{"id":72516,"date":"2023-05-15T01:00:15","date_gmt":"2023-05-15T05:00:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=72516"},"modified":"2023-09-20T10:51:44","modified_gmt":"2023-09-20T14:51:44","slug":"qotd-how-military-history-shapes-cultures-and-societies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2023\/05\/15\/qotd-how-military-history-shapes-cultures-and-societies\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: How military history shapes cultures and societies"},"content":{"rendered":"<blockquote><p><a href=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400.png\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" style=\"float:right; padding: 0px 0px 10px 25px\" src=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400.png\" alt=\"\" width=\"400\" height=\"400\" class=\"alignright size-full wp-image-48672\" srcset=\"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400.png 400w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400-150x150.png 150w, https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2019\/06\/QotD-thumbnail-400x400-50x50.png 50w\" sizes=\"auto, (max-width: 400px) 100vw, 400px\" \/><\/a>&#8230; <strong>war and conflict deeply shaped societies in the past and to the degree that we think that understanding those societies is important<\/strong> (a point on which, presumably, all historians may agree), <strong>it is also important to understand their conflicts<\/strong>. I am often puzzled by scholars who work on bodies of literature written almost entirely by combat veterans (which is a good chunk of the Greek and Latin source tradition), in societies where most free adult men probably had some experience of combat, who then studiously avoid ever studying or learning very much about that combat experience (that &#8220;war and society&#8221; lens there again). Famously, <a href=\"https:\/\/en.wikipedia.org\/wiki\/Aeschylus\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">Aeschylus<\/a>, the greatest Greek playwright of his generation, left no record of his achievements in writing in his epitaph. Instead he was commemorated this way:<\/p>\n<ul>\n<p><em>Aeschylus, son of Euphorion, the Athenian lies beneath this marker<br \/>\nhaving perished in wheat-bearing Gela<br \/>\nOf his well-known prowess, the grove of Marathon can speak<br \/>\nAnd long-haired Mede knows it well.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/ul>\n<p>If a scholar wants to understand Aeschylus or his plays, don&#8217;t they also need to understand this side of his experience too? I know quite a number of scholars who ended up coming to military history this way, looking to answer questions that were not narrowly military, but which ended up touching on war and conflict. For that kind of research \u2013 for our potential scholar of Aeschylus \u2013 it is important that there be specialists working to understand war and conflict in the period. Of course this is particularly true in understanding historical politics and political narratives, given that most pre-modern states were primarily engines for the raising of revenues for the waging of war (with religious expenditures typically being the only ones comparable in scale).<\/p>\n<p>Bret Devereaux, <a href=\"https:\/\/acoup.blog\/2020\/11\/13\/collections-why-military-history\/\" rel=\"noopener\" target=\"_blank\">&#8220;Collections: Why Military History?&#8221;, <em>A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry<\/em><\/a>, 2020-11-13.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>&#8230; war and conflict deeply shaped societies in the past and to the degree that we think that understanding those societies is important (a point on which, presumably, all historians may agree), it is also important to understand their conflicts. I am often puzzled by scholars who work on bodies of literature written almost entirely [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1526,7,5,41],"tags":[1527,1457,262,294,381],"class_list":["post-72516","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-greece","category-history","category-military","category-quotations","tag-ancientgreece","tag-bretdevereaux","tag-culture","tag-literature","tag-theatre"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-iRC","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72516","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=72516"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72516\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":82140,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/72516\/revisions\/82140"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=72516"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=72516"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=72516"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}