Plundering the Sixth Century Mediterranean

I've been a bit overwhelmed, for lots of reasons.  But, as I trudge on, I think I am making progress.  In fact, the principal offshoot of my grant (SSHRC Insight Development Grant), one part of what was once conceived as one large book-length project and now three, is starting to take shape.  In fact, I think I've found the ties that should bind it all together in a meaningful way.  Given that I expect to start typing before too long, this seemed a good time to pause and write my thoughts/intentions down.

The overarching plan for the grant and now this book was to look at all three of Procopius' works in tandem with a focus on military matters, but more than the battles that occupied book one (and the thesis).  The plan was to make my approach as holistic as possible, with Procopius serving as the foundation for all matters pertaining to war, from organization and strategy to logistics and tactics.  As I plugged away, however, it started to seem that it was going to become something I'd rather it wasn't:  a psuedo-commentary in which I went through all the key topics usually associated with military matters found in Procopius and evaluated them systematically.  While that's important, it has the danger of forcing modern concepts or ideas on Procopius.  And, it might be a bit dry:  I'd rather there be some sort of thread underlining such an approach.

A number of years have passed since I started working on this, and a few things have influenced my thinking including my continued interest in the cultural approach to warfare, which I will likely address in some capacity or other in this book, world history, and in particular the sixth-century Roman state's place in the wider Eurasian world and how it was impacted by people to its west, north, east, and south, and its evidently evolving approach to warfare. Some significant publications have helped too, particularly Justinian's Codex, but also aspects of some of Anastasius' imperial edicts (a bit earlier, yes, but part of the same broader context).

What I've found is that the two central themes that tie the three works together, at least from the perspective I'm interested in, are defence and plunder.  In the Secret History (SH) Procopius lambastes Justinian for, among other things, his greed and desire for money, his inability to protect the empire from plundering raids carried out by myriad peoples in the Balkans and the Near East, and the damage he wrought on newly conquered lands like North Africa and Italy, as well as those of the very people he's trying to protect the empire from, the assorted barbarians.  In the Buildings (B), Procopius is obviously obsessed with Justinian's (alleged in parts) building programme, and much of it is connected with defence.  Indeed, as Procopius sees it in the B, Justinian's job is to protect the empire, and this is done by means of both men and materiel.  The B is, of course, filled with forts and fortified settlements, which Procopius alleges Justinian either built himself or repaired.  While good questions have been raised about how much of this he actually effected, there's good reason to think that he did devote considerable attention to fortification work, as a host of studies have shown.  As I suggested, however, he also regularly mentions the garrisons of these forts in the B, and he even implies that it's not enough to build fortifications, for they need men to man them.  Then there's the Wars (W), and Procopius focuses on either defence or plunder depending on the context of a particular war.  So, there's much more on defence in the PW than there is in the VW and GW.  In fact, defensive-issues tend to surface in those latter two wars after Rome has managed to win, at least initially.  The VW is rife with plundering Roman (or allied) soldiers.  While it is not quite as prevalent in Italy, it remains a problem, as the actions of Bessas, for instance, illustrate. 

I've only just given you the briefest of summaries:  the final version will flesh out the details.  Suffice to say, what we seem to have is a world rife with armies, Roman, Persian, and otherwise, eager for plunder, in which no one entity is greedier than another.  Procopius' works, when read collectively, seem to agree, in some way or another, on this.  Indeed, his perspective is understandably pro-Roman, but even he touches on the impact of Rome's actions in this regard on other places in both the W and SH.  It's also become clear to me that Procopius' emphasis on the importance of a strong defensive outlook is reflected in much of our additional evidence, from inscriptions and papyri to the law and some of our other literary sources.  There is, for instance, a strong undercurrent of fear that seems to pervade life (I've found), and Procopius, and Justinian, really, seems keen on countering this by means of defensive measures that provide safety and security.  It's possible that that this climate of fear was constructed by Justinian, and I think that many feel that this was the case.  What's less clear (and so new to me), I think, is that this extended to foreign affairs too, i.e. not only natural disasters and the social unrest that often plagued Constantinople. 

Anyway, so that's it, or what I'm running with.  The final version, obviously, will be much longer.  Should add that once all this is finished a few years from now (that's all three parts), I'll be delighted to be free from Procopius.  Not sure what I'd do next (I had something I now think I need a prolonged break, if not a clean break, from that former resident of Caesarea), but that's a few years away yet.

Agathias, a Herodotus for the Age of Justinian

I've been slowly working my way through Agathias, reading the text, in translation I admit (though with the accompanying Greek text), much closer than I ever have before.  Some of it I'd already gone through before, but this time I'm trying to soak it all in, so to speak, partially keeping my open for certain things, like evidence of combat motivation (for a paper) and military communities (again for a paper), but while also keeping my eyes open to interesting features.  I've found more than a few, and as I near the end there are a few things stand out.  I'd planned to discuss a few of them here, but the others, the careful crafting of his historian persona, his abundant (in comparison to Procopius) methodological statements, his interest in the personal or intimate anecdotes, and his interest in the sensory and the emotional will have to wait for another day, because I'm tired.  So here, a couple of observations on his Herodotean proclivities.

For one, Agathias is, in many respects, far more Herodotean than I had appreciated before.  Some time ago Averil Cameron went carefully through a set of supposed correspondences identified by Franke and highlighted some of the glaring problems.  Much of what she said all that time ago makes a lot of sense.  Some years later, Whitby (nb - former supervisor) highlighted, if briefly, Agathias' love of digressions.  While I take Cameron's point, it's worth highlighting those digressions.  While they might seem weird and unnecessary - Agathias has been criticized for spending too much time on things that matter too little - I think they do offer him a means of engaging more fully with his audience.  He wants to show us what he knows, though more on that personal aspect in a second.  It also gives him a chance to display his learning, while also adhering to the grand classical historical tradition.  Digressions were important, and this was one of their distinctive features that he chose to pay attention to, in part because he knew what his strengths were. 

Now the very fact that his longest of digressions concerns the Persians should be a red flag:  he has Herodotus on his mind.  Yes, it's also relevant.  The most recent Persian war was drawing to a close, and the historian who professed to be succeeding, Procopius, had devoted considerable attention to them.  But the most obvious ancient historian, for any late antique or Byzantine historian to my eyes, when Persians are the subject is Herodotus.  That doesn't necessarily mean that he needed to flood his Persian-themed discussions with Herodotean-borrowings.  In fact, it would be difficult, given Herodotus wrote in Ionian Greek and Agathias favoured the Atticizing Greek of Procopius and their predecessors.  While there likely are a host of particular episodes in Herodotus that are paralleled in Agathias, I'm not so sure it has to be so exact. 

There's one last Herodotean characteristic, a smaller one, admittedly, that I want to draw attention to.  Agathias regularly presents two explanations or theories in his digressions.  So, something along the lines of, some think this is the case, others think this is the case.  Quite often, and possibly in the latter half in particular - though I'd have to check, it might just be my memory - Agathias will also finish a digression or extended discussion with something along the lines of, let the reader decide for him or herself how she feels.  To me, that screams of Herodotus, more so than anything else.  It'll do with some fleshing out, however.

So, his Herodotean-leanings deserve additional attention.  Plus, it has me rethinking what I said about his Thucydidean-borrowings in a chapter that'll be out next year.  Basically, I said he was less successful, by some margin, at the Thucydidean-style history than Procopius.  While this hasn't changed my mind, I would, on further thought, have made greater emphasis on the possibility - lo likelihood - that this was ok, because that wasn't what he had in mind:  Agathias didn't want to be a modern-day Thucydides, for Procopius had already done that.  Indeed, he spends lots of time commending Procopius for what he's already done, and stressing what he'll do differently.  Rather, Agathias, I'm starting to think, was much more interested in being a modern-day Herodotus.  

England, Hadrian's Wall, and the Romans Part 2 (images)

In the previous I blabbed a bit about the trip and included a few observations. Above are a few of the highlights.  I'd have done more but the internet connection here is slow.  Suffice to say, there are shots from Roman Cardiff (the wall at the start), a helmet, the amphitheatre, and part of the barracks at Caerleon (Wales), some shots from a milefort and the wall at Cawfields on Hadrian's Wall, and a couple of shots from Vindolanda, one with the spaces underneath the floor (I believe) and the other, a gravely block, which is where they found the remains of a child (evidence for children in the fort).

More next time, possibly in a few days.

Using Military Language in Late Antiquity

I recently read an interesting article (by Jonathan McLaughlin) on letters exchanged between members of the, let's say, cultural elite and the military elite in the fourth century in the latest issue of JLA (Journal of Late Antiquity).  The two principal characters were Libanius and Ellebichus, a "barbarian" general.  It turns out that we have the letters of Libanius (we have a lot of those, actually) to this general, but not the replies.  Nevertheless, a friendship was struck between these two unlikely gentlemen, who didn't always see eye-to-eye, and this exchange of letters helped bridge the culture divide - well, exchanges of this type between all sorts of different members of the elite helped to so.  Anyway, the article's give me much food for thought on a variety of issues from late antique communications and interactions, and the character of elite networks, to issue of genre, here epistolography.

One little point I want to pick up on here is a comment McLaughlin made about Libanius' use of military terms in a letter to Ellebichus (Ep. 925), and the phrases in question include:  "hurled arrows [ta belh] at both" and "put down their weapons [katethento ta hopla]".  The military terms and language that Libanius employs in this letter, and presumably in others - I'd have to check - is not very technical.  Yes, there are arms and arrows, but the words that he used had a long pedigree.  The point I'm trying to make is that the words that Libanius was using in the late fourth century (AD) are the same ones that Thucydides used in the late fifth century (BC).  There's nothing revolutionary about this, of course, for the classicizing practices of late antique writers have been commented on for some time.  Still, what I was struck by the generality of the language used by Libanius, much of the same sort that Procopius uses, someone whose language use I'm much more familiar with.  The point is Procopius isn't overly technical either, even though he does spend most of his time getting into military matters.  Indeed, it's quite likely that the sort of people who read Procopius (or listened to it) were those who read (or listened to) Libanius, and they might well have appreciated this general militayr langauge.  At least, that's been my take on it.

Libanius' apparent use of military language and terminology (JLA 2014:  272, n. 81) has me thinking: what constitutes military language?  It might seem obvious, terms that describe things that military do and are.  But, a considerable amount of technicality is often implied when discussing military matters, both ancient and modern, and thinking about military language reminded me of a night out a year or two ago.  It was a friend's bachelor party (something to that effect - maybe pre-bachelor party), and it was a fairly select group at the start. There were four of us, three of whom had served (or were serving in some capacity) in the armed forces, both British and Canadian.  Needless to say, the one person who hadn't (me - the guy who spends a good amount of his time thinking about ancient militaries) was about lost in a myriad of military acronyms.   I'd try to reproduce some here, but I can't remember any of them (sure some can be found here http://www.militaryacronyms.net/). Anyway, this is probably my modern experiences blurring my perceptions of the ancient world, but I have this notion that Roman military language would be some sort of ancient version of that, originally in Latin, but eventually in Greek.  Following this line of thinking, then, the "military language" of Libanius and later Procopius is actually the civilian version - it's been rendered into a form that civilians can understand.  Just as I struggled to understand (and struggled is generous - failed might be better) to understand what they were saying, the largely civilian audience that consumed Libanius' and Procopius' (and others') works would have had a much easier time with their language then anything "properly" military and technical. 

Let me step back for a second.  I've been reading more Procopius (for teaching purposes mostly, though research obviously too - in translation, Kaldelli's new version), been giving some thought to the earlier imperial military, and some perusing of the Notitia Dignitatum.  If we focus on one particular group of terms, those for units for example, if you read Procopius you find very little indication of technical terms for unit types and names.  There are vague references to infantry, cavalry, occasionaly a reference to some sort of Latin term, and there are mentions of all sorts of ethnic units (maybe).  But there are none of the sort of titles we find in the Notitia Dignitatum, or the units that populate the earlier funerary epitaphs and diplomata.  Those sorts of long-winded names, like the ala antana dromedariorum (Not. Dign. or. 34.33), strike me as, well, proper military language - and all the aspects that would go with it.  And admittedly, if Procopius' works (and those of all other classical and classicizing historians for that matter) included all of the participating units they would soon make for some very painful, and possibly confusing, reading, at least to most of us. 

Of course, unit names and so on might apply only to administrative matters.  It may even be that the military bulletins and so forth discussed in previous posts were filled with the names of participating units, and all sorts of other terms (officer ranks, troop types, etc.).  That too would, I think, count as military langauge, though at the administrative level.  Maurice's Strategikon, which I haven't mentioned yet, probably also consists of what could be called technical military language (I believe Rance has made a strong case for this in a number of publications, and I look forward to his translation and commentary).  I think then too that the stuff Procopius and Libanius use is something else - the civilian versions, translations even, of the technical military mumbo-jumbo.  To get back to the acronyms, does that mean Roman soldiers were running around using acronyms and technical terms when talking to one another in day-to-day life?  I don't know, and I'm not sure we have any good evidence for this (not that it didn't or might not have existed - we just don't know).  What we'd probably like is some letters, and there might even be some, but even those are problematic, at least if we assume that the literacy needed to compose letters was higher than that of your average soldier.  Officers - well, they had different experiences and upbringings in a lot of cases.  But regular soldiers?  How could we find out about the sort of language they used?  Harder to say.  Maybe graffito, if it existed, would be useful?  Maybe there are wooden tablets that might enlighten us?  Have to check.  But, it might remain an enigma for some time. 

Anyway, enough for now, though I supect I'll return to this in the future...

Return of the Blog

Many moons ago, while I was a graduate student at Warwick, I had a wee blog. What posts I had were usually about late antique things, with Procopius, Justinian, and sixth century warfare the subject of the bulk of those posts.  There were occasional posts about non-academic things.  Here, I plan on doing the same. On the academic side of things probable topics include the Classical World, Late Antiquity, Byzantium, Rome, historiography (classical, late antique, and byzantine), ancient and medieval warfare, frontiers, barbarians, and teaching.  Those of a less academic sort are likely to include Winnipeg, hockey, and, well, whatever else comes to mind.