Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus’ tribunates – both of which ended with them being killed (I think it is perfectly fair to say “murdered”) – typically occupy a position in survey coverage of the Roman Republic as the inciting incident that begins (if not quite causes) the collapse of the Republic itself, the first outbreak of violence in Roman politics, the first escalation in a spiral that would lead to the repeated outbreak of civil war in the first century. And that is certainly how they were understood in antiquity; both Plutarch and Appian make this claim (App. BCiv. 1.17; Plut. Ti. Gracch. 20.1). And in part because the sources (again, Plutarch and Appian) frame the Gracchi quite positively and in part, to be frank, because their reforms are generally “left-coded” in a university environment that is inherently sympathetic to left-coded things, the Gracchi tend to come across to students as righteous reformers killed by foolish, hidebound and greedy reactionary Roman senators. And that is, to be fair, a potentially valid reading (if employed with some caveats).
But it is also generally the only reading students get and it is not the only valid reading of the evidence we have. So for this week, I want to complicate the Gracchi, presenting some of the details that often get left out of introductory surveys. In particular, we’re going to discuss the problems that Tiberius Gracchus’ key law, the Lex Sempronia Agraria was designed to solve and I am going to argue that Tiberius was attempting to solve a problem that didn’t exist (though he couldn’t have known it), a view which is now quite common in the scholarship but almost entirely absent in how we tend to teach the Gracchi.
But more to the point, I am going to argue that Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus’ behavior did, in fact, violate the norms of the Republic and that it was not entirely unreasonable for the senatorial elite to conclude these men, in their unrestrained and nakedly ambitious approach to politics, represented a real threat to the Roman political order and that they might be aiming for something approaching a “soft coup” in the context of a political order whose features – including the democratic ones – worked through an unwritten constitution of norms (what the Romans called the mos maiorum, “the customs of the ancestors”), which both brothers actively undermined. The claim that the Gracchi threatened to make themselves tyrants was not an empty claim and that is the dark reflection of their role as well intentioned reformers.
In short, then, if the only version of the Gracchi you have encountered is that of the near-saintly, then martyred proto-progressive reformers, that’s not quite the complete picture (and the left-coding of their ideas is decidedly anachronistic). Naturally, in trying to complicate this picture, I am essentially taking the position of prosecutor, so this “take” is going to be far more negative on the Gracchi than how I would, say, teach them in class or, indeed, how I regard them myself.
So the way we’re going to approach this problem is first to discuss the problem that Tiberius Gracchus thought he was addressing (and some of the issues there), before walking through the means he used to push forward the Lex Sempronia Agraria. Then I want to look at some of the wide-ranging laws proposed by Gaius Gracchus to assess the degree to which those laws cohere and ways we might understand his program and actions, potentially rather more negatively.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: On the Gracchi, Part I: Tiberius Gracchus”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2025-01-17.
May 12, 2025
QotD: The Gracchi
May 11, 2025
History of Britain, I: Hail Prettanike! Early References to the British Isles
Thersites the Historian
Published 6 Jan 2025The natural starting point for examining the history of Britain is to look at how the island and its inhabitants first entered the historical record.
May 8, 2025
Augustus and the creation of the Principate – The Conquered and the Proud 13
Adrian Goldsworthy. Historian and Novelist
Published 11 Dec 2024Continuing the series “The Conquered and the Proud”, this video looks at the political system created by Augustus — the Principate or rule of a princeps or “first”. We look at the twin elements of his formal power, the tribunician potestas and the maius imperium proconsulare. Next time we we look at Augustus, the provinces and imperial expansion.
QotD: Trade empires
So let us consider the motives of Empire in a few cases.
The Phoenicians had a magnificent trade empire, though with a few elements we find familiar from the more recent Viking version, or indeed the Venetian “Republic” — namely a bit of raiding, and quite a bit of slave trading. All three broadened into a bit of conquest — Carthage, Normandy and the sack of Constantinople in the 4th Crusade come to mind — but all those offshoots were by-products of the original cultures, and none of them became the norm for the ongoing home culture (each of which faded away as circumstances changed and they failed to adapt). So we could say that they were essentially trading empires.
Greece and Carthage and Rome were also trade empires, initially letting their security concerns drag them into a bit of conquest on the side. The difference in their cases was that the conquest element became dominant and completely changed the “homeland”. The city states of Greece becoming the world-conquering hordes of Alexander, and completely undermining the vibrant city state cultures that had proceeded them. The Phoenician trading city of Carthage becoming an expansionary conquest state that eventually pushed Rome too hard. And Rome’s overseas campaigns in Spain and North Africa completely undermining the independent farmer/citizen/soldier class of the Roman Republic, and replacing them with a system of professional troops whose loyalty could only be bought by ever increasing conquests by the emperors.
Naturally every expansion eventually reaches limits, and the concern reverts to trying to secure what you have, and hold the outsiders further away. Which is why, amusingly, people like the Romans and the Chinese came through their expansionary conquest phase, and then found themselves back in the position of having to protect the fringes through deals with tribes that can be traded with/employed by/or paid tribute. Cue Attila the Hun and his ilk.
So empires on the way down may also be considered trade and security empires I suppose, though many still had a conquest impulse (for fame or fortune or simply to pay the defenders off) built in, or tried to act as if they were still conquering hordes. Cue Constantinople and Belisarius.
In fact most empires will go through a variety of stages, though I think it fair to say that most empires have a core purpose and attitude, no matter how they tinker at the edges to deal with specific circumstances.
Nigel Davies, “Types of Empires: Security, Conquest, and Trade”, rethinking history, 2020-05-02.
May 3, 2025
QotD: When the Cursus Honorum failed, so did the Roman Republic
The Old Republic was full of men like Caesar, because people are what they are; there are always potential Caesars running around. But the names of the Old Republic’s Caesars don’t appear in the history books, because back then they still maintained the distinction between process and outcome. If there’s a conflict between them, process must yield, and so even though a potential Caesar did a competent job as quaestor and was ready to stand for curule aedile, he’d be taken aside by an old man (“senate” comes from senex, “old man”) for a stern talking-to … or more than a stern talking-to, if it came to that.
By Julius Caesar‘s day, though, process had completely eclipsed outcome. Again, the “real” Caesar is much debated by historians, but what’s not in dispute is his naked ambition. Everybody knew what Caesar was about, right from the get-go. But since there was no way to stop his climb up the cursus honorum spelled out in the Policies and Procedures Manual, nobody did.
Indeed, by Caesar’s time, the rot was so deep that most (I’d argue all, but I’m not a Classicist) of the offices on the CH were eyewash, just lines on a CV. The curule aediles weren’t managing the grain supply; they had battalions of freedmen running that. They were still putting on games, of course, but they weren’t personally putting them on; again, battalions of clever freedmen did that. The only thing the aedile did for “his” games was pay for them … on credit, and only in order to take the next step up the ladder.
And the rot was, of course, recursive. Caesar at least had clarity: He wanted to be quaestor so he could be aedile; to be aedile so he could be praetor; to be praetor so he could be governor; to be governor so he could be general; to be general so he could be … well, whatever, that’s part of the great debate surrounding Caesar, but it doesn’t matter for our purposes. For us, what matters is that everyone else was doing the same thing, and because all the real work was being done by those battalions of clever freedmen, the quality of Republican leadership dropped off dramatically. How can a praetor-in-name-only accurately judge the competence of an aedile-in-name-only? Yeah, he technically held the office for a year, but he left it as ignorant of its duties as when he entered.
Severian, “Cursus Honorum”, Founding Questions, 2021-12-27.
[NR: Links to the Roman Glossary added.]
May 2, 2025
HBO’s Rome – Ep 6 “Egeria” – History and Story
Adrian Goldsworthy. Historian and Novelist
Published 30 Oct 2024This time we come to Episode 6 of Season 1 of ROME. This one is very much based around the City of Rome itself and places Antony centre stage. In the video we look at the actual history and how well the show reflects this. For more detail on the history, have a look at the videos in the Conquered and the Proud playlist.
April 30, 2025
QotD: The experience of the infantryman through the ages
Well, here is where we come back to the note I made earlier about how “warring” and “soldiering” were different verbs with different meanings. After all, while soldiering implies these difficulties, warring doesn’t, necessarily. And it isn’t hard to see why – the warrior classes in these societies, often being aristocrats, generally didn’t do a lot of these things. It is, for instance, noted in the Roman sources when a general chose to eat the same food as his soldiers, because most Roman aristocrats didn’t when they served as generals or military tribunes. The privileges of rank and class applied.
And that’s something we see with medieval aristocrats too. On the one hand, Jean de Bueil talks about the “difficulties and travail” of war, but at the same time, Clifford Rogers notes one (fictional and lavish, but not outrageous) war party “suitable for a baron or banneret” included a chaplain, three heralds, four trumpeters, two drummers, four pages, two varlets (that is, servants for the pages), two cooks, a forager, a farrier, an armorer, twelve more serving men (with horses, presumably both as combatants and as servants), and a majordomo to manage them all – in addition to the one lord, three knights and nine esquires (C. Rogers, Soldiers’ Lives through History: the Middle Ages (2007), 28-9).
Jean le Bel (quoted in Rogers, op. cit.) contrasts the situation of the nobles in Edward III’s army (1327), where “one could see great nobility well served with a great plenty of dishes and sweets – such strange ones that I wouldn’t know to name or describe them. There one could see ladies richly adorned and nobly ornamented” while in the camp proper an open brawl between the regular soldiers from England and Hainault broke out and eventually turned into an open battle in which 316 died, but so segregated was the camp that, “most of the knights and of their masters were then at court, and knew nothing of this” (Rogers, 66-7). Likewise, except in fairly extreme positions, most of the ditch-digging, camp-building duties would fall to the common soldiers (and, as Roel Konijnendijk can quite accurately tell you, ditches are important! When in doubt, dig some ditches – or make others dig ditches for you).
That said, these differences are not merely confined to the high aristocrats. Marching under a heavy load is often given as one example of the quintessential “soldier experience”, but it seems that many Greek hoplites went to war with a personal slave or servant to carry their equipment for them, despite being infantrymen. The Romans carried equipment and supplies something closer to what a modern soldier might (both in terms of weight and also, apart from ammunition, in terms of what was carried), but then non-Roman sources like the Greek writer Polybius (18.18.1-7) or the Jewish writer Josephus (BJ 3.95) appear quite stunned with the amount of tools and equipment the Romans carry (and Polybius, by the by, is writing before Marius’ mules). Evidently the Roman impedementia was quite a bit heavier, though even the Macedonians carried much more than a Greek hoplite army (Note Engels, Alexander the Great and the Logistics of the Macedonian Army, 1978 on this).
Meanwhile, Jonathan Roth is quick to note (in The Logistics of the Roman Army at War (264 B.C. – A.D. 235) (1999)) that despite either bad or insufficient rations being a common complaint of soldiers, such complaints appear absent from Roman sources, even in the context of legionary mutinies. Indeed, the evidence suggests that Roman soldiers ate quite well, with fairly ample rations. In camp the Roman soldier’s diet was not so different from what he might eat in peacetime (especially once we get into the imperial period with legions stationed in semi-permanent bases); on the march they had to make do with bucellatum, a hard biscuit something like hardtack. But for many Italian peasants, the diet doesn’t seem to have been much worse – or much different – from what they ate in peacetime.
By way of sharp contrast to the plodding, heavily loaded but surely very lethal Roman legionary, the impis of the Zulu traveled fast, light and sometimes somewhat hungry. Zulu warriors generally carried only their equipment on the march, while supplies were carried by udibi, boys serving as porters. Even then, such supplies were minimal – the Zulu force that arrived at Rorke’s Drift (1879) had only been out six days, but none of the warriors in it had eaten in two. Such minimally supplied flying columns, moving fast and with considerable stealth (one cannot read anything on the Anglo-Zulu war without noticing how, even with cavalry scouts, Zulu impis seem so often just to appear next to British forces) were the norm for Zulu warfare. And to be clear, this wasn’t some “primitive” or underdeveloped form of war – the light and fast operational movements of the Zulu were intentional (much of it was a product of Shaka’s reforms) and very effective – albeit not so effective as to offset the massive advantages the British possessed in population, economic capacity or military technology. Nevertheless, not even every sort of common soldier was the heavily loaded, slow moving, well-fed ditch-digging sort like the Romans. The “soldier experience” needs to cover the lightly loaded and armed, fast moving, hungry, non-ditch-digging Zulu experience too.
And then of course when we consider nomadic peoples, we find that in many cases their lives on campaign were not that much different from their lives at peacetime, involving many of the same skills and activities.
In short, the experience of the drudgery of war – the bad food, long toil, heavy encumbrance and so on was all still quite contingent (or we might say “dependent”) on the society going to war. Social divisions mattered. Expectations about masculine behavior mattered. Military systems mattered. Yes, modern armies in the European tradition expect their soldiers to do a lot of labor and drudgery, but remember where that military system came from: it was the system of the common soldiers serving under the aristocrats who most certainly did not do those things but who did impose sharp, corporal discipline. Which, to be clear, doesn’t make this system ineffective – it was clearly effective. The point here is that it was socially contingent – a different society would have come up with a different system. And they did! The Early Modern European system is only one way to organize an army and historically speaking not even the most common.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Universal Warrior, Part IIb: A Soldier’s Lot”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-02-05.
April 12, 2025
A Basic Introduction To The Ancient Roman Political System
MoAn Inc.
Published 12 Dec 2024
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QotD: The changed role of the Dictatorship in the late Roman Republic
Now, precisely because we are now talking about the irregular dictatorship, there really is no way to lay out its features except to go through its uses. Fortunately, there aren’t that many.
In the spring of 83 BC, Sulla, who had been notionally serving in a proconsular command in the East to fight Mithridates, landed in Italy with his army; Rome had effectively come under the control of a military junta initially led by Gaius Marius (cos.107, 104-100, 86) and after his death by L. Cornelius Cinna, Gn. Papirius Carbo and Gaius Marius the younger (son of the former). Sulla openly fought the consuls of 83 (Gaius Norbanus and L. Cornelius Scipio), pushing towards Rome. As the year shifted over into 82, Carbo and Marius the Younger had themselves elected consuls. Marius was killed in 82 during the siege of Praeneste; Carbo fled to Sicily after Sulla took Rome (where he’d eventually be captured and killed by Pompey in 81).
Now this posed a problem, constitutionally: there were always to be two consuls and consular elections had to be presided over by a consul … but one consul was dead and the other fled. The customary solution to this problem was the appointment of an interrex, a five-day-long office which essentially only had the authority to hold elections for new consuls in the absence of consuls or an already appointed dictator. Prior to 82, the last confirmed interrex we know of was in 216, but there may have been another in 208, in either case this also a long-unused office. All the interrex is supposed to do is hold an assembly of the comitia centuriata which can elect new consuls; they did not have any further authority.
Sulla, sweeping into Rome, convened the Senate and directed them to select an interrex; one wonders if this was the same meeting of the Senate Sulla convened within hearing distance of his soldiers in the process of butchering six thousand captured Romans who had sided against him, in case the Senate imagined they were being given a choice (Plut. Sulla 30.1-3). In any event, the Senate selected Lucius Valerius Flaccus (its oldest member, App. BCiv 1.98) on the assumption he would hold elections; instead, Sulla directed him (with the obvious threat of violence) to instead convene the comitia centuriata and instead of holding elections, propose a law (the lex Valeria) to make Sulla dictator with the remit of rei publicae constituendae causa, “for reforming the constitution of the Republic” – an entirely new causa never used before. Of course with Sulla’s army butchering literally thousands of his political opponents, the assembly knew how they were to vote.
This is, to be clear, a thing that customarily the interrex cannot do. This is also not, customarily, how dictators are selected. The appointment of a dictator had not been recommended by the Senate and in any case has also chosen the wrong voting assembly (the comitia centuriata instead of the comitia curiata) and also the interrex doesn’t have the authority to nominate a dictator or propose a law that nominates a dictator. You may begin to see why I see this as a new political innovation and not a clear extrapolation from previous practice. None of this is how the customary dictatorship had ever worked.
The law also gave Sulla a lot of powers, which was important because most of these powers were not things that customarily a dictator could do. He could legislate by fiat without an assembly, something dictators could not do before. He was given the ability to alter the number of senators as well as choose new senators and expel current senators; a dictator had once been named, Fabius Buteo in 216, to enroll new senators, but had (according to Livy) openly noted he did not consider himself to have the authority to remove senators enrolled by the previous Censors (Liv. 23.23). Sulla rendered his authority immune to the acts of the tribunes, whereas that office had previously been the only office to exist outside of the dictator’s authority. Finally, his appointment had no time limit set to it, whereas previously all dictators had six months and no more.
What Sulla has done here is used new legislation (remember, Rome has no written constitution which could invalidate any new law) to create what was is effectively an entirely new office, which shared neither an appointment procedure, term limit, or set of authorities and powers with the previous version.
Sulla then made a lot of very reactionary changes to the Roman Republic we need not get into here, got himself elected consul in 80, and then resigned his dictatorship (after rather a lot longer than six months, making Sulla, by the traditional criteria, the worst dictator Rome had up until that point, though I doubt he saw it that way), and after that retired from public life. Sulla seems to have imagined the office he created out of thin air in 82 would be a thing sui generis, a unique office to him only, to that moment only. Which was incredibly foolish because of course once you’ve created the precedent for that kind of office, you can’t then legislate away your own example.
And so Caesar utilized the same procedure. M. Aemilius Lepidus (later to be triumvir with Octavian and Antony), the praetor in 49, put forward the legislative measure – once again, proposed as a law rather than through the normal process – to make Caesar dictator for that year (Dio 41.36.1-3), with the same sweeping powers to legislate by fiat that Sulla had. One of the first things Caesar did was openly threaten the tribunes with violence if they interfered with him; as noted the tribune’s powers were not at the discretion of the dictator in the customary system and tribunes were held to be sacrosanct and thus legally immune to any kind of coercion by other magistrates, so this too represented a continuation of Sulla’s massive increase in the dictator’s absolute authority (App. BCiv 2.41, Plut. Caes. 35.6-11).
Caesar’s dictatorship, rather than initially being without time limit, was renewed, presumably every six months, from 49 through February 44, when Caesar had himself instead appointed dictator perpetuo rei publicae constieundae causa, “Dictator forever for the reformation of the Republic”, at this point (if not earlier) reusing Sulla’s made-up causa and now making explicit his intention to hold the office for life. He was assassinated a month later, on March 15, 44 BC, so perpetuo turned out to not be so perpetual.
As an aside, Julius Caesar is sometimes given a rosy glow in modern teaching materials, in part because he got such a glow from the ancient sources (one could hardly do otherwise writing under the reign of his grand-nephew, Augustus, who had him deified). That glow was often reinforced by (early) modern writers writing with one eye towards their monarch – Shakespeare, for instance. This may be a topic for another time, but I think a fair assessment of Caesar strips away most of this glow (especially his “man of the people” reputation), except for his reputation as a gifted general, which is beyond dispute. Julius Caesar’s career was a net negative for nearly everyone he encountered, with the lone exception of Augustus.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Roman Dictatorship: How Did It Work? Did It Work?”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-03-18.
April 10, 2025
HBO’s Rome – Ep 5 “The Ram has touched the wall” – History and Story
Adrian Goldsworthy. Historian and Novelist
Published 18 Sept 2024Continuing series looking at the HBO/BBC co production drama series ROME. We will look at how they chose to tell the story, at what they changed and where they stuck closer to the history.
April 6, 2025
QotD: The basics of army logistics before railways
But in the pre-railroad era (note: including the early gunpowder era well into the 1800s) that wasn’t the case. Soldiers could carry their own weapons and often their own ammunition (which in turn put significant limits on both). For handheld weapons, the difference gunpowder made here was fairly limited, since muskets were fairly slow firing and soldiers had to carry the ammunition they’d have for a battle in any event. The major difference with gunpowder came with artillery (that is, cannon), which needed the cannon, their powder and shot all moved. The result was a substantial expansion of the “siege train” of the army, which did not change the structure of logistics but did place new and heavy demands on it, because the animals and humans moving all of that needed to be fed. But overwhelming all of that was food and, if necessary, water.
Adult men need anywhere from 2,000 to 3,200 calories per day in order to support their activity; soldiers marching under heavy load will naturally tend towards the higher end of this range. Now, these requirements can be fudged; as John Landers notes, soldiers who are underfed do not immediately shut off. On the other hand, they cannot be ignored for long: no matter the morale an undernourished army will struggle to perform. Starvation is real and does not care how many reps you could do or how motivated you were when the campaign started (in practice, armies that are not fed sufficiently dissolve away as men desert rather than starve).
Different armies and different cultures will meet that nutritional demand in different ways, but staple grains (wheat, barley, corn, rice) dominate rations in part because they also dominated the diet of the peasantry (being the highest calories-per-acre-farmed-and-labor-added foods) and because they were easy to move and store. Fruits and vegetables were, by contrast, always subject to local availability, since without refrigeration they were difficult to keep or move; meat at least could be smoked, salted or made into jerky, but its expense made it an optional bonus to the diet rather than the core of it. So the diet here is mostly bread; many armies reliant on wheat and barley agriculture came up with a fairly similar idea here: a dense but simple flour-and-water (and maybe salt) biscuit or cracker which if kept dry could keep for long periods and be easy to move. The Romans called this buccelatum; today we refer to a very similar modern idea as “hardtack“. However, because these biscuits aren’t very tasty, for morale reasons armies try to acquire actual bread where possible.
In practice the combination of calorie demands with calorie-dense grain-based foods is going to mean that rations tend to cluster in terms of weight, even from different armies. Spartan rations on Sphacteria were two choenikes of barley alphita (a course barley flour) per man per day (Thuc. 4.16.1) which comes out to roughly 1.4kg; Spartan grain contributions to the syssitia (Plut. Lyc. 12.2) were 1 medimnos of barley alphita per month, which comes out to almost exactly 1kg per day (but supplemented with meat and such). Both Roth and Erdkamp (op. cit. for both) try to calculate the weight of Roman rations based on reported grain rations and interpolations for other foodstuffs; Roth suggests a range of 1.1-1.327kg (of which .85kg was grain or bread), while Erdkamp simply notes that they must have been somewhat more than the .85kg grain ration minimum.1 The Army of Flanders was given pan de munición (“munition” or “ration” bread) made of a mix of wheat and rye in loaves of standard size; the absolute minimum ration was 1.5lbs (.68kg) per day (Parker, op. cit. 136), somewhat less than the more logistically capable (as we’ll see) Roman legions, but in the ballpark, especially when we remember that soldiers in the Army of Flanders often supplemented that with purchased or pillaged food. Daily U.S. Army rations during the American Civil War were around 3lbs (1.36kg; statistic via Engels (op. cit.) who inexplicably thinks this is a useful reference for Macedonian rations), but some of the things included (particularly the 1.6oz of coffee) were hardly minimum necessities; the United States much like the Romans has a well-earned reputation for better than average rations, though this is admittedly a low bar.
So we can see a pretty tight grouping here around 1kg, especially when we account for some of these ration-packages being supplemented by irregular but meaningful amounts of other foods (especially in the case of the Army of Flanders, where we know this happened). There is some wiggle room here, of course; marching rations like hardtack are going to be lighter per-day than raw grains or good bread (or other, even tastier foods). But once meat, vegetables and fruits – and the diet must be at least sometimes supplemented with non-grain foods for nutritional reasons – are accounted for, you can see how the rule of thumb around 3lbs or 1.36kg forms out of the evidence. Soldiers also need around three liters of water (which is 3kg, God bless the metric system) per day but we are going to operate on the hopeful assumption that water is generally available on the route of our march. If it isn’t our daily load jumps from 1.36kg to 4.36kg and our operational range collapses into basically nothing; in practice this meant that if local water wasn’t available an army simply couldn’t go there.2
Marching loads vary by army and period but generally within a range of 40 to 55kg or so (60 at the absolute upper-end). As you may well imagine, convincing soldiers to carry heavier loads demands a greater degree of discipline and command control, so while a general may well want to push soldier’s marching load up, the soldiers will want to push it down (and of course overloading soldiers is going to eventually have a negative impact on marching speed and movement capabilities). But you may well be thinking that 40-55kg (which is 90-120lbs or so) sounds more than ample – that’s a lot of food!
Except of course they need to carry everything and weapons, armor and (for gunpowder armies) shot are heavy. Roman soldiers were and are famous for having marched heavy, carrying as much of their equipment and supplies as possible in their packs, which the Romans called the sarcina (we’ll see why this could improve an army’s capabilities). This practice is often attributed to Gaius Marius in the last decade of the second century (Plut. Marius 13.1) but care is necessary as this sort of “reform” was a trope of Roman generalship and is used of even earlier generals than Marius (e.g. Plut. Mor. 201BC on Scipio Aemilianus). Various estimates for the marching load of Roman troops exist but the best is probably Marcus Junkelmann’s physical reconstruction (in Die Legionen des Augustus (1986); highly recommended if you can read German; alas for the lack of an English translation!) which recreated all of the Roman kit and measured a marching load of 54.8kg (120.8lbs), with ~43 of the 54.8kg reserved for weapons, armor, entrenching kit and personal equipment, leaving just 11.8kg for food (about ten days worth). Other estimates are somewhat less, but never much less than 40kg for a Roman soldier’s equipment before rations, leaving precious little weight in which to fit a lot of food.
The same exercise can be run for almost any kind of infantryman: while their load is often heavy, after one accounts for weapons, armor and equipment (and for later armies, powder and shot) there is typically little space left for rations, usually amounting to not more than a week or two (ten days is a normal rule of thumb). Since the army obviously has more than two weeks of work to do (and remember it needs to be able to march back to wherever it started at the end), it is going to need to get a lot more food.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Logistics, How Did They Do It, Part I: The Problem”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2022-07-15.
1. To be clear, we know with some certainty that Roman rations were supplemented, but not by how much. If you read much older scholarship, you will find the notion that Roman soldier’s diet lacked regular meat; both Erdkamp and Roth reject this view decisively and for good reason.
2. I may return to the logistics of water later, but some range can be extended here by taking advantage of the fact that pack animals, while they need a lot of water per day over a long period, can be marched short periods with basically no water and still function, whereas water deprived humans die very quickly. Consequently an army can do a low-water “lunge” over short distances by loading its pack animals with water, not watering them, having the soldiers drink the water and then abandoning the pack animals as they die (the water they carried having been consumed). This is, to say it least, a very expensive thing to do – animals are not cheap! – but there is some evidence the Romans did this, on this see G. Moss, “Watering the Roman Legion” M.A. Thesis, UNC Chapel Hill (2015).
March 28, 2025
QotD: Prosopography
Prosopography is vital in the study of Classical Antiquity, especially the Roman Republic. The Romans, as I’m sure you recall, practiced “patronage and clientage” — a man’s clients were often in a very real way more important than his biological family. Prove that Wossname was So-and-So’s client, and you know a lot about Wossname, even if you can’t find it in the archaeological record, and what you do know about him from the record takes on a whole new meaning. For instance, under Gaius Marius (et al.), the patron / client relationship got extended to the army — coteries of officers and NCOs personally loyal to their commanding general, not to the State — and there’s your Fall of the Roman Republic.
Kremlinology required something similar. Since the important levels of the Apparat all went to the same Higher Party Schools in Moscow, the fact that So-and-So was Wossname’s roommate for a few semesters was potentially of much greater importance than anything So-and-So did as the People’s Commissar of Whatever. He might’ve looked like a real up-and-comer based on his early promotion to a prestige post, but based on his prosopography an experience Kremlinologist might deduce that this was just horse-trading — someone high up in the Politburo owed Wossname’s father a favor for something back in the Great Patriotic War, and so this was payback; Wossname wasn’t going any higher than that.
It’s even more important in a completely ideologized society like the USSR. No Roman client would ever go so far as to openly stab his patron in the back — no one in his society would ever trust him again; he’d get shanked the very minute he donned the purple — but a Roman could have a change of heart. He might get religion, of either the philosophical (Epicureanism, Stoicism) or the actual cultic sort. This would significantly change the patron / client relationship. But in a society like the USSR — ostentatiously dedicated to the World Proletarian Revolution — ideology imposed some hard limits …
Severian, “Alt Thread: A Brief Bit of Brandonology”, Founding Questions, 2021-12-01.
March 9, 2025
Sulla: bloodthirsty psycho or saviour of the Republic?
Adrian Goldsworthy. Historian and Novelist
Published 23 Oct 2024Today’s question asked about Lucius Cornelius Sulla, the first man to the march his legions against the city of Rome, starting the first — but far from the last — of Rome’s civil wars. He killed a lot of people, broke a lot of laws and conventions, but as dictator also introduced a very “conservative” programme of reforms. How should we judge Sulla, as a selfish, brutal murderer, or as a reluctant rebel and well-intentioned reformer?
March 7, 2025
QotD: Infantry combat and esprit de corps
Well, no. Not quite.
We can approach this question through the idea of cohesion – the moral force that holds a group of combatants together on the battlefield under the intense emotional stresses of combat. The intense bonds that soldiers form in modern armies (particularly those in the European pattern) are not an accident, but a core part of how those armies, institutionally, seek to build cohesion. [W]e discussed briefly the emergence of the extensively drilled and disciplined “mechanical” soldier of Early Modern Europe, noting that this approach wasn’t necessary for the effective use of firearms (the Ottoman Janissaries, for instance, were quite good with firearms, but were not trained and organized in this way), but rather was a product of elite aristocratic (read: officer) disdain for their up-jumped peasant soldiers and thus the assumption by those aristocrats that the only way to get such men to fight effectively was to relentlessly drill them.
Now the funny thing about this system is that it clearly worked, but not for the reasons its aristocratic pioneers believed. It was only really after the Second World War that systematic study began to be made of unit cohesion (e.g. S.L.A. Marshall, Men Against Fire (1947), though subsequent literature on the topic is voluminous and Marshal’s work has its problems, but its conclusions are broadly accepted having been confirmed in subsequent studies) [NR: Some discussion on Marshall and his theories here]. What emerged quite clearly was that it wasn’t “the cause” or patriotism that held troops together under fire, but group cohesion born out of an intense need not to let fellow soldiers in the unit down. In short, what held units together and made them fight more effectively was (in part, there are many conclusions in Men Against Fire) the strong social bonds between comrades.
And, in fact, the drill and discipline of early modern European armies unintentionally did quite a lot of cohesion building things. Soldiers were removed from civilian society (isolation from larger groups builds unit cohesion), split into very small groups (keeping the core group that coheres below Dunbar’s number aids in group cohesion; thus why the platoon is a natural unit size) and then pushed through difficult and unpleasant training (that drill and discipline) creating a sense of unique shared experience and sacrifice. All of which doesn’t render men machines, but it does create strong social bonds within the units that will keep the men fighting even when they care little for their cause (which they generally did in this period; one does not find a super-abundance of patriotism among, say, the Army of Flanders).
And there is a tendency to point to this cohesion, its modern source in “toughening” boot camp and to say, “aha! That is the true universal about effective soldier-warriors!” Except – and you knew there was going to be an except – except it isn’t. Systems built on the use of drill and discipline for the development of unit cohesion through social bonds are actually, historically speaking, quite rare. We see systems like that in use by the Romans from the Middle Republic forward (but significantly faded by the end of late antiquity; the Byzantine army doesn’t seem to function this way), in China from the Han Dynasty onward, in Japan for the ashigaru infantry from the Sengoku period, and in Europe from the Early Modern period. That sounds like a lot, but that is relatively small minority of the historical period and even then in a relatively small minority of places. It is, for instance, a period that only covers about half of the historical period in Western Europe, the place most often associated with this very system of organization (though that association is perhaps unfair to East Asia).
Instead, most societies relied on existing social bonds formed outside of the experience of war for cohesion. Greek hoplite armies, for instance, generally formed up by polis (read: city) and then within those blocks by still smaller and smaller social divisions, so that family and neighbors would be standing shoulder to shoulder in the battle line (Sparta does this through the system of communal messes, the syssitia, but the idea that you fought alongside the men you dined with socially – your neighbors, generally – was perfectly normal in most Greek cities). That was intentional – it allowed the phalanx to cohere through the social pressure not to be seen as a coward before the men who meant the most to you, whose shaming gaze you would have to endure in civilian life. The same pressures, by the well, held together the (mostly volunteer) armies of the American Civil War (on this, see, McPherson, For Cause and Comrades (1997)).
By contrast, “warrior” classes often rely on a sort of class solidarity along with the demand of an individual military aristocrat to be individually militarily excellent. Richard Kaeuper quips of the literature of the medieval knightly class that it was filled with “utterly tireless, almost obsessional emphasis placed on personal prowess” (R.W. Kaeuper, Chivalry and Violence in Medieval Europe (1999)). We’ve talked a fair bit about the values of mounted aristocrats, both in their role as combatants and in their roles as generals and those values are relatively disconnected from discipline-induced forms of buddy-cohesion. Of course exactly what “good generalship” or “good officership” looks like varies wildly from place to place – Alexander was expected to command his cavalry from the front; Roman emperors rarely took the battlefield and when they did they commanded from the rear since it would be foolish to risk the “brain” of the army in personal combat and in any event someone at the front of a cavalry charge can hardly direct the rest of the army.
One of the things I find most striking about the “warrior ethos” advanced by writers like Pressfield is that it accepts as normal the unique nature of the bonds that hold soldiers together in battle, assuming this bond and its shared sacrifice to be at once unique to combat and also transcendent to all combatants. But one of the key points made very well in Sebastian Junger’s War (2010) and later Tribe (2016) is just how strange that experience is, historically. Junger notes that in earlier societies, soldiers would have returned from war into communities (often small, agricultural communities or tribal communities) every bit as close-knit as the infantry platoon – and indeed, often involving literally the same people as the infantry platoon. Instead, the intense feeling of uniqueness that modern soldiers feel about the bonds of combat is because of the historically unusual deracination produced by modern societies by the industrial revolution and the post-industrial period.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Universal Warrior, Part IIb: A Soldier’s Lot”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-02-05.
March 1, 2025
QotD: Roman Republic versus Seleucid Empire – the Battle of Magnesia
Scipio also brought fresh troops with him. The Senate authorized him to raise a supplementum (recruitment to fill out an army) of 3,000 Roman infantry, 100 Roman cavalry, 5,000 socii infantry and 200 socii cavalry (Livy 37.2.1) as well as authorizing him to carry the war into Asia (meaning Anatolia or Asia Minor) if he thought it wise – which of course he will. In addition to this, the two Scipios also called for volunteers from Scipio Africanus’ veterans and got 5,000 of them, a mix of Romans and socii (Livy 37.4.3), so all told Lucius Cornelius Scipio is crossing to Greece with reinforcements of some 13,000 infantry (including some battle-hardened veterans), 300 cavalry and one Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus.1 That said, a significant portion of this force is going to end up left in Greece to handle garrison duty and the Aetolians. Antiochus III, for his part, spends this time raising forces for a major battle, while dispatching his son Seleucus (the future Seleucus IV, r. 187-175) to try to raid Pergamum, Rome’s key ally in the region.
Once the Romans arrive (and join up with Eumenes’ army), both sides maneuvered to try and get a battle on favorable terms. Antiochus III’s army was massive with lots of cavalry – 62,000 infantry and 12,000 cavalry, an army on the same general order of magnitude as the one that fought at Raphia – so he sought an open area, setting up his fortified camp near Magnesia, with fairly formidable defenses – a ditch with a double-rampart (Livy 37.37.9-11). Unsurprisingly, the Romans, with a significant, but smaller force, preferred a fight in more confined quarters and for several days the armies sat opposite each other with minor skirmishes (Livy 37.38).
The problem Scipio faced was a simple one: the year was coming to a close, which meant that soon new consuls would be elected and he could hardly count on his command being extended. Consequently, Scipio calls together his war council – what the Romans call a consilium – to ask what he should do if Antiochus III couldn’t be lured into battle on favorable terms. The answer he got back was to force a battle and so force a battle Scipio did, advancing forward onto the ground of Antiochus’ choosing, leading to the Battle of Magnesia.
We have two accounts of this battle which mostly match up, one in Livy (Livy 37.39-44) and another in Appian’s Syrian Wars (App. Syr. 30-36). Livy here is generally the better source and chances are both authors are relying substantially on Polybius (who would be an even better source), whose account of the battle is lost.
Antiochus III’s army was enormous, with a substantial superiority in cavalry. From left to right, according to Livy (Livy 37.40), Antiochus III deployed: Cyrtian slinger and Elymaean archers (4,000), then a unit of caetrati (4,000; probably light infantry peltasts), then the contingent of Tralli (1,500; light infantry auxiliaries from Anatolia), then Carian and Cilicians equipped like Cretans (1,500; light archer infantry), then the Neo-Cretans (1,000; light archer infantry), then the Galatian cavalry (2,500; mailed shock cavalry), then a unit of Tarantine cavalry (number unclear, probably 500; Greek light cavalry), a part of the “royal squadron” of cavalry (1,000; Macedonian shock cavalry), then the ultra-heavy cataphract cavalry (3,000), supported by a mixed component of auxiliaries (2,700; medium thureophoroi infantry?) along with his scythed chariots and Arab camel troops.
That gets us to the central component of the line (still reading left to right): Cappadocians (2,000) who Livy notes were similarly armed to the Galatian infantry (1,500, unarmored, La Tène infantry kit, so “mediums”) who come next. Then the main force of the phalanx, 16,000 strong with 22 elephants. The phalanx was formed 32 ranks deep, with the intervals between the regiments covered by the elephants deployed in pairs, creating an articulated or enallax phalanx like Pyrrhus had, but using elephants rather than infantry to cover the “hinges”. This may in fact, rather than being a single phalanx 32 men deep be a “double” phalanx (one deployed behind the other) like we saw at Sellasia. Then on the right of the phalanx was another force of 1,500 Galatian infantry. Oddly missing here is the main contingent of the elite Silver Shields (the Argyraspides); some scholars2 note that a contingent of them 10,000 strong would make Livy’s total strength numbers and component numbers match up and he has just forgotten them in the main line. We might expect them to be deployed to the right of the main phalanx (where Livy will put the infantry Royal Cohort (regia cohors), confusing a subunit of the argyraspides with the larger whole unit. Michael Taylor in a forthcoming work3 has suggested they may also have been deployed behind the cavalry we’re about to get to or otherwise to their right.
That gets us now to the right wing (still moving left to right; you begin to realize how damn big this army is), we have more cataphracts (3,000, armored shock cavalry), the elite cavalry agema (1,000; elite Mede/Persian cavalry, probably shock), then Dahae horse archers (1,200; Steppe horse archers), then Cretan and Trallian light infantry (3,000), then some Mysian Archers (2,500) and finally another contingent of Cyrtian slinger and Elymaean archers (4,000).
This is, obviously, a really big army. But notice that a lot of its strength is in light infantry: combining the various archers, slingers and general light infantry (excluding troops we suspect to be “mediums”) we come to something like 21,500 lights, plus another 7,700 “medium” infantry and then 26,000 heavy infantry (accounting for the missing argyraspides). That’s 55,200 total, but Livy reports a total strength for the army of 62,000; it’s possible the missing remainder were troops kept back to defend the camp, in which case they too are likely light infantry. A Roman army’s infantry contingent is around 28% “lights” (the velites), who do not occupy any space in the main battle line. Antiochus’ infantry contingent, while massive, is 39% “lights” (and another 14% “mediums”), some of which do seem to occupy actual space in the battle line.
Of course Antiochus also has a massive amount of cavalry ranging from ultra-heavy cataphracts to light but highly skilled horse archers and massive cavalry superiority covereth a multitude of sins.
But the second problem with this gigantic army is one that – again, in a forthcoming work – Michael Taylor has pointed out. The physical space of the battlefield at Magnesia is not big enough to deploy the whole thing […]
Now Livy specifies that the flanks of Antiochus’ army curve forward, describing them as “horns” (cornu) rather than “wings” (alae) and noting they were “a little bit advanced” (paulum producto), which may be an effort to get more of this massive army actually into the fight […]. So while this army is large, it’s also unwieldy and difficult to bring properly into action and it’s not at all clear from either Livy or Appian that the whole army actually engaged – substantial portions of that gigantic mass of light infantry on the wings just seem to dissolve away once the battle begins, perhaps never getting into the fight in the first place.
The Roman force was deployed in its typical formation, with the three lines of the triplex acies and the socii flanking the legions (Livy 37.39.7-8), with the combined Roman and socii force being roughly 20,000 strong (the legions and alae being somewhat over-strength). In addition Eumenes, King of Pergamum was present and the Romans put his force on their right to cover the open flank, while he anchored his left flank on the Phrygios River. Eumenes’ wing consisted of 3,000 Achaeans (of the Achaean League) that Livy describes as caetrati and Appian describes as peltasts (so, lights), plus nearly all of Scipio’s cavalry: Eumenes’ cavalry guard of 800, plus another 2,200 Roman and socii cavalry, and than some auxiliary Cretan and Trallian light infantry, 500 each. Thinking his left wing, anchored on the river, relatively safe, Scipio posted only four turmae of cavalry there (120 cavalry). He also had a force of Macedonians and Thracians mixed together – so these are probably “medium” infantry – who had come as volunteers, who he posts to guard the camp rather than in the main battleline. I always find this striking, because I think a Hellenistic army would have put these guys in the front line, but a Roman commander looks at them and thinks “camp guards”. The Romans also had some war elephants, sixteen of them, but Scipio assesses that North African elephants won’t stand up to the larger Indian elephants of the Seleucids (which is true, they won’t) and so he puts them in reserve behind his lines rather than out front where they’d just be driven back into him. All told then, the Roman force is around 26,000 infantry and 3,000 cavalry – badly outnumbered by Antiochus, but of a relatively higher average quality and a bit more capable of actually fitting its entire combat power into the space.
The Battle
Because the armies are so large, much like as happened at Raphia, the battle that results is almost three battles running in parallel: the two wings and the center. Antiochus III commanded from his right wing, where – contrary to the expectations of Scipio who thought the river would secure his flank there – he intended his main attack. His son Seleucus commanded the left. Livy reports a light rain which interfered with both with visibility and some of Antiochus’ light troops’ weapons, as their bows and slings reacted poorly to the moisture (as composite bows will sometimes do; Livy 37.41.3-4, note also App. Syr. 33).Antiochus opens the battle on his left with his scythed chariots, a novel “gimmick” weapon (heavy chariots with blades all over them, used to shock infantry out of position). This may have been a nasty surprise for the Romans, but given the dispositions of the army, it was Eumenes, not Scipio who faces the chariots and as Livy notes, Eumenes was well aware how to fight them (Livy 37.41.9), using his light troops – those Cretan archers and Trallian javelin-troops. Deployed in loose order, they were able to move aside to avoid the chariots better than heavy infantry in close-order (similar tactics are used against elephants) and could with their missiles strike at chariot drivers and horses at range (Livy 37.41.10-12). Turning back this initial attack seems to have badly undermined the morale of the Seleucid left-wing, parts of which fled, creating a gap between the extreme left-wing and the heavy cavalry contingent. Eumenes then, with the Roman cavalry, promptly hammered the disordered line, hitting first the camel troops, then in the confusion quickly overwhelming the rest of the cavalry, including the cataphracts, leading Antiochus’ left wing to almost totally collapse, isolating the phalanx in the center. It’s not clear what the large mass of light infantry on the extreme edge of the battlefield was doing.
Meanwhile on the other side of the battle, where Scipio had figured a light screen of 120 equites would be enough to hold the end of the line, Antiochus delivered is cavalry hammer-blow successfully. Obnoxiously, both of our sources are a lot less interested in describing how he does this (Livy 37.42.7-8 and App. Syr. 34), which is frustrating because it is a bit hard to make sense of how it turns out. On the one hand, the constricted battlefield will have meant that, regardless of how they were positioned, those argyraspides are going to end up following Antiochus’ big cavalry hammer on the (Seleucid) right. They then overwhelm the cavalry and put them to flight and then push the infantry of that wing (left ala of socii and evidently a good portion of the legion next to it) back to the Roman camp.
On the other hand, the Roman infantry line reaches its camp apparently in good order or something close to it. Marcus Aemilius, the tribune put in charge of the camp is able to rush out, reconstitute the infantry force and, along with the camp-guard, halt Antiochus’ advance. The thing is, infantry when broken by cavalry usually cannot reform like that, but the distance covered, while relatively short, also seems a bit too long for the standard legionary hastati-to-principes-to-triarii retrograde. Our sources (also including a passage of Justin, a much later source, 31.8.6) vary on exactly how precipitous the flight was and it is possible that it proceeded differently at different points, with some maniples collapsing and others making an orderly retrograde. In any case, it’s clear that the Roman left wing stabilized itself outside of the Roman camp, much to Antiochus’ dismay. Eumenes, having at this point realized both that he was winning on his flank and that the other flank was in trouble dispatched his brother Attalus with 200 cavalry to go aid the ailing Roman left wing; the arrival of these fellows seem to have caused panic and Antiochus at this point begins retreating.
Meanwhile, of course, there is the heavy infantry engagement at the center. Pressured and without flanking support, Appian reports that the Seleucid phalanx first admitted what light infantry remained and then formed square, presenting their pikes tetragonos, “on all four sides” (App. Syr. 35), a formation known as a plinthion in some Greek tactical manuals. Forming this way under pressure on a chaotic battlefield is frankly impressive (though if they were formed as a double-phalanx rather than a double-thick single-phalanx, that would have made it easier) and a reminder that the core of Antiochus’ army was quite capable. Unable in this formation to charge, the phalanx was showered with Roman pila and skirmished by Eumenes’ lighter cavalry; the Romans seem to have disposed of Antiochus’ elephants with relative ease – the Punic Wars had left the Romans very experienced at dealing with elephants (Livy 37.42.4-5). Appian notes that some of the elephants, driven back by the legion and maddened disrupted the Seleucid square, at which point the phalanx at last collapsed (App. Syr. 35); Livy has the collapse happen much faster, but Appian’s narrative here seems more plausible.
What was left of Antiochus’ army now fled to their camp – not far off, just like the Roman one – leading to a sharp battle at the camp which Livy describes as ingens et maior prope quam in acie cades, “a huge slaughter, almost greater than that in the battle” (Livy 37.43.10), with stiff resistance at the camp’s gates and walls holding up the Romans before they eventually broke through and butchered the survivors. Livy reports that of Antiochus’ forces, 50,000 infantry and 3,000 cavalry were killed, another 1,500 captured; these seem really high as figures go, but Appian reports almost the exact same. Interesting, Livy doesn’t report the figure in his own right or attribute it to Polybius but instead simply notes “it is said that”, suggesting he may not be fully confident of the number either. Taylor supposes, reasonably I think, that this oversized figure may also count men who fled from the battlefield, reflecting instead that once Antiochus III could actually reconstitute his army, he had about 19,000 men, most of the rest having fled.4 Either way, the resulting peace makes clear that the Seleucid army was shattered beyond immediate repair.
Roman losses, by contrast, were shockingly light. Livy reports 300 infantry lost, 24 Roman cavalry and 25 out of Eumenes’ force; Appian adds that the 300 infantry were “from the city” – meaning Roman citizens – so some socii casualties have evidently been left out (but he trims Eumenes’ losses down to just fifteen cavalry) (Livy 37.44.2-3; App. Syr. 36). Livy in addition notes that many Romans were wounded in addition to the 300 killed. This is an odd quirk of Livy’s casualty reports for Roman armies against Hellenistic armies and I suspect it reflects the relatively high effectiveness of Roman body armor, by this point increasingly dominated by the mail lorica hamata: good armor converts lethal blows into survivable wounds.5 It also fits into a broader pattern we’ve seen: Hellenistic armies that face Roman armies always take heavy casualties, winning or losing, but when Roman armies win they tend to win lopsidedly. It is a trend that will continue.
So why Roman victory at Magnesia? It is certainly not the case that the Romans had the advantage of rough terrain in the battle: the battlefield here is flat and fairly open. It should have been ideal terrain for a Hellenistic army.
A good deal of the credit has to go to Eumenes, which makes the battle a bit hard to extrapolate from. It certainly seems like Eumenes’ quick thinking to disperse the Seleucid chariots and then immediately follow up with his own charge was decisive on his flank, though not quite battle winning. Eumenes’ forces, after all, lacked the punch to disperse the heavier phalanx, which did not panic when its wing collapsed. Instead, the Seleucid phalanx, pinned into a stationary, defensive position by Eumenes’ encircling cavalry, appears to have been disassembled primary by the Roman heavy infantry, peppering it with pila before inducing panic into the elephants. It turns out that Samnites make better “glue” for an articulated phalanx than elephants, because they are less likely to panic.
Meanwhile on the Seleucid right (the Roman left), the flexible and modular nature of the legion seems to have been a major factor. Antiochus clearly broke through the Roman line at points, but with the Roman legion’s plethora of officers (centurions, military tribunes, praefecti) and with each maniple having its own set of standards to rally around, it seems like the legion and its socii ala managed to hold together and eventually drive Antiochus off, despite being pressured. That, in and of itself, is impressive: it is the thing the Seleucid center fails to do, after all.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Phalanx’s Twilight, Legion’s Triumph, Part IVb: Antiochus III”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2024-04-05.
1. I enjoy this joke because the idea of bringing Scipio Africanus along as a junior officer is amusing, but I should note that in the event, he doesn’t seem to have had much of a role in the campaign.
2. E.g. Bar Kockva, The Seleucid Army: Organization and Tactics in the Great Campaigns (1979)
3. “A Commander Will Put an End to his Insolence: the Battle of Magnesia, 190BC” to appear in The Seleucids at War: Recruitment, Organization and Battles (forthcoming in 2024), eds. Altay Coşkun and Benhamin E. Scolnic.
4. Taylor, Antiochus the Great (2013), 143.
5. On this, see, uh, me, “The Adoption and Impact of Roman Mail Armor in the Third and Second Centuries B.C.” Chiron 52 (2022).
