltoi (or celtae), though as we’re going to see the people who did this are not actually co-terminus with this military system or with all the people folks (including the original video) think of as Celtic or any identifiable polity or political structure. In particular, Caesar reports that the folks living in what is today France (then Gaul) north of the Garonne and south of the Marne and the Seine called themselves celtae, which he takes to be equivalent to the Latin galli (Caes. BGall. 1.1). Strabo, meanwhile, describes peoples in Spain as both keltoi and also keltiberes (which enters English as Celtiberians, Strabo, Geography 3.2.15) as well as those in Gaul (Geography 4.1ff), but doesn’t make the claim that they call themselves that (instead repeatedly noting these groups broken up into smaller tribal units with their own names). Both Caesar (Caes. BGall. 1.1) and Strabo (Geography 4.1.1) go out of their way to stress that the folks they’re talking about do not have the same languages, institutions or mode of life, even those who are, to Strabo, galatikos – “Gallic” or more precisely “Galatian-like” (referring to the sub-group of Gallic peoples the Greeks were the most familiar with).
Galli, rendered into modern English as “the Gauls” (though the latter is not a descendant of that word, but a wholly different derivation), is likewise tricky. We’re fairly sure that both keltoi and galli are Celtic-language words, meaning that (contrary to the video) they’re both probably “endonyms”, (a thing people call themselves) but it is really common for peoples in history to take the endonym of the first group of people they meet and apply it to a much larger group of “similar” (or not so similar) people. The example I use with my students is “Frank”; – it was common in both the Eastern Mediterranean and later in East Asia to use some derivative of “Frank” or “Frankish” to mean “Western or Central European” – the term got applied to the Portuguese in China, and to both Germans and Sicilian Normans during the Crusades. It’s possible that galli in Latin is connected to the Galatai (Greek) or Galatae (Latin), the Galatians, a Celtic-language speaking La Tène material culture group who migrated into Anatolia in the 270s, but a number of etymologies have been proposed. It certainly wouldn’t be the first time the Romans named a massive ethnic group after the first people they met; this is how we get the word “Greek” when the Greeks call themselves Hellenes. So assuming off the bat that all of these different tribal groups that Caesar or Strabo treat as a cultural unity thought of themselves that way is most unwise. The most we know is that if you called some of these folks (but not all of them, as we’ll see) keltoi or galli, they’d say, “yeah, I guess that more or less describes me”, perhaps in the same way describe a Swiss person as “European” isn’t wrong, but it also isn’t quite right.1
Surely here linguistics will help us out? If we can identify a Celtic language then surely everyone who speaks that language will have that culture? First, this is yet more question begging; English is the official language of South Sudan and yet the South Sudanese are not English, British or American. Linguistic connections do not always imply ethnic or cultural connections extending beyond language. And, in fact, examining the Celtic language family is a brilliant way to illustrate this.
There is, in fact, a family of Celtic languages and indeed it is only in the sense of languages which you will see me use the word Celtic in a formal way precisely to avoid the giant pickle of confusion we are currently working through. Very briefly, it has been shown linguistically that the various surviving Celtic languages are related to each other and also to the extinct languages of pre-Roman continental Europe that were spoken in Gaul, Noricum and parts of Spain. So far so good, right, we have a nice, perfect match between our keltoi and Celtic-language-speakers, right?
Of course not. That would be easy! Because notice there that Irish, Manx, Scottish Gaelic and Welsh are all Celtic languages. But our sources are actually quite clear that at least the Romans and the Greeks did not consider these folks to be galli or keltoi. Indeed, Strabo explicitly defines the people of Britain against the keltoi as two distinct groups, making it clear he doesn’t think the inhabitants of the British Isles were “Celts” (Geography 4.5.2); Caesar doesn’t either (BGall. 4.21ff). Tacitus sees in the britanniae evidence of German, Iberian and Gallic influence, marking them as distinct from all three, but concludes that Gallic settlement is the most likely cause, a point on which we may be quite certain he is wrong, for reasons discussed just below (Tac. Agr. 11). So the groups described as “Celts” don’t entirely overlap with Celtic language speakers.
Well, surely here the archaeologists can help us out, right? Yes and no. On the one hand, we have a collection of object types, artistic motifs and archaeologically visible patterns that we associate with some of the areas settled by people who our sources regard as “Celts” and who were Celtic language speakers. The older of these two material culture groupings we call “Halstatt culture” after the original type-site in Hallstatt, Austria, though we find Hallstatt culture objects (remember, these are objects, not people, a thing to be relevant in a moment) in a territorial range that forms a sort of crescent shape embracing the northern edges of the Alps, from around 1200 BC to around 500 BC. We then shift to a material culture pattern which may have developed out of late Hallstatt culture which we call La Tène culture after its type-site of La Tène in Switzerland; it runs from around 500 BC (very roughly) to around 50 AD, with lots of subdivisions.
And just about all of the folks our sources will identify as “Celts” or “Gauls” tend to live in areas where where we find, by the third century or so, at least some elements of La Tène material culture (and many in places where they have the full package). So do we at last have a way to identify some “Celts”, by matching wherever we find La Tène material culture?
No. Of course not. That would be easy and history is not easy.
First, not all of the people our sources describe as Celts adopt all or even most of the elements of La Tène material culture. Most notably, the folks in Iberia who were keltoi (according to Strabo) or Celtiberians have some elements of La Tène material culture, but are notably missing others. They don’t have, for instance, the whole La Tène military package – mail in particular is absent in Iberia until the Romans arrive, and the La Tène swords they have are local variations of early La Tène I swords by the third and second centuries, not the La Tène II swords we find in most of the rest of the cultural zone.2 The artistic style in “Celtic” Spain is also different and unsurprisingly there’s a lot of Iberian borrowing. As a result, archaeologically, the keltoi of south-western Iberia aren’t some sort of carbon-copy of the keltoi of central France. There’s not no connection here, they are Celtic-language speakers and they have some La Tène stuff, but the Iberian Celtici are quite a bit further from the Helvetii (the folks who probably inhabited the La Tène site) than, say, the Senones.
Meanwhile, we find some La Tène material culture objects in southern Britain, but they don’t fully penetrate the Isles (despite the general assumption that all of the people of Britain and Ireland were Celtic language speakers) and many appear to be expensive, high-status imports. Indeed, while it was once supposed that the arrival of La Tène material culture objects signified some invasion or settlement of Britain by people from Gaul, an analysis of burial patterns3 demonstrates pretty clearly that this isn’t happening in this period, because burial practices in southern Britain remain distinct from those on the continent. Instead, we’re seeing trade.
Meanwhile, we find tons of La Tène material culture objects in cultural contexts that we know were neither “Celtic” in any cultural sense nor filled with Celtic-language speakers. The clearest instance of these are in Illyria and Thrace, who spoke Indo-European but not Celtic language (so a language as close to Celtic languages as Latin or Greek or German), where it’s clear that folks adopted at least some La Tène material culture, including weapons and armor. Of course by the third century, when it came to militaria, we’d have the same problem with the Romans, who by the end of the Second Punic War, had adopted a La Tène sword (albeit from Spain and with a different suspension system), a variant of the La Tène shield, a La Tène helmet type (domestically manufactured), and La Tène body armor (mail). If we didn’t have any surviving Latin language material, I am almost certain there would be nationalist pseudo-archaeologists claiming the Roman Empire was clearly some “pan-Celtic” imperial construct on that basis.4 And of course in the third century, a Greek variant of the La Tène shield, the thureos, begins showing up everywhere in the Hellenistic East, but that doesn’t make them Celts either (they’d be the first to tell you).
Meanwhile, there’s even more complexity than this, because objects of La Tène material culture aren’t the whole of archaeologically visible culture. There are building habits, burial habits, evidence for social organization and on and on. And those vary significantly within the La Tène material culture zone. I put this in the bibliography and I’m afraid it is a (necessarily) difficult and technical read, but if you want to get a sense of just how complex this can get, check out Rachel Pope’s efforts to define the Celts in the Journal of Archaeological Research (2022). To quote some of her conclusions, “In fact, ‘Celts’ as a historical label does not map neatly onto any archaeological tradition; it overlaps with late Hallstatt traditions in northeast France and less ostentatious archaeologies farther west … Nor did the name ‘Celt’ ever equate to all of Gaul, let alone all of Europe.”
So to be clear, we have Celtic-language speakers who aren’t called Celts by our sources and don’t have La Tène material culture (Ireland, N. Britain), Celtic-language speakers who are called Celts by our sources but don’t have the full La Tène material culture package (Spain, Portugal), non-Celtic language speakers who do have some of the La Tène material culture package but who are clearly not Celts to our sources (Thracians, Illyrians, Dacians, etc.), full La Tène material culture-havers who are explicitly not Celts in our sources (Caesar, specifically) and maybe speak a Celtic-language (the Belgae), and partial La Tène material-culture-havers who do speak a Celtic language but are still explicitly not Celts in our sources (S. Britain). Oh, and while we’re here, by the second century we also have La Tène material culture-havers who probably still speak a Celtic-language and are called Celts/galli by our sources but write inscriptions in Greek (the Galatians) and seem to have different religious structures and folks identified as Celts in our sources who are in the process of ditching large parts of La Tène material culture and learning Latin (Cisalpine Gaul), who might, à la Pope (op. cit.), actually be the direct, local descendants of the “original” Celts.
And then of course we have a band across parts of the Alps and central France where everything lines up: Celtic-language speakers with La Tène material culture who our sources call keltoi or galli and live in a place called Gallia by the Romans. But it would be a mistake to assume this is the cultural “heartland” of a “Celtic” people – indeed, La Tène material culture may be more deeply rooted in more Northern parts of France [than in] the Danube region, which has a lot of non-Celtic language speakers in it in this period! Because, to be clear, what we actually have are a host of smaller, tribal societies which share come cultural elements and differ in others, who seem to think of themselves primarily as members of a tribe and who lack notable “pan-Celtic” institutions, to which Greeks and Romans, needing a way to label their neighbors, took whatever ethnic signifiers they had and applied them (over)broadly.
[…]
At no point where all of these people united in a single polity (the closest they get is that most of them get conquered by the Romans) and there’s no indication that they ever saw themselves as a cultural or ethnic unity. And of course we haven’t even gotten into the idea that they might all be somehow closely ethnically related but let’s just go ahead and tag that as “very unlikely” and keep moving.
All of that is to make the point that any treatment of “Celtic” warfare is immediately begging an enormous question because “who were the Celts?” is at best an unanswered question and to be frank, probably an unanswerable question. Crucially, “the Celts” do not share a military system. Warfare among Celtic-language speakers in the British Isles isn’t necessarily based around La Tène material culture, nor is warfare in S. Portugal among peoples identified by our sources as keltoi; both areas seem to have very substantial regional variation. By contrast, the galli of central France and Cisalpine Gaul do seem to share at least substantial elements of a military system with the – according to Caesar – non-celtae of broader Gaul and as well as with the Galatians who live, I must repeat, in Anatolia (having migrated there in the third century). There is thus no “Celtic” military system which maps clearly onto either Celtic-language distribution or peoples described as keltoi by our sources.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Who Were ‘the Celts’ and How Did They (Some of Them) Fight?”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-05-12.
1. Especially in the sense that “European” gets used to mean “citizen of a country in the European Union”, which Switzerland is not. Mostly. The EU is complicated.
2. On these differences, see F. Quesada Sanz, “Patterns of Interaction: ‘Celtic’ and ‘Iberian’ weapons in Iron Age Spain” in Celtic Connections, vol. 2, eds. W. Gillies and D.W. Harding (2005) and in even more detail F. Quesada Sanz, “El Armamento Ibérico. Estudio tipológico, geográfico, functional, social y simbólico de las armas en la Cultura ibérica” (siglos VI-I a.C.) (1997). Interestingly, the Roman gladius Hispaniensis seems likely to have been a Roman adaptation of the peculiar Iberian La Tène swords, so you have the La Tène I sword making its way to Iberia, becoming distinctive, being adopted by the Romans instead of the more common (to them) La Tène II sword, thus becoming the gladius. On this, see F. Quesada Sanz, “Gladius Hispaniensis: an Archaeological View from Iberia” JRMES 8 (1997).
3. On this, see S. James, The Atlantic Celts: Ancient People or Modern Invention (1999).
4. On this, see M.J. Taylor, “Panoply and Identity During the Roman Republic” PBSR 88 (2020). On the helmet type and its evolution, see U. Schaaff, “Keltische Helme”, in Antike Helme (1988) for a rundown; P. Connolly Greece and Rome At War (1981), 121 also has a fantastic visual chart of the development of the type in the La Tène material culture zone, where you can see quite clearly where in the fourth century the Italic variants of this helmet type are breaking off from, while the La Tène helmets continue their development in other directions, later to be re-adopted by the Romans who thought it was so nice, they borrowed it twice.
October 2, 2023
QotD: Who were the Celts?
September 16, 2023
QotD: The Persian “Royal Roads”
The oldest road network that we have pretty good evidence for was the Persian Royal Road of the Achaemenids but these too were not the first (the Achaemenid dynasty ruling a vast empire from 559 to 330 BC; this is the Persian Empire of Xerxes and Darius III). Even before them the Assyrians (Middle and Neo-Assyrian Empires running from 1363 to 609 BC)1 had build roadways to hold together parts of their empire, though I confess I know very little of the extent of that road system except that we’re fairly sure it existed and like the later systems we’re going to talk about, it included not just the physical infrastructure of the roads but a sophisticated relay system to allow official messengers to move very rapidly over the network.
The modern perception of the Persian Royal Road is conditioned perhaps a bit too much by Herodotus who described the royal road – singular – as a single highway running from Susa to Sardis. Susa was one of several Achaemenid royal capitals and it sat at the edge of the Iranian plateau where it meets the lowland valley of Mesopotamia, essentially sitting right on the edge where the Persian “heartland” met the area of imperial conquests. Meanwhile, Sardis was the westernmost major Achaemenid administrative center, the regional capital, as it were, for Anatolia and the Aegean. So you can see the logic of that being an important route, but the road system was much larger. Indeed, here is a very rough sketch of how we might understand the whole system.
Compare the dashed line – the Royal Road as described by Herodotus – with the solid lines, the rest of the system we can glean from other sources or from archaeology and you can see that Herodotus hasn’t given us the whole story. For what it is worth, I don’t think Herodotus here is trying to lie – he has just described the largest and most important trunk road that leads to his part of the world.
This system doubtlessly emerged over time. Substantial parts of the road network almost certainly predated the Achaemenids and at least some elements were in place under the first two Achaemenid Great Kings (Cyrus II, r. 559-530 and Cambyses II, r. 530-22) but it seems clear that it is the third Achaemenid ruler, Darius I (r. 522-486; this is the fellow who dispatched the expedition defeated at Marathon, but his reign was far more important than that – he is the great organizer of the Persian Empire) who was responsible for the organization, formalization and expansion of the system. And in practice we can split that system into two parts, the physical infrastructure of roads and then the relay system built atop that system.
In terms of the physical infrastructure, as far as I can tell, the quality of Persian Royal Roads varied a lot. In some areas where the terrain was difficult, we see sections of road cut into the rock or built via causeways over ravines. Some areas were paved, but most – even most of the “royal” roads (as distinct from ancillary travel routes) were not.2 That said, maintenance seems to have been more regular on the royal roads, meaning they would be restored more rapidly after things like heavy rains that might wash an unpaved road out, making them more reliable transport routes for everyone. They also seem to have been quite a bit wider; Achaemenid armies could have long logistics tails and these roads had to accommodate those. Several excavated sections of royal roads are around 5m wide, but we ought to expect a lot of variation.
On top of the physical infrastructure, there was also a system of way-stations and stopover points along the road. These were not amenities for everyone but rather a system for moving state officials, messengers, soldiers, and property (like taxes). While anyone could, presumably, walk down the road, official travelers carried a sealed travel authorization issued by either a satrap (the Persian provincial governors) or the king himself. Such authorizations declared how many travelers there were, where they were going and what the way-stations, which stocked supplies, should give them. Of course that in turn meant that local satraps had to make sure that way-stations remained stocked up with food, fodder for animals, spare horses and so on. Fast messengers could also be sent who, with that same authorization, would change horses at each way-station, allowing them to move extremely fast over the system, with one estimate suggesting that a crucial message could make the trip from Sardis to Susa – a trip of approximately 2,500km (1,550 miles, give or take) in twelve days (by exchanging not only horses, but riders, as it moved).
All of which gives some pretty important clues to why royal roads were set up and maintained. Notice how the system specifically links together key administrative hubs, like the three main Achaemenid capitals (Susa, Ekbatana and Persepolis) and key administrative centers (Memphis, Sardis, Babylon, etc.) and that while anyone can use the roads, the roads serve as the basis for a system to handle the logistics of moving officials and state messages, which of course could also serve as the basis for moving armies. After all, you can send messengers down the royal roads, through the existing system set up for them, to instruct your satraps to gather local forces or more importantly to gather local food supplies and move them to the road in depots where the army can pick them up (and perhaps some local troops) as it moves through to a nearby trouble spot (while the nice, wide road allows you to bring lots of pack animals and carts with your army).
In short this is a large, expensive but effective system for managing the problem of distance in a large empire. Cutting down travel and message times reduces the independence of the satraps, allowing the Great King to keep an eye on them, while the roads provide the means to swiftly move armies from the core of the empire out to the periphery. We can actually see this play out with Alexander’s invasion. He crosses into Asia in 334 and defeats the local satrapal army at Granicus in 334. Moving into the Levant in 333, he’s met at Issus by Darius III with a massive army, collected from the central and western parts of the empire – which means that news of Alexander’s coming has reached Darius who has then marshaled all of those troops from his satrapies (and hired some mercenaries), presumably using his efficient message system to do it and then moved that force down the road system to meet Alexander. Alexander defeats that army, but is met by another huge army at Gaugamela in 331, this time gathered mostly from the eastern parts of the empire. While the Persian army fails in defeating Alexander, the exercise shows the power of the system in allowing the Great King, Darius III to coordinate the military efforts of an enormous empire.
So this is a system meant to enable the imperial center to control its periphery by enabling the court to keep tabs on the satraps, to get messages to and from them and move armies and officials (and taxes!) around. And doubtless it was also not lost on anyone that such a visible series of public works – even if the roads were not always paved and had to be repaired after heavy rains and such – was also an exercise in legitimacy building, both a visual demonstration of the Great King’s power and resources but also a display of his generosity and industry.
And I lead with all of that because the Roman road network works the same way, just on an even larger scale. Which isn’t to say the Romans were copying the Achaemenids (they don’t seem to have been) but rather that this is a common response to the problem of managing an uncommonly large empire.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Roman Roads”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-06-02.
1. The Middle Assyrian Empire and the Neo-Assyrian or New Assyrian Empires were, in fact, the same state. We split them up because of a severe contraction in Assyrian power during the Late Bronze Age Collapse.
2. On this, see Henkelman and Jacobs, 727-8
August 23, 2023
QotD: “Megacorporations” of the Roman era
Which is to say that what really defines a megacorporation is that it trespasses into domains usually occupied by the state: military, police and judicial functions – the use of force. A megacorporation is, simply put, a corporation so large and powerful that it begins to act as a state, be that in the form of the private armies of Cyberpunk 2077, the privatized police force of the Robocop franchise, or the straight-up corporate governments of Stellaris (which in turn channel things like the Spacer’s Guild or the Ferengi Alliance) And that is core to the generally dystopian leaning of megacorporations – they are meant to reflect capitalism and corporate empire building taken to an extreme, to the point where it has swallowed the entire rest of the society.
Taking that definition to history, we can actually see a fair number of megacorporations; they are by no means common, but they do exist. Going very far back, the Roman societates (lit: “fellowships”, but “business association” or “company” is an accurate enough rendering) of the publicani (businessmen who filled public contracts) exercised close to this sort of power in some of Rome’s early provinces. During the Middle and Late Roman Republic, the job of extracting tax revenue from the provinces was too administratively complex for the limited machinery of the Republic, so instead the senate directed the censors to auction the right to collect taxes. Groups of Roman businessmen (and often silent patrician partners) would group resources together to bid for the right to collect taxes from a province – any taxes they took in excess of that figure would be their profit.
These companies could be very large indeed. For instance, parts of the lex portorii Asiae (the customs laws for the Roman province of Asia) survive and include regulations for the relevant company including a slew of customs houses and guard posts (the law is incomplete, but mentions more than 30 collection points – all major ports – to which would also need to be added posts along the land routes into the province). From other evidence we know that the staff at customs posts included armed guards along with the expected tax collectors and bookkeepers. And we know that publicani were sometimes delegated local or Roman forces to do their work (e.g. Cic. Ad Att. 114, using Shackleton Bailey’s numbering). They also maintained the closest thing the Roman Republic had to a postal service (Cic. Ad Att. 108). It’s not clear exactly how many employees one of the larger tax collection companies might have had (and those for the province of Asia – equivalent to the west coast of Anatolia – would have been some of the largest), but it was clearly considerable, as were the sums of money involved.
To the cities and towns of a province, such Roman companies must have seemed like megacorporations, especially if they were in with the governor (which they generally were) and thus could call down the forces of Rome on recalcitrant taxpayers. And we certainly know that these publicani often collected substantially far more than was due to them under the law (the reason why “tax collector” and “sinner” seem to be nearly synonymous in the New Testament, a fact that gave Ernst Badian’s study of them, Publicans and Sinners, its title). At the same time, we see the clear limitations too: such companies were clearly subservient to the governor and to the Roman state. Administrative changes beginning under Julius Caesar and brought to completion under Augustus did away with some of the largest tax contracts and the influence of the societates publicanorum with them.
Bret Devereaux, “Fireside Friday: January 1, 2021”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-01-01.
August 7, 2023
The Longest Year in Human History (46 B.C.E.)
Historia Civilis
Published 24 Apr 2019
(more…)
QotD: How do we determine Roman dates like “46 BC”?
Now the Roman calendar is itself kind of a moving target, so we can start with a brief history of that. At some very early point the Romans seem to have had a calendar with ten months, with December as the last month, March as the first month and no January or February. That said while you will hear a lot of folk history crediting Julius Caesar with the creation of two extra months (July and August) that’s not right; those months (called Quintilis and Sextilis) were already on the calendar. By the time we can see the Roman calendar, it has twelve months of variable lengths (355 days total) with an “intercalary month” inserted every other year to “reset” the calendar to the seasons. That calendar, which still started in March (sitting where it does, seasonally, as it does for us), the Romans attributed to the legendary-probably-not-a-real-person King Numa, which means in any case even by the Middle Republic it was so old no one knew when it started (Plut. Numa 18; Liv 1.19.6-7). The shift from March to January as the first month in turn happens in 153 (Liv. Per. 47.13), probably for political reasons.
We still use this calendar (more or less) and that introduces some significant oddities in the reckoning of dates that are recorded by the Roman calendar. See, because the length of the year (355 days) did not match the length of a solar year (famously 365 days and change), the months “drifted” over the calendar a little bit; during the first century BC when things were so chaotic that intercalary months were missed, the days might drift a lot. This problem is what Julius Caesar fixed, creating a 365 day calendar in 46; to “reset” the year for his new calendar he then extended the year 46 to 445 days. And you might think, “my goodness, that means we’d have to convert every pre-45 BC date to figure out what it actually is, how do we do that?”
And the answer is: we don’t. Instead, all of the oddities of the Roman calendar remain baked into our calendar and the year 46 BC is still reckoned as being 445 days long and thus the longest ever year. Consequently earlier Roman dates are directly convertible into our calendar system, though if you care what season a day happened, you might need to do some calculating (but not usually because the drift isn’t usually extreme). But in expressing the date as a day, the fact that the Gregorian calendar does not retroactively change the days of the Julian calendar, which also did not retroactively change the days of the older Roman calendar means that no change is necessary.
Ok, but then what year is it? Well, the Romans counted years two ways. The more common way was to refer to consular years, “In the year of the consulship of X and Y.” Thus the Battle of Cannae happened, “in the year of the consulship of Varro and Paullus,” 216 BC. In the empire, you sometimes also see events referenced by the year of a given emperor. Conveniently for us, we can reconstruct a complete list of all of the consular years and we know all of the emperors, so back-converting a date rendered like this is fairly easy. More rarely, the Romans might date with an absolute chronology, ab urbe condita (AUC) – “from the founding of the city”, which they imagined to have happened in in 753 BC. Since we know that date, this also is a fairly easy conversion.
Non-Roman dates get harder. The Greeks tend to date things either by serving magistrates (especially the Athenian “eponymous archon”, because we have so many Athenian authors) or by Olympiads. Olympiad dates are not too bad; it’s a four-year cycle starting in 780 BC, so we are now in the 700th Olympiad. Archon dates are tougher for two reasons. First, unlike Roman consuls, we have only a mostly complete list of Athenian archons, with some significant gaps. Both dates suffer from the complication that they do not line up neatly with the start of the Roman year. Olympiads begin and end in midsummer and archon years ran from July to June. If we have a day, or even a month attached to one of these dates, converting to a modern Gregorian calendar date isn’t too bad. But if, as is often the case, all you have is a year, it gets tricky; an event taking place “in the Archonship of Cleocritus” (with no further elaboration) could have happened in 413 or 412. Consequently, you’ll see the date (if there is no month or season indicator that lets us narrow it down), written as 413/2 – that doesn’t mean “in the year two-hundred and six and a half” but rather “413 OR 412”.
That said, with a complete list of emperors, consuls and Olympiads, along with a nearly complete list of archons, keeping the system together is relatively easy. Things get sticky fast when moving to societies using regnal years for which we do not have complete or reliable king’s lists. So for instance there are a range of potential chronologies for the Middle Bronze Age in Mesopotamia. I have no great expertise into how these chronologies are calculated; I was taught with the “Middle” chronology as the consensus position and so I use that and aim just to be consistent. Bronze Age Egyptian chronology has similar disputes, but with a lot less variation in potential dates. Unfortunately while obviously I have to be aware of these chronology disputes, I don’t really have the expertise to explain them – we’d have to get an Egyptologist or Assyriologist (for odd path-dependent reasons, scholars that study ancient Mesopotamia, including places and cultures that were not Assyria-proper are still called Assyriologists, although to be fair the whole region (including Egypt!) was all Assyria at one point) to write a guest post to untangle all of that.
That said in most cases all of this work has largely been done and so it is a relatively rare occurrence that I need to actually back convert a date myself. It does happen sometimes, mostly when I’m moving through Livy and have lost track of what year it is and need to get a date, in which case I generally page back to find the last set of consular elections and then check the list of consuls to determine the date.
Bret Devereaux, “Referenda ad Senatum: January 13, 2023: Roman Traditionalism, Ancient Dates and Imperial Spies”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-01-13.
July 21, 2023
QotD: War elephant weaknesses against Roman troops
So today we’re going to ask, “why?” We’ve answered that question in the immediate term – to quote Trautmann (2015) on the point, “the Roman refusal of the war elephant … was based upon a low estimate of its value” (250). To put another way, they thought they sucked. We know elephants could be quite potent in battle, so the answer must be a touch more complicated. We’ll look at this two ways: first (because it’s me) in terms of logistics, and then in terms of anti-elephant tactics, to see why elephants could not succeed against (or with) Rome. I am also going to speculate – just a touch – on which of these factors might explain the other major area elephant warfare did not penetrate: China.
Roman Elephants
But first, a necessary caveat to an objection no doubt already brewing in the minds of some: but didn’t the Romans use elephants sometimes? Yes, though Roman employment of elephants was at best uneven (this is a point, I’d like to note, where Trautmann (2015) shows its value over, for instance, J. M. Kistler’s War Elephants (2006) – the latter’s reading of Roman use of war elephants bends the evidence to serve an argument, rather than the other way around). Nevertheless, the Romans did use war elephants during the last two centuries of the Republic.The Romans had some war elephants (just 20) at Cynocephelae (197 B.C.) against Macedon – these had been drawn from the kingdom of Numidia, which had sided with Rome against Carthage in the Second Punic War. Plutarch (Flam. 8.2-5) leaves the animals out of the battle narrative, but Livy (who is the better source; Liv. 33.9) notes their use to break up the Macedonian right wing, which was not yet even in fighting formation. It’s not clear the elephants were necessary for the Roman victory here and the key action was actually a flanking attack by infantry.
The Romans brought elephants to Magnesia (190 B.C.), but left them in reserve; the Romans only had a few, whereas their Seleucid opponents had brought many more. Moreover, the Roman elephants were smaller African elephants, effectively useless against the large Asian elephants the Seleucids used. Pydna (168 B.C.) against the Macedonians again, is harder to assess because the sources for it are poor (part of Livy’s narrative of the battle is mostly lost). Plutarch (Aem. 19-22) leaves the elephants out again, whereas Livy notes that Perseus’ dedicated elephant-fighting corps was ineffective in fighting the Roman elephants on the right wing, but attributes success there to the socii infantry rather than the elephants (Liv. 44.41.4-6). Kistler reads this as a notable elephant success, but Livy does not say this, instead crediting the socii on the right and the legions breaking up the Macedonian center.
The Romans did find elephants useful in places like Spain or southern Gaul (modern Provence) where just a handful could bewilder and terrify opponents completely unused to and unprepared for them. The last gasp of true Roman war elephants came in 46 B.C., where Julius Caesar defeated a Roman army led by Metellus Scipio which had sixty elephants in it. The elephants lost and one of Caesar’s legions (my personal favorite, Legio V Alaudae (Larks!)) took the elephant as a legionary symbol in commemoration of having beaten them.
So absolutely yes, the Romans of the Middle and Late Republic made some use of war elephants, but it was hardly a distinguished run. As Trautmann notes – quite correctly, in my view – the Romans were always more interested in ways to defeat elephants than to use them.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: War Elephants, Part II: Elephants against Wolves”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-08-02.
May 27, 2023
QotD: The war elephant’s primary weapon was psychological, not physical
So it is possible – even without special anti-elephant weapons or tactics – for very high quality infantry (and we should be clear about this: Alexander’s phalanx was as battle hardened as troops come) to resist the charge of elephants. Nevertheless, the terror element of the onrush of elephants must be stressed: if being charged by a horse is scary, being charged by a 9ft tall, 4-ton war beast must be truly terrifying.
Yet – in the Mediterranean at least – stories of elephants smashing infantry lines through the pure terror of their onset are actually rare. This point is often obscured by modern treatments of some of the key Romans vs. Elephants battles (Heraclea, Bagradas, etc), which often describe elephants crashing through Roman lines when, in fact, the ancient sources offer a somewhat more careful picture. It also tends to get lost on video-games where the key use of elephants is to rout enemy units through some “terror” ability (as in Rome II: Total War) or to actually massacre the entire force (as in Age of Empires).
At Bagradas (255 B.C. – a rare Carthaginian victory on land in the First Punic War), for instance, Polybius (Plb. 1.34) is clear that the onset of the elephants does not break the Roman lines – if for no other reason than the Romans were ordered quite deep (read: the usual triple Roman infantry line). Instead, the elephants disorder the Roman line. In the spaces between the elephants, the Romans slipped through, but encountered a Carthaginian phalanx still in good order advancing a safe distance behind the elephants and were cut down by the infantry, while those caught in front of the elephants were encircled and routed by the Carthaginian cavalry. What the elephants accomplished was throwing out the Roman fighting formation, leaving the Roman infantry confused and vulnerable to the other arms of the Carthaginian army.
So the value of elephants is less in the shock of their charge as in the disorder that they promote among infantry. As we’ve discussed elsewhere, heavy infantry rely on dense formations to be effective. Elephants, as a weapon-system, break up that formation, forcing infantry to scatter out of the way or separating supporting units, thus rendering the infantry vulnerable. The charge of elephants doesn’t wipe out the infantry, but it renders them vulnerable to other forces – supporting infantry, cavalry – which do.
Elephants could also be used as area denial weapons. One reading of the (admittedly somewhat poor) evidence suggests that this is how Pyrrhus of Epirus used his elephants – to great effect – against the Romans. It is sometimes argued that Pyrrhus essentially created an “articulated phalanx” using lighter infantry and elephants to cover gaps – effectively joints – in his main heavy pike phalanx line. This allowed his phalanx – normally a relatively inflexible formation – to pivot.
This area denial effect was far stronger with cavalry because of how elephants interact with horses. Horses in general – especially horses unfamiliar with elephants – are terrified of the creatures and will generally refuse to go near them. Thus at Ipsus (301 B.C.; Plut. Demetrius 29.3), Demetrius’ Macedonian cavalry is cut off from the battle by Seleucus’ elephants, essentially walled off by the refusal of the horses to advance. This effect can resolved for horses familiarized with elephants prior to battle (something Caesar did prior to the Battle of Thapsus, 46 B.C.), but the concern seems never to totally go away. I don’t think I fully endorse Peter Connolly’s judgment in Greece and Rome At War (1981) that Hellenistic armies (read: post-Alexander armies) used elephants “almost exclusively” for this purpose (elephants often seem positioned against infantry in Hellenistic battle orders), but spoiling enemy cavalry attacks this way was a core use of elephants, if not the primary one.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: War Elephants, Part I: Battle Pachyderms”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-07-26.
April 29, 2023
QotD: The problem of war-elephants
On the other hand, the Romans spend about 200 years (from c. 264 to 46 B.C.) mopping the floor with armies supported by war elephants – Carthaginian, Seleucid, even Roman ones during the civil wars (Thapsus, 46 B.C.). And before someone asks about Hannibal, remember that while the army Hannibal won with in Italy had almost no war elephants (nearly all of them having been lost in the Alps), the army he lost with at Zama had 80 of them. Romans looking back from the later Imperial period seemed to classify war elephants with scythed chariots and other failed Hellenistic “gimmick” weapons (e.g. Q. Curtius Rufus 9.2.19). Arrian (a Roman general writing in the second century A.D.) dismisses the entire branch as obsolete (Arr. Tact. 19.6) and leaves it out of his tactical manual entirely on those grounds.
This negative opinion in turn seeps into the scholarship on the matter. This is in no small part because the study of Indian history (where war elephants remained common) is so under-served in western academia compared to the study of the Greek and Roman world (where the Romans functionally ended the use of war elephants on the conclusion that they were useless). Trautmann, (2015) notes the almost pathetic under-engagement of classical scholars with this fighting system. Scullard’s The elephant in the Greek and Roman World (1974) remains the standard text in English on the topic some 45 years later, despite fairly huge changes in the study of the Achaemenids, Seleucids, and Carthaginians in that period.
All of which actually makes finding good information on war elephants quite difficult – the cheap sensational stuff often fills in the gaps left by a lack of scholarship. The handful of books on the topic vary significantly in terms of seriousness and reliability.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: War Elephants, Part I: Battle Pachyderms”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-07-26.
March 25, 2023
QotD: Sparta’s fate
What became of Sparta?
In short, Sparta became a theme-park. A quaint tourist get-away where wealthy Greeks and Romans could come to look and stare at the quaint Spartans and their silly rituals. It developed a tourism industry and the markets even catered to the needs of the elite Roman tourists who went (Plutarch and Cicero both did so, Plut. Lyc. 18.1; Tusc. 5.77).
In term of civic organization, after Cleomenes III’s last gasp effort to make Sparta relevant – an effort that nearly wiped out the entire remaining Spartiate class (Plut. Cleom. 28.5) – Sparta increasingly resembled any other Hellenistic Greek polis, albeit a relatively famous and also poor one. Its material and literary culture seem to converge with the rest of the Greeks, with the only distinctively Spartan elements of the society being essentially Potemkin rituals for boys put on for the tourists who seem to be keeping the economy running and keeping what is left of Sparta in the good graces of their Roman overlords.
Thus ended Sparta: not with a brave last stand. Not with mighty deeds of valor. Or any great cultural contribution at all. A tourist trap for rich and bored Romans.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: This. Isn’t. Sparta. Part VII: Spartan Ends”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-09-27.
February 17, 2023
QotD: Risk mitigation in pre-modern farming communities
Subsistence farmers generally do not do this. Remember, the goal is not to maximize profit, but to avoid family destruction through starvation. If you only farm one crop (the “best” one) and you get too little rain or too much, or the temperature is wrong – that crop fails and the family starves. But if you farm several different crops, that mitigates the risk of any particular crop failing due to climate conditions, or blight (for the Romans, the standard combination seems to have been a mix of wheat, barley and beans, often with grapes or olives besides; there might also be a small garden space. Orchards might double as grazing-space for a small herd of animals, like pigs). By switching up crops like this and farming a bit of everything, the family is less profitable (and less engaged with markets, more on that in a bit), but much safer because the climate conditions that cause one crop to fail may not impact the others. A good example is actually wheat and barley – wheat is more nutritious and more valuable, but barley is more resistant to bad weather and dry-spells; if the rains don’t come, the wheat might be devastated, but the barley should make it and the family survives. On the flip side, if it rains too much, well the barley is likely to be on high-ground (because it likes the drier ground up there anyway) and so survives; that’d make for a hard year for the family, but a survivable one.
Likewise – as that example implies – our small farmers want to spread out their plots. And indeed, when you look at land-use maps of villages of subsistence farmers, what you often find is that each household farms many small plots which are geographically distributed (this is somewhat less true of the Romans, by the by). Farming, especially in the Mediterranean (but more generally as well) is very much a matter of micro-climates, especially when it comes to rainfall and moisture conditions (something that is less true on the vast flat of the American Great Plains, by the by). It is frequently the case that this side of the hill is dry while that side of the hill gets plenty of rain in a year and so on. Consequently, spreading plots out so that each family has say, a little bit of the valley, a little bit of the flat ground, a little bit of the hilly area, and so on shields each family from catastrophe is one of those micro-climates should completely fail (say, the valley floods, or the rain doesn’t fall and the hills are too dry for anything to grow).
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Bread, How Did They Make It? Part I: Farmers!”, A collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-07-24.
February 15, 2023
Ancient Rome’s Naked Fertility Festival (Lupercalia)
Tasting History with Max Miller
Published 8 Feb 2022
(more…)
February 5, 2023
QotD: Annual cycles of plenty and scarcity in pre-modern agricultural societies
That has more than just economic impacts because the family unit becomes more vulnerable as that food stockpile dwindles. Malnutrition brings on a host of other threats: elevated risk of death from injury or disease most notably. Repeated malnutrition also has devastating long-term effects on young children […] Consequently, we see seasonal mortality patterns in agricultural communities which tend to follow harvest cycles; when the harvest is poor, the family starts to run low on food before the next harvest, which leads to rationing the remaining food, which leads to malnutrition. That malnutrition is not evenly distributed though: the working age adults need to be strong enough to bring in the next harvest when it comes (or to be doing additional non-farming labor to supplement the family), so the short rations are going to go to the children and the elderly. Which in turn means that “lean” years are marked by increased mortality especially among the children and the elderly, the former of which is how the rural population “regulates” to its food production in the absence of modern birth control (but, as an aside: this doesn’t lead to pure Malthusian dynamics – a lot more influences the food production ceiling than just available land. You can have low-equilibrium or high-equilibrium systems, especially when looking at the availability of certain sorts of farming capital or access to trade at distance. I cannot stress this enough: Malthus was wrong; yes, interestingly, usefully wrong – but still wrong. The big plagues sometimes pointed to as evidence of Malthusian crises have as much if not more to do with rising trade interconnectedness than declining nutritional standards). This creates yearly cycles of plenty and vulnerability […]
Next to that little cycle, we also have a “big” cycle of generations. The ratio of labor-to-food-requirements varies as generations are born, age and die; it isn’t constant. The family is at its peak labor effectiveness at the point when the youngest generation is physically mature but hasn’t yet begun having children (the exact age-range there is going to vary by nuptial patterns, see below) and at its most vulnerable when the youngest generation is immature. By way of example, let’s imagine a family (I’m going to use Roman names because they make gender very clear, but this is a completely made-up family): we have Gaius (M, 45), his wife, Cornelia (39, F), his mother Tullia (64, F) and their children Gaius (21, M), Secundus (19, M), Julia1 (16, F) and Julia2 (14, F). That family has three male laborers, three female laborers (Tullia being in her twilight years, we don’t count), all effectively adults in that sense, against 7 mouths to feed. But let’s fast-forward fifteen years. Gaius is now 60 and slowing down, Cornelia is 54; Tullia, we may assume has passed. But Gaius now 36 is married to Clodia (20, F; welcome to Roman marriage patterns), with two children Gaius (3, M) and Julia3 (1, F); Julia1 and Julia2 are married and now in different households and Secundus, recognizing that the family’s financial situation is never going to allow him to marry and set up a household has left for the Big City. So we now have the labor of two women and a man-and-a-half (since Gaius the Elder is quite old) against six mouths and the situation is likely to get worse in the following years as Gaius-the-Younger and Clodia have more children and Gaius-the-Elder gets older. The point of all of this is to note that just as risk and vulnerability peak and subside on a yearly basis in cycles, they also do this on a generational basis in cycles.
(An aside: the exact structure of these generational patterns follow on marriage patterns which differ somewhat culture to culture. In just about every subsistence farming culture I’ve seen, women marry young (by modern standards) often in their mid-to-late teens, or early twenties; that doesn’t vary much (marriage ages tend to be younger, paradoxically, for wealthier people in these societies, by the by). But marriage-ages for men vary quite a lot, from societies where men’s age at first marriage is in the early 20s to societies like Roman and Greece where it is in the late 20s to mid-thirties. At Rome during the Republic, the expectation seems to have been that a Roman man would complete the bulk of their military service – in their twenties and possibly early thirties – before starting a household; something with implications for Roman household vulnerability. Check out Rosenstein, op. cit. on this).
On top of these cycles of vulnerability, you have truly unpredictable risk. Crops can fail in so many ways. In areas without irrigated rivers, a dry spell at the wrong time is enough; for places with rivers, flooding becomes a concern because the fields have to be set close to the water-table. Pests and crop blights are also a potential risk factor, as of course is conflict.
So instead of imagining a farm with a “standard” yield, imagine a farm with a standard grain consumption. Most years, the farm’s production (bolstered by other activities like sharecropping that we’ll talk about later) exceed that consumption, with the remainder being surplus available for sale, trade or as gifts to neighbors and friends. Some years, the farm’s production falls short, creating that shortfall. Meanwhile families tend to grow to the size the farm can support, rather than to the labor needs the farm has, which tends to mean too many hands (and mouths) and not enough land. Which in turn causes the family to ride a line of fairly high risk in many cases.
All of this is to stress that these farmers are looking to manage risk through cycles of vulnerability […]
I led in with all of that risk and vulnerability because without it just about nothing these farmers do makes a lot of sense; once you understand that they are managing risk, everything falls into place.
Most modern folks think in terms of profit maximization; we take for granted that we will still be alive tomorrow and instead ask how we can maximize how much money we have then (this is, admittedly, a lot less true for the least fortunate among us). We thus tend to favor efficient systems, even if they are vulnerable. From this perspective, ancient farmers – as we’ll see – look very silly, but this is a trap, albeit one that even some very august ancient scholars have fallen into. These are not irrational, unthinking people; they are poor, not stupid – those are not the same things.
But because these households wobble on the edge of disaster continually, that changes the calculus. These small subsistence farmers generally seek to minimize risk, rather than maximize profits. After all, improving yields by 5% doesn’t mean much if everyone starves to death in the third year because of a tail-risk that wasn’t mitigated. Moreover, for most of these farmers, working harder and farming more generally doesn’t offer a route out of the small farming class – these societies typically lack that kind of mobility (and also generally lack the massive wealth-creation potential of industrial power which powers that kind of mobility). Consequently, there is little gain to taking risks and much to lose. So as we’ll see, these farmers generally sacrifice efficiency for greater margins of safety, every time.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Bread, How Did They Make It? Part I: Farmers!”, A collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2020-07-24.
January 18, 2023
The Roman Army, With Adrian Goldsworthy
Well That Aged Well
Published 12 May 2021In this episode we take a look at the Roman Army, and its comanders. What made the Roman Army so efficent? Was it the practice? The motivation? Their courrage? Or was it more to it? Find out in this week’s episode of “Well That Aged Well”, With Erlend Hedegart.
(more…)
January 7, 2023
QotD: The “camp followers” of a pre-modern army
We can start with sutlers, merchants buying or selling from the soldiers themselves (the Romans called these fellows lixae, but also called other non-soldiers in the camp lixae as well, see Roth (2012), 93-4; they also call them mercatores or negotiatores, merchants). Sutlers could be dealing in a wide array of goods. Even for armies where ration distribution was regular (e.g. the Roman army), sutlers might offer for sale tastier and fancier rations: meat, better alcohol and so on. They might also sell clothing and other goods to soldiers, even military equipment: finding “custom” weapons and armor in the archaeology of military forts and camps is not uncommon. For less regularly rationed armies, sutlers might act as a supplement to irregular systems of food and pay, providing credit to soldiers who purchased rations to make up for logistics shortfalls, to collect when those soldiers were paid. By way of example, the regulations of the Army of Flanders issued in 1596 allowed for three sutlers per 200-man company of troops (Parker, op. cit.), but the actual number was often much higher and of course those sutlers might also have their own assistants, porters, wagons and so on which moved with the army’s camp. Women who performed this role in the modern period are often referred to by the French vivandière.
For some armies there would have been an additional class of sutlers: slave dealers. Enslaved captives were a major component of loot in ancient warfare and Mediterranean military operations into and through the Middle Ages. Armies would abduct locals caught in hostile lands they moved through or enemies captured in battles or sieges; naturally generals did not want to have to manage these poor folks in the long term and so it was convenient if slave-dealer “wholesalers” were present with the army to quickly buy the large numbers of enslaved persons the army might generate (and then handle their transport – which is to say traffic them – to market). In Roman armies this was a regularized process, overseen by the quaestor (an elected treasury official who handled the army’s finances) assigned to each army, who conducted regular auctions in the camp. That of course means that these slave dealers are not only following the army, but are doing so with the necessary apparatus to transport hundreds or even thousands of captives (guards, wagons, porters, etc.).
And then there is the general category of “camp follower”, which covers a wide range of individuals (mostly women) who might move with the camp. The same 1596 regulations that provided for just three sutlers per 200-man Spanish company also provided that there could be three femmes publiques (prostitutes), another “maximum” which must often have been exceeded. But prostitutes were not the only women who might be with an army as it moved; indeed the very same regulations specify that, for propriety’s sake, the femmes publiques would have to work under the “disguise of being washerwomen or something similar” which of course implies a population of actual washerwomen and such who also moved with the army. Depending on training and social norms, soldiers may or may not have been expected to mend their own clothes or cook their own food. Soldiers might also have wives or girlfriends with them (who might in turn have those soldier’s children with them); this was more common with professional long-service armies where the army was home, but must have happened with all armies to one degree or another. Roman soldiers in the imperial period were formally, legally forbidden from marrying, but the evidence for “soldier’s families” in the permanent forts and camps of the Roman Empire is overwhelming.
The tasks women attached to these armies have have performed varied by gender norms and the organization of the logistics system. Early modern gunpowder armies represent some of the broadest range of activities and some of the armies that most relied on women in the camp to do the essential work of maintaining the camp; John Lynn (op. cit., 118-163) refers to the soldiers and their women (a mix of wives, girlfriends and unattached women) collectively as “the campaign community” and it is an apt label when thinking about the army on the march. As Lynn documents, women in the camp washed and mended clothes, nursed the sick and cooked meals, all tasks that were considered at the time inappropriate for men. Those same women might also be engaged in small crafts or in small-scale trade (that is, they might also be sutlers). Finally, as Lynn notes, women who were managing food and clothing seem often to have become logistics managers for their soldiers, guarding moveable property during battles and participating in pillaging in order to scrounge enough food and loot for they and their men to survive. I want to stress that for armies that had large numbers of women in the camp, it was because they were essential to the continued function of the army.
And finally, you have the general category of “servants”. The range of individuals captured by this label is vast. Officers and high status figures often brought either their hired servants or enslaved workers with them. Captains in the aforementioned Army of Flanders seem generally to have had at least four or five servants (called mozos) with them, for instance; higher officers more. But it wasn’t just officers who did this. Indeed, the average company in the Army of Flanders, Parker notes, would have had 20-30 individual soldiers who also had mozos with them; one force of 5,300 Spanish veterans leaving Flanders brought 2,000 such mozos as they left (Parker, op. cit. 151).
Looking at the ancient world, many – possibly most – Greek hoplites in citizen armies seem to have very often brought enslaved servants with them to carry their arms and armor; such enslaved servants are a regular feature of their armies in the sources. The Romans called these enslaved servants in their armies calones; it was a common trope of good generalship to sharply restrict their number, often with limited success. At Arausio we are told there were half as many servants (calonum et lixarum) as soldiers (Liv. Per. 67, on this note Roth (2013), 105), though excessive numbers of calones et lixae was a standard marker of bad general and the Romans did lose badly at Arausio so we ought to take those figures with a grain of salt, as Livy (and his sources) may just be communicating that the generals there were bad. That said, the notion that a very badly led army might have as many non-combatants following it as soldiers is a common one in the ancient sources. And while Roman armies were considered notable in the ancient world for how few camp servants they relied on and thus how much labor and portage was instead done by the soldiers, getting Roman aristocrats to leave their vast enslaved household staff at home was notoriously difficult (e.g. Ps.Caes. BAfr. 54; Dio Cass. 50.11.6). Much like the early modern “campaign community”, our sources frequently treat these calones as part of the army they belonged to, even though they were not soldiers.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Logistics, How Did They Do It, Part I: The Problem”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-07-15.
December 27, 2022
Marcus Licinius Crassus, the richest man in Rome
In The Critic, Bijan Omrani reviews Crassus: The First Tycoon by Peter Stothard:
If you are feeling despondent about the dismal quality of the current generation of politicians, it may be some comfort to remember that even in the golden age of Rome such complaints were legion.
The poet Horace wrote at length about how the ruling class had gone downhill. Once, there had been paragons of virtue such as Cincinnatus, who after saving Rome as dictator laid down his power without demur and returned to live on his humble farm; or the consul Regulus, who refused to make any concessions after being captured by the Carthaginians, although he knew they would torture him to death. Instead of these titans, the modern age had brought forth a base generation. Marcus Licinius Crassus, the richest man in Rome and subject of this new biography, was foremost among them.
The formidable influence wielded by Crassus in the final years of the Roman Republic — he was an ally, and rival, of Julius Caesar and Pompey the Great — came not by way of old-fashioned heroics and victories on the battlefield. His methods were recognisably modern. Peter Stothard characterises him as a “disrupter of old rules, fixer and puller of the puppet strings of power”. His tools were money and the economy of favours. He employed them with a coldness, ruthlessness and level of calculation that makes him unappetising, but deeply compelling. Stothard’s description of him as “The First Tycoon” is apt. He is the sort of character one might expect to find wearing red braces in a New York boardroom, rather than a brocaded toga in the Roman Forum.
By origin, Crassus was a member of one of Rome’s blue-blooded families. His pursuit of political influence by means of business rather than military prowess would seem at first sight unexpected, given the traditional prohibition against the senatorial aristocracy engaging in trade. Yet, the turmoil of Crassus’s formative years overturned these niceties. The last sight he had of his father, who had served as a consul, was of his head on a spike in the Forum.
He was a victim of the perennial strife that plagued Rome at the beginning of the 1st century BC, caused by imbalances in wealth and tensions between Rome and wider Italy, not to mention discord over land, military and constitutional reforms. With the death of his father and two of his brothers, Crassus had to flee Rome and hide in a cave for eight months in Spain, where his family still had allies. It is doubtless these upheavals — similar to those of Julius Caesar, who lost his father young and had to go into hiding during this chaos — led Crassus to seek an inviolable security, regardless of whether he trampled on old Roman conventions and upset others to do so.
When the aristocratic faction seized power in the late 80s BC, Crassus was able to return to Rome. There, he pursued every commercial method, no matter how disreputable, to accumulate wealth. It satisfied not only his needs for security but, as Stothard argues, it was also a way of seeking revenge for the death of his father. He bought up the properties of those families allied to the earlier populist regime which had just been displaced.
These came at a knock-down price, as the families had been outlawed, with some executed and others sent into exile. Crassus appears to have been on a committee which determined the loyalty of citizens to the new government and appears not to have scrupled to condemn those whose property he coveted. His other prime method for enlarging his portfolio was to buy up cheaply buildings that were on fire, or else in the path of a fire. He organised his slaves along military lines, using them with relentless efficiency to acquire, rebuild and sell on property for a huge profit.
