Justinian's Guide to Ruling an Empire

I just finished reading Peter Heather's (PH) Rome Resurgent, which I now have to write a review for.  When I first heard about the book, I was both excited and horribly disappointed: excited because I love the topic and have read some of Heather's other work, disappointed because it looked like he had done what I had done.  The good news, for me, is that he doesn't quite seem to have done what I had intended:  write a detailed study of the impact of Justinian's wars on the fate of the empire.  Yes, this is what the book purports to do - and to some degree it does just that, but not quite in the way that I would. 

I'm not going to get into all the nitty-gritty here; most of that will have to wait for the review.  That being said, there is one issue I want to raise, which PH got to, or at least underlined, at the end:  how do you rule for a really long time?  As PH makes clear, Justinian (J) did a lot of things while he was emperor, some of which are quite significant, with four items the accomplishments that usually get most of the attention:  wars of conquest, legal reforms, building of Hagia Sophia, and the closing of the Academy in Athens.  Besides those accomplishments, PH illustrates well J's determination in a number of other capacities, including the religious sphere, for J, like many before and after, strove to bring unity to the Christian church, though with mixed results.

As PH sees J, a great deal of his accomplishments should be ascribed to his attempts to prove his credentials (for rule) and, in the aftermath of the Nika revolt, restore order and his lost prestige (or something to that effect).  J didn't have a clear plan with the west.  Rather, with real challenges to his rule all around, J needed to find some means of consolidating his power, and military success in far-flung places, as the opportunities arose, seemed the best bet.  Yes, there was some strategic thinking on J's and his empire's part, but little of it was long term, and PH argues there's not much in the way of concern for the wellbeing of that empire.  Ultimately, then, while J doesn't deserve the blame for the later ills of the empire, which were largely the result of the world war (as PH calls it) of the later sixth century, most of his success would seem to be a combination of opportunism and - as I take PH's underlying message - dumb luck.

Like others, PH sees J as an emperor only out for number one, with little regard for his people and what impact his policies had on them.  He was quite happy to plunder and pillage if it got him what he wanted, and that was control of the empire.  So, the many thousands who died in Constantinople itself, or the wider parts of the empire at large (Antioch, North Africa, Italy), mattered little.  Many have seen J as a particularly harsh ruler, and PH would seem to fall on this side of the spectrum, if not quite at the far end.

This is where I come in.  I don't want to make a judgement on J's cruelty here, but I do wonder if the absence of long term strategic planning fits well with what we know about J's reign.  Few emperors lived and reigned as long as J.  While many of PH's explanations are perfectly reasonable, is it really possible to rule for nearly 40 years on dumb luck, or something a little more sophisticated than that?  Augustus' long reign is undoubtedly due to his careful networking, planning, and plotting - and like J, he was a master propagandist.  Even if J didn't have any real long term version at the start of his reign, the near disastrous Nika riot would, to my mind, seem to have provided just such an opportunity, after the dust settled, for J to carefully, with Theodora's help, work out how to rule for a long time without the same kinds of crises.  Rather importantly, it seems to have worked, despite all the challenges that he later faced, from the death of his wife and the onset of the plague, which might have afflicted J himself, to the Persian invasions of 540 and the 559 Kutrigur attack of Constantinople.

This doesn't necessarily mean that J had a long term plan to conquer the west and rebuild the ancient pan-Mediterranean empire.  A good part of J's initiatives on that front truly could have been the result of circumstances, and I don't doubt that J did many of the same things that many if not all pre-modern rules have done to ensure rule, including prove their religious and military mettle.  I think the absence of detail - and insufficient evidence - are the cause of some of my dissatisfaction with the explanation PH offers.  I guess then too that what I'd also like to know more about is how exactly an emperor like J went about carrying out his foreign policy objectives - and even how he created them in the first place.  To what degree were there sets of instructions, or guidelines, left from previous rulers that laid out some of this stuff?  Anyway, what the book proves to me, at least for the moment, that my 'great' "impact of war under Justinian" project isn't dead yet, and in fact might be in better shape than I'd feared.  Now if only I hadn't just sent in a proposal for a big research project on Ammianus.  Oh well, maybe it'll get rejected in April? :)

Scrubbing Out Procopius, or the Anti-Kaegi "Procopius the Military Historian"

It's pretty hard to escape the pull of the Procopius-black hole when it comes to the sixth-century East Roman Empire, at least if you're interested in military and political issues.  That's part of the reason why scholars like Roger Scott have devoted so much attention to the other historians like Malalas.  Scott's four pillars of the age of Justinian are:  the construction of Hagia Sophia, the codification of Roman law, the closing of Plato's Academy in Athens, and Justinian's reconquest of the west.  Although Procopius does devote considerable attention to Hagia Sophia in the Buildings, it's the reconquest that garners so much attention in the Wars.  There's no doubt that this presents a skewed view of Justinian's world.  In this post, however, I'd like to flip things around.  To what degree does Procopius' interests in war obscure other pertinent matters, and in turn cause most of us to overlook other important pieces of evidence?  Bearing all this in mind, I want to discuss six aspects of Procopius' military history:  his classicizing vocabulary, his descriptions of combat, his interest in the conquest of Africa and Italy, and his focus on Belisarius in the Wars, his account of the fortifications of the northeast frontier in the Buildings, and his account of the malaise of the empire's soldiers in the Secret History.

Let's begin with the latter, and proceed in reverse order, finishing with Belisarius.  In the Secret History Procopius' emphasizes the suffering of most of the empire's inhabitants, and the soldiers are no exception.  One particular group that Procopius complains suffered a great deal are the border troops, who got into such a sorry state that they effectively stopped being soldiers.  If we forget about Procopius' comments here, and in the other two texts for that matter, in which frontier troops feature hardly at all, and instead look at the surviving evidence we get quite a different picture, at least potentially.  We have plenty of documentary evidence for frontier soldiers in Egypt and Israel/Palestine, and to a lesser degree Jordan.  That material points to thriving frontier communities full of soldiers, who identify as such.  Most seem fully integrated into local life, and if anything the abundance of property documents, not to mention marriage certificates, point to some degree of wealth and prosperity amongst those very soldiers.  So where are they getting their money?  Have they managed to supplement their income through other means, as some has suggested was the case with the soldier from Aphrodito who also served as a boatmen?  Or is their income derived primarily if not entirely from their state income?  If we didn't have Procopius' comments, I suspect the argument would be that the frontier soldiers were flourishing, at least in the sixth-century southeast.  The legal evidence, which is full of material concerned specifically with soldiers, would reinforce these sorts of arguments.

Next we move to the forts of the northeast.  Procopius' love-in for Justinians' building programme has led to a great debate:  just how many of the fortification work we read about is really attributable to him?  Many have highlighted the work of Anastasius, for instance, though in other cases the jury is still out.  What if all we had were the surviving fortifications and a few incidental anecdotes?  Justinian's efforts would certainly be diminished, but then so too might Anastasius'.  There are plenty of forts still standing in Syria (or there were until recently), and plenty more in Jordan.  The date of some of those Jordanian forts are ambiguous, while others are more obviously fourth century in date.  Some seem to have been occupied regularly, though only some have been privy to detailed excavations.  If all we had to go on was these Jordanian (and the neighbouring Israeli/Palestinian forts) forts, we wouldn't see Justinian's reign as an age of considerable frontier work in this part of the frontier, though the comparative epigraphic and papyrological evidence would imply that many if not most of the fortifications continued to the sites of a good deal of activity.

Procopius tends to use archaic vocabulary, vocabulary better suited to the world of Thucydides, or so goes the usual complaints.  This applies to military matters too, and we get hints of this in the words he uses for divisions within the military.  Much of his terminology is vague:  the men with general X, the infantry, the horsemen, etc.  In other cases, his diction has occluded more than it has illuminated.  He likes to use the word katalologos, for instance, a word rarely used by classical or even classicizing historians, when describing groups of soldiers (units or even regiments).  Quite a few have taken this to mean that the term had a more technical meaning, and more specifically that it denoted the army's field units.  It's not an unreasonable assumption if we assume that Procopius is mostly concerned with the field unit soldiers (at the expense of frontier soldiers).  That it features in virtually no other military source for the sixth century should give us pause, however, and A H M Jones is one of the only ones to have done so.  If we didn't have Procopius' Wars narrative where he used words like  katalogos we'd probably devote more attention to the words we do occasionally find in the inscriptions and papyri.  The newly published inscription form Perge would receive a great deal of attention - and scholars would likely be obsessed with how we get from the regiments of the eastern section of the Notitia Dignitatum to the units of Maurice, with no unnecessary - even unhelpful - pauses to consider Procopius.  To some degree this might still happen, though maybe it should happen sooner.  Is it not, for example, interesting that Theophylact can talk of legions on the eastern frontier around the same time that we find the word "legion" in Egyptian papyri - and just a few decades after that Anastasian inscription detailing the structure (it seems) of a legion? 

Turning to combat, Maurice's Strategikon might give the impression that cavalry played a major role in combat at the end of the sixth century.  But it wouldn't explain quite which proportions of the military dominated decades earlier.  Our material evidence is limited, while the other evidence is ambiguous.  If we had to rely on Pseudo-Joshua, we wouldn't get too far.  Corippus' Iohannis, though quite detailed, is a panegyrical epic, and his combat scenes are vaguely Homeric:  they involve single combats, and the dashing to and fro of soldiers into and out of battle.  Agathias, on the other hand, does go to some lengths to describe the experience of combat even if he spends only a little on the finer details. In his most detailed battle, the Battle of Casilinum, there's little in his account that betrays a clear emphasis on either cavalry or infantry.  That might help provide context for the anonymous treatise of political science which includes that fictional debate between Menas and Thomas on the relative merits of the two solitudes to borrow a Canadian literary-cum-historical phrase.  But whether cavalry had supplanted infantry would not yet be clear.

Moving on to the conquest, we would suspect that the campaign in Italy had the smallest of impacts on matters in the capital, which would be in line with some of Scott's arguments.  Even the more local evidence, the Lives of the Popes, devotes only a little bit of attention to the war, with the siege of Rome, such a central feature of Procopius' account, restricted to a few lines.  North Africa, on the other hand, is something else.  Later writers, like Photius and Theophanes, who had read all of part of Procopius, either paraphrase or quote Procopius' narrative of the Vandal Wars.  The aforementioned epic of Corippus also gives the impression that a significant conflict had taken place in the region.  In fact, we could even look to another of the four pillars, Roman law, for yet more evidence of the war's impact.  Besides the overt propaganda at the opening of the Codex of Justinian, there are specific laws that point the acquisition of significant territory in North Africa, and the efforts of the state to administer the new lands.  What this evidence might imply was that a long and significant war had taken place in North Africa, which resulted in a lasting Roman victory.

That North African success brings us to the last point, the reputation of Belisarius.  It seems to me, and many others besides, that his reputation rests largely on the literary efforts of Procopius.  A closer look at the epigraphy, on the other hand, might bring greater attention to Solomon, who published his successes in North Africa quite widely.  Belisarius features in maybe a dozen Latin inscriptions, and a handful of Greek ones.  Solomon, however, features in nearly three times as many Latin inscriptions from North Africa.  On this limited evidence the impression might be that Solomon was the great general of the age, or at least the campaign.  Thanks to Agathias, Narses' reputation might rise too, and though the historian is not unflattering towards Belisarius, his account gives only the vaguest impression of the man's military accomplishments.  Indeed, if all we had to go on was the many later references to Procopius' works, we'd be left wondering what the scope of Belisarius' accomplishment truly was, and perhaps a little baffled the comments of authors like the one who wrote the entry on Procopius in the Suda, or the later Byzantine historian Manasses.

All this is to suggest that the survival of Procopius' long works has not only obfuscated our understanding of the wider world of sixth-century Byzantium, but also more specifically Byzantine military affairs.  While his work has undoubtedly shed a great deal of light on matters like combat, in other instances, such as the careers of "lesser" generals like Solomon or the hardships of the frontier soldiers, what he has provided has obscured other important aspects of the empire's military history.  A greater focus on these other kinds of evidence for sixth-century military affairs might bring a much more about this period to light.

NOTE:  I'd forgotten about Foss' paper on Theodora.  He does this, only with the Secret History.  I've got a copy, but haven't read it yet (will do so now...)

This Revolution Wasn't Televised, or Horses, Huns, and Romans, Oh My!

I continue to chug away, working on this conference paper, which is connected to the grant and its attendant research.  This means more thinking about the steppes, and today the Huns in particular and their role in all of this.  It also means going back to some earlier work for a Roman army textbook, which I think I've mentioned before.  Anyway, about a year ago, when my energy was focused on the army textbook and this grant was an unimaginable miracle (not yet a reality), I spent some time looking at what people had googled about the Roman army, as this seemed a good (or reasonable) way to approach writing something for those coming to something cold (or coldish).  One question that google identified was something to the effect of, "how effective was the Roman army?"  Considering that question led me to work on military revolutions, military effectiveness, decisive battles, and more.  There was much of interest and much that wasn't - or simply concerned with eras I know little about.  
 
While I plan to touch on these sorts of questions (revolutions, effectiveness, etc) at various points in that textbook, it's looking like it will have some bearing on this other work too, including the conference paper, which looks more closely at the Eurasian influence.  I will, in part, be talking about where the warfare that Procopius describes (and the sixth century Romans waged) fits into the greater scheme of things.  Is it representative of Rome's new way of fighting, an age of hippotoxotai?  Is it still largely connected to what came before, the infantry armies of centuries past?  Or is it some sort of hybrid, between these two worlds?  Regardless of where it is (and at present I lean to the middle, a transitional age), attendant issues include when and how all these changes came into being and their impact. 

As I consider all this, one thing that's been most useful is the work that I've done on the Roman military in the Moesias, as it's allowed me to look more closely at organizational changes over an important area over a significant period of time.  It's also put me in an excellent position to understand some of the later changes that came, especially when were are less well informed about how they came about.  It's clear, for instance, that the Romans were constantly and gradually changing their military and everything about it.  In the Moesias they go from a few units of perhaps 1000s of soldiers and maybe a handful of known military bases, predominantly filled with infantry, to dozens, if not hundreds, of units in even more bases, from wee fortlets to larger legionary bases, and still, predominantly, infantry - but with growing numbers of cavalry too.  We can also see in some cases changes both in response to significant military challenges (soldiers shifted to the east from the Moesias, so new troops brought in from parts west and north) and in advance of major military operations (the number of auxiliary units in the Moesias spike in the run-up to Trajan's wars against Dacia). 

We can't observe organizational changes in this same level of detail for any other period of Roman history, so far as I know (thank you diplomata).  This makes for much more guesswork later.  Nevertheless, the general pattern seems to be that many emperors made changes on some level, some more than others.  These might be in regard to specific issues, or more general ones.  Admittedly, the specific motivations of the emperors are hardly ever immediately clear, so a great deal of guesswork, though of the educated sort, is involved.  Generally, though, I get the sense that big, significant, changes didn't come about all that often, if ever, in the Roman world, at least in the military sphere.  Certainly none of them, to my mind, could be called revolutionary to any degree.  In fact, for many of the "big" changes that we can discern, you can usually find a counter-argument to claims about their usefulness.  I'll come back to this momentarily.

The next set of questions surround why they come about.  The sort of changes I alluded to above with respect to troop movements perhaps have more to do with short term issues and so are perhaps less useful for dealing with this sort of question.  But there are plenty of other changes in the Roman military that attract attention, from changes in equipment to changes in tactics, changes in dress, and even changes in soldierly origins.  As I see it, the sort of changes I'm alluding to here - adoption of the weapons and/or techniques of a different people - are usually explained in one of several ways:  technological breakthroughs; cultural change (the move to the Spanish sword in the republican era came down to a so-called sword culture); military necessity (the Huns caused lots of problems and so the Romans responded by introducing the cavalry to match); financial considerations (money issues, like the deteriorating value of pay, led to the implementation of payment in kind to soldiers in the third century before things stabilized); and practical considerations.  To get back to counter-arguments, then, too much emphasis on any one issue, and not enough awareness of the broader context can obscure some things.  For instance, Alofs has shown that the stirrup, which was introduced in the sixth-century in the Mediterranean, did not transform mounted combat despite the claims of some (his bugaboo is Hugh Kennedy).  Although I don't think he mentioned them, the mounted archers of earlier imperial Rome (i.e., not late antique/early medieval era), like the Ala Gallorum et Thracum Antiana sagittaria were stirrup free.  In fact, this is where I think Simon James' book Rome and the Sword hits the mark in any number of ways, for he tends to bring in quite a lot of evidence and perspectives.

So, to get back to the steppes and its peoples' impact on sixth-century Roman warfare, it seems to me that to see their system as offering some sort of revolutionary approach which came about because of the marked inferiority of the Roman military machine (this is the view of Hyun Jin Kim) is an overstatement.  The Romans had mounted warriors for centuries before the Huns came along even if they were fewer in number before the sixth century.  Any increase, which would be hard to illustrate with the same level of detail, might be down to any number of factors.  And if it came about before our earliest confirmed Hunnic contact (the end of the fourth century), it's difficult to attribute this to their influence.  Along those lines, to see Adrianople as proof of the limitations of the Roman military, especially when faced with a nomadic threat, is to adopt a far too liberal reading of our primary source, Ammianus, and to ignore too much of the work that has been undertaken on that battle.  While it certainly seems to have left its mark on some contemporaries (as Lenski's article from 1997 shows), its impact on the organization and tactics of the eastern army, which suffered so greatly in the battle, was not of the sort adduced (a completely new approach adopted), as the Notitia Dignitatum makes clear (the organization of the eastern and western halves, while not coterminous, still have a great deal in common, organizationally speaking).  This isn't to deny an impact from the steppes, it's only to hold off from putting too much weight on the role of the Huns in particular in all of this.

The Eurasian Way of War in the Sixth Century (Part 1)

In late July I'm making my first trip to a Celtic Classics Conference, and, surprise-surprise, I'm speaking in the Roman Army session.  By chance, at least in part, I speak dead last:  most of the papers cover republican-era topics, and I'm speaking on the end of antiquity.  In some ways it also seems fitting.  The topic, generally speaking, is the "Eurasian Way of War", and the impetus is a similarly-named book by David Graff on seventh century Byzantium and China.  His book ranges widely, and goes from the institutions, literature, and resources to campaigning, weapons, and tactics.  I can't cover it all in one talk, so I'm going to limit discussion to one part of Graff's book and subject, the steppe influence on how the two parties, Byzantium (Rome) in particular, fought.

The subject has not struggled for attention.  Coulston, for instance, has discussed the influence of the steppe on Rome's military, especially during the high empire, while James has gone a bit further by looking too at the impact of interactions with Parthians and Sasanians.  Jin Kim, whose interests lie in the Huns and their impact on Rome, has argued that the steppe's impact on Rome in late antiquity and earlier has been significant and wide-ranging.  But these are just three such examples. 

A good deal of the attention has focused on cavalry, and Rome's gradual (or not?) adoption of heavily-armoured and mounted horsemen.  The usual view is that the infantry-heavy military of the Roman world in the republican and imperial eras gave way to a cavalry driven one. This process was complete by the sixth century.  The proof for this transformation is usually assorted comments of Procopius and Maurice (pseudo).  Procopius famously (to the few) compares contemporary mounted archers to Homer's archers in his preface to the Wars, an odd comparison to be sure, and ultimately finds the latter wanting.  This comparison has attracted a lot of attention (myself included), and the jury's still out on whether we should take it seriously, and what it says or means for the rest of Procopius' narrative.  Eleven of the twelve books that comprise Maurice's Strategikon focus on cavalry, and there's good reason to think the infantry chapter was a later addition.

We know that the peoples of the Steppes and the Iranian empires were well versed in these two broad types of horsemen.  The nomadic steppe peoples, the Scythians in particular, were recognized for their horse archery as far back as Herodotus (4.46.3).   A number of auxiliary cavalry units in the Roman military were mounted from the second century, some, evidently, of Near Eastern origin, others not.  As for the heavily-armoured horses, the Romans might have come up against them as early as Crassus' defeat and death at the hands of the Parthians at Carrhae in 53 BC, if not a few decades earlier in Armenia (Plut. Luc. 31.6).  It's the wars in the Balkans against the Sarmatians and related peoples in the first and second centuries AD, however, that are usually said to have had the greatest impact, however.  In fact, the first Roman cataphract unit, the ala Gallorum et Pannoniorum catafracta, appears in Moesia Inferior in the second century (CIL 11.5632), though we don't know when it first emerged. 

By the sixth century the mounted archer seems to have been even more widely used, while the heavily armed cataphracts (and clibanarii) perhaps less so.  Procopius suggests that many Roman and allied mounted soldiers were adept at archery in the middle of the sixth century.  Although it's not always clear what constitutes Roman and what doesn't, the point seems to be that its use was spread throughout the military.  Given that a number of Huns were fighting for Rome at this point, it might be reasonable to assume that the so-called Romans doing the fighting learned it from them.  We would then have, in these instances, evidence for a direct transference of this mode of combat from steppe warriors to Roman soldiers. 

Where things get tricky, however, is when we try to discern when this happened.  My implied evidence for Procopius only works if there hadn't been mounted archers in the military before he was writing, and yet we know full well that there were.  In fact, one scholar (Alofs), in a series of papers, goes to great pains to argue that mounted archery was an integral aspect of warfare from at least the end of the fifth century onwards, if not earlier, with no discernible break in the seventh century which some, like Kennedy, have supposed.  To be fair, Graff too highlighted the build-up of atypical (i.e. non-Roman or Mediterranean) cavalry amongst the Romans in his book (and a DOP journal article, which is, effectively, a precis), and so sees this impact stretching back some decades.  The adoption of a Eurasian way of war was a gradual thing.  I'd been tempted to compare the prevalence of these kinds of mounted warriors in Ammianus and Vegetius (best evidence for combat itself in the late fourth and early fifth centuries) with what we find in Procopius and Maurice (best for the second half of the sixth), but I'm not sure how far I'd get.  I'd really like the surviving portions of the fifth century fragmentary historians, like Priscus, to be far more substantial than they already are.

As far as how widespread heavily-armoured cavalry and mounted archers were in the sixth century that's harder to say, and opinions differ.  Most see a prominent role for the mounted archers, less so for the heavily-armoured ones.  They don't feature all that often in the texts, though a unit based, or at least attested, in Egypt, the Leontokilibanarii suggests heavily-armoured cavalry were still in use, at least in some capacity, in the sixth century.  Suffice to say, mounted archers certainly feature in all three of Procopius' Wars, and play a particularly prominent role in the Gothic wars, which to my mind says a great deal about how willing the Romans were to adopt their tactics to different enemies, though his literary proclivities had an impact too.  Fact is I still have to look at the specifics of Procopius' accounts in more detail (I've got lots of notes), and that's something I haven't gotten around to yet.  Suffice to say, however, many of the signs are pointing towards a significant role for horse archers in sixth-century Roman combat (Petitjean, Syvanne, and Alofs would all agree), which means that Graff's supposition that Byzantium had acquired a Eurasian way of war is all the more likely. 

All this being said - and I have provided a sweeping overview - some questions remain, which I'll turn to in part 2.

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.  

War and the Plague in the Sixth Century (AD)

I've been going back over some material on the sixth-century plague in the past month or two, partially for another project (digital textbook), partially for this new (ish) research project, and partially out of interest.  I've made Meier's new article (Early Medieval Europe 2016) bus reading, and so I've been slowly working my way through it, and definitely enjoying it.  My bus trips are short, so I only ever get so far.

So far, just over halfway through, I think he's done a good job of summarizing earlier research - it's an excellent introduction as is to the subject - and is making some good points all the same.  Earlier today, I came across his brief sections, lines even, on the effects of the plague on waging war.  As he notes, this is an issue that hasn't been resolved. 

Some hold that the plague had a significant impact on Rome's ability to wage war, let alone that of other states like Persia.  This impacted everything from financing war to the paying of troops.  The varied instances of military unrest that cropped up afterwards in places like Africa should be attributed to the lack of money to pay the men.  Problems with recruitment too - Belisarius had to rely on finding men himself later during the war in Italy - would also come down to the impact of the plague.  There simply weren't enough men. 

Others, however, hold the opposite line.  Rome was able to wage war on at least two fronts simultaneously during the outbreak of the plague, which would seem to minimize its impact on the empire's ability to wage war.  The thinking goes:  if plague really did have a significant impact on Justinian's military, how could they put 1000s of men in the field in Africa, Italy, Bulgaria, and Syria at the same time? 

As noted, this is an issue that hasn't been resolved, and it's one that's interested me for a little while.  Coming back to it again now, however, is it even possible to get any kind of resolution?  Most importantly, how could we hope to measure the plague's direct impact on the state's ability to wage war?  Our evidence isn't good enough, so far as I can tell, to indicate changes in the number of soldiers fighting for Rome before or after the plague took hold.  There are a few big figures for the military as whole, and references to various armies by Procopius and others.  But those are very much context specific, and there's often a lot of material that gets left out.

We also know little about the specifics of recruitment.  There are a few pieces of legislation that get into recruitment, and some of this we can date with a good deal of precision.  But the recruitment material is from the years before the plague broke out.  It also tends to be about the process itself:  these are the sorts of men who can and should be recruited, and this is what they should and should not do.  It doesn't reveal anything, really, about where they might be from and what to do if men couldn't be found.  There's no legislation that reveals any sort of crisis in recruitment in the middle years of the sixth century. 

The truth is, the evidence, as a whole, is often ambiguous.  While it might reveal things like damage, depopulation, financial instability, and mixed success in war, it doesn't connect these potential impacts of war to the wars themselves or the plague.  For instance, was the Roman Empire in the 540s and 550s struggling in war so much because of the plague, or because it was engaged on so many different fronts?  To take another example, Procopius spends a good deal of time on the impact of the plague on the empire in his famous passage.  He also details the impact of the wars in his Wars and Secret History.  What he doesn't do, however, is connect the plague to the mixed success at war.  It could be because there was no connection.  It could also be that he didn't realize that there was a connection.  Or it could be that there was one that he recognized, but one he chose to ignore in favour of other explanations, like the evils of Justinian. 

In short, there's no resolution yet for this problem, but I'm not sure we could ever get a definitive one.  With that said, the best, I think, that we could hope for is an analysis of the indirect or circumstantial kind.  There seems to be better evidence for the impact of the plague on other aspects of life, like the broader economy and rural agriculture.  If we can establish its impact on all these other matters, it seems likely that it would have had an impact on the military too. 

Procopius, War, and the Law

One of the biggest surprises of the summer was receiving a grant for a research project on more sixth-century things.  I’ve applied for all sorts of grants over the years, and generally been unsuccessful.  I’d all but dismissed my chances of getting this one until I received the shocking notice. 

The grant is, effectively, for a book that will be the follow-up to Procopius book one, and it will look more at the history side than the historiographical one.  That means Procopius is still important, but he’s one part of a whole, with the other part/s occupied by the archaeological, epigraphic, legal, and papyrological evidence.  It also entails considering, at least to some degree, the other literary evidence.  Ultimately the book will provide something of a commentary on how Procopius deals with war in the sixth century, with the discussion ranging from military organization to planning and logistics, and even how war was fought. 

The book will offer a holistic approach, and we’re fortunate in that the age of Justinian is so well documented, perhaps more so than just about every other period of the ancient or late antique worlds, at least in my opinion.  The catch is that the voluminous evidence doesn’t always cover the same affairs, and this is particularly true for military matters.  There are, for instance, some detailed reports on fortifications in Jordan and Bulgaria, but scarce reports on those same structures in our surviving literary evidence.  We have detailed descriptions of battles from Procopius and some other authors, but little in the way of surviving weaponry.  This means we can’t always compare this disparate material, and trying to make sense of all of it can be a bit of a challenge.  The danger, lo temptation, too is trying to make all the pieces fit together, when, in reality, the pieces come from different puzzles.  Still, one of the great thrills of this project is that it’s given me the opportunity to dabble into all sorts of other kinds of evidence that I’ve paid less attention to in the past. 

To this point, when I haven’t been embroiled in all sorts of other work matters, I’ve been concentrating a great deal on the other evidence.  I’ve discovered, for instance, that there is far more epigraphic evidence for military matters in the sixth century than I’d previously believed.  While we’re nowhere near the epigraphic heights of the first two centuries AD, there are a few inscriptions in Latin that either mention Justinian, a general, and assorted other commanders as well some military units.  There are even more Greek ones.  Many of these have only a tangential bearing on my project, for most of the war-related ones have more to say about war’s impact than about how it is waged, and I’m starting to think I won’t be able to get into those matters.  There’s also the Anastasius edict, which I’d only been vaguely familiar with before.  I certainly hadn’t realized what a fabulous document it is. 

In fact, I feel fortunate that there are so many wonderful research tools at our disposal now, from the two excellent epigraphic databases (for Greek and Latin), to the papyrological one, and the TLG, which does require access to a research library of some capacity or other. 

We also now have the wonderful text and translation of the Justinianic Codex, and the grant allowed me to buy a copy.  I’ve been looking at this legal material in more depth than I ever have before, and it’s forced me to come to grips with what is quite a substantial body evidence, and one that’s been scarcely applied to the military sphere, especially in the sixth century, apart from Jones.  So far it’s posing all sorts of interesting questions for me.  For one thing, there’s a staggering amount of legislation, and it seems aspiring lawyers would have had to understand, even know, just about all of it.  If Procopius himself had been a lawyer, and I think he had, this means that he too would have had to have been intimately familiar with the material.  It turns out too that assessors were tasked with knowing the law, and even providing guidance to judges who might require assistance. 

If Procopius was both a lawyer and an assessor, this in itself raises interesting questions about Procopius’ practices as an historian, but also what or who was considered an essential part of an army.  Surely Procopius wasn’t the only assessor acting in a military environment, just the only one who wrote quite so much and so well.  It also raises questions about the long reach of Justinian, and how exactly Procopius might have got the job.  Were generals assigned assessors by Justinian so that he could, in some ways, keep a check on the generals?  Maybe not directly, but indirectly.  In other words, were the generals expected to follow the letter of the law as dictated by Justinian, and were they assigned assessors to ensure that this happened? It seems unlikely, perhaps, but then quite a lot of the legislation found in the Corpus Iuris Civilis that specifically concerns military matters actually deals with what could be considered property duties and expectations of generals and the like. 

The legal material also has me wondering if it, in some way, should be considered an ideal:  this is how things should be, in Justinian’s eyes.  How often would they work that way in practice?  And for my purposes (military stuff), can Procopius provide evidence for this?  Is the law in some sense the rhetoric, and what Procopius describes the reality? 

Anyway, there’s a lot to chew on, and quite a bit more to digest, so I hope to provide more posts in the coming months.

Agathias on War

It may seem all too predictable, especially given the trajectories of Cameron and Kaldellis, but for a long time I've considered dabbling much deeper into the world of Agathias. As little as there has been written on Procopius, even less has been written on Agathias, and a good part of that, for obvious reasons, has been devoted to his poetic proclivities. What is more, though this is, to some degree, par for the course, opinions of his capabilities vary widely, and there have been no sustained and extensive treatments of his value as an historian.  Kaldellis did write a handful of papers that focused on Agathias the historian, and Cameron wrote her monograph on Agathias more generally, but there's nothing substantial (in terms of size at least - not quality) out there on Agathias as an historian, and certainly nothing focused on his military credentials.

And yet, despite his legal background and poetic leanings, Agathias devoted a lengthy, or at least significant, and detailed history to military matters, a fact which he himself professed early in his text.  He self-consciously followed in the footsteps of Procopius, at times seeking to distance himself from Procopius' perceived failings, at others subtly agreeing and/or engaging with Procopius' military leanings.  Some see Agathias' discussion of military matters as excellent (Syvanne); others as sub-par (Wheeler).  And yet, if no one has undertaken a sustained analysis, how can we know, and how should we use him, if at all?

It's hard to underscore his importance, whether real or potential.  Like Xenophon in his Hellenica to Thucydides in his History, Agathias picks up exactly where Procopius left off in book 8.  And yet, unlike Procopius, his narrative is concentrated on only a few years, though important ones for Justinian's empire.  Agathias' History is undoubtedly shorter than Procopius' Wars - and the fact that current editions and translations don't exist in comparable texts makes my attempts to eyeball the differences between them questionable at best, there's no getting round the potential benefits of that level of detail. 

As I go through the History for other reasons, and start thinking I should devote more energy to the military character of his writing than I have (my interest in Procopius waxes and wanes several times over the course of a day), there have been a number of things that have jumped out at me.  For instance, he seems to engage with Procopius regularly, often indirectly, at least when one focuses on the military angle.  This is, I think, worth drawing attention too, especially since he's less overt in these instances than he is when it comes to the Persians, for instance. 

In addition, we know that Agathias lacked Procopius' experience with war, and so his sources for military matters would inevitably have differed in significant ways.  This would seem to cast doubt on his usefulness on military matters, though so many people who write about war these days who consider themselves experts, at least of a sort, have had no such experiences themselves, myself included.  Thus, it's not out of the realm of possibility for an educated and intelligent writer like Agathias to track down all the necessary materials to craft a believable work of military historiography.  Indeed, with this in mind, another topic that I'd have to explore would be Agathias' engagement with wider military thinking, both that evinced in the surviving military manuals, but also in the wider world.  It has struck me that Agathias' accounts have seemed far more sensible and satisfactory than I had expected and been led to believe - or even remember.  Admittedly, the last time I read him in this much detail my interest was focused almost squarely on combat. 

Anyway, much to consider.  While a thorough analysis may reveal that he doesn't deserve to be classed with Procopius, it might well be that he deserves more credit than he often gets, at least, again, in the realm of military matters.  Indeed, as I've noted before, if nothing else he seems to be one of the best writers of the experience of combat, a not unimportant subject in the wider category of military history.

Unit Cohesion - Part 1

One of my current little projects is a paper on unit cohesion in the sixth century (AD/CE) for a book on that topic.  Fortunately, it is something that I've thought about before, particularly when I was doing the PhD thesis.  So far, besides some mental mapping of the shape of the paper, I've been reading and re-reading some of the literature on the subject, both that dealing with the ancient world and the modern.  As I say, some of it I've read before, and some I haven't.  This post, then, pretty much like all the others, will serve as a research diary entry.  In this case, I need to take stock of my progress so far, and write down some of the things I've been thinking about.

First, I've occupied myself with looking at some of the standard literature - again, it's extensive so it can only be a selective reading, and some of it's new (to me), some of it's not.  One of the classics is Marshall's Men Against Fire, a book that pops up in a number of discussions.  I confess that I've found it a difficult book to read, and not because of the complexity of the content, but rather because of the style and, to some degree, its content.  Marshall writes like someone who knows a great deal about their subject, and then exaggerates how much they know all while on occasion fudging the content to suits one's ends, and without going to the trouble of supporting these sorts of claims.  Granted, I'd read about the book in the past, and this might have coloured my reading (first time), and I also expected to enjoy it much more than I did.  I'm also writing this post decades after it was written, so much of what Marshall writes seems pretty obvious to me now, and in a way that it probably wasn't to his initial readers. 

Now, one of the key highlights include Marshall's suggestion that the majority of WWII US soldiers didn't actually use their weapons (20% or less).  The former point has inspired the work of later writers, including those who've tackled the ancient world, like Goldsworthy and Sabin (both to some degree or other).  It has been jumped on by a number of people, however, and in the copy I have there's a preface (by Russell W Glenn) that basically shows how those figures are a load of crap.  Another book on my to-read list is Grossman's On Killing, and I have this sneaking suspicion that he too uses similar figures - I wonder if I'll discover that he gets it from Marshall.  If so that will cast doubt (in my eyes) on the applicability of at least some of material.  Indeed, although my paper's on cohesion, it's clear that combat motivation is connected, and it's worth considering.  If few men really were able to make an effort to kill in combat, how would an ancient army work around this?  It's worth stressing too that ancient peoples, and even those from different places and times (Greece, even Athens vs. Sparta, Imperial Rome, Republican Rome, Late Antique Rome, etc .), would approach war in a different way from us, even if we're all humans.  We also don't have ancient people to interview, or ancient diaries to read, to figure out how often weapons were discharged and the like - harder to do with swords, easier with arrows and javelins.  Even if we did, of course, interviews aren't always the best means of deducing this sort of information.  People forget things, or confuse things, or even fabricate things, intentionally to suit their own ends, or unintentionally to give the interviewer what he or she might want.  So, in some ways were better off without it.  In sum, Marshall's numbers are suspect, and even if they aren't it's extremely difficult to do this for the ancient (impossible?).  Worth noting too, that Marshall's views were heeded by the US military, and later research evidently showed that proportion of soldiers who fired their weapons in subsequent wars (Korea, Vietnam) improved significantly as a result of the changes they made.

The second key suggestion was Marshall's abundant claims that one of (or the) main reasons men fought was for the men in their unit (social cohesion, bonding, band of brothers stuff, etc.).  This key point has, in some circles, achieved far more in the way of acceptance.  The "band of brothers" perspective certainly has been adopted by the public, but many scholars too see this as the best means of explaining unit cohesion.  A recently published book on the 2003 Iraq war, for instance, argues for the continued importance of social cohesion in explaining performance, though the authors also stress ideological motives (which they contrast with motivations of past American soldiers).  It shouldn't be a surprise to learn that many have questioned this too:  this brotherly bonding is not what motivates men and leads to cohesion.  For the ancient world, Crowley has questioned its application to Athenian hoplites, while Lendon has questioned its applicability to Roman soldiers.  Then there are a number of sociologists and political scientists, amongst others, who have questioned how effectively social cohesion explains performance (in combat in particular).

If we move beyond Marshall, we discover that there are two different kinds of cohesion that have been the focus of much of this research, social (the bonding of Marshall), and task (unifying to achieve a goal).  You can have one without the other, and social cohesion doesn't necessarily lead to task cohesion.  Even within the topic of social cohesion (or is it separate?) - or group cohesion (the unit cohesion that's the focus of my paper) - there are a host of variations, from peer bonding, to leader bonding, to organizational bonding, to institutional bonding.  We also find primary cohesion, and secondary cohesion.  For the purposes of the volume, they've (editors) make unit cohesion the umbrella term, with some of the variables worth pursuing including:  horizontal unit cohesion, vertical unit cohesion, task cohesion, and social cohesion.  Their definition of unit cohesion is:  " the bonding together of soldiers in such a way as to sustain their will and commitment to each other, the unit, and mission accomplishment, despite combat or mission stress".  There is, then, a baffling array of potential terms and topics of discussion.

The question, then, is how I narrow down what is already a large collection of material, even if I've only presented some of it.  Part 2, then, will focus on how I plan to address this in the paper.

A Sensory History of Combat in Late Antiquity

Several months ago, Jonathan Eaton introduced a book to me on Twitter that presented a seemingly novel way of approaching historical combat.  The book in question is Mark Smith's The Smell of Battle, the Taste of a Siege: a sensory history of the Civil War, does what it's title suggests.  I haven't finished it yet, but I've been working through it while working on a number of other things.

Admittedly, and for my sins, I've contemplated/started working a sensory history of combat in late antiquity, and the sixth century in particular.  While it's early days yet, there are a few things that have struck me about this approach to war, especially when the ancient world is the subject matter.  The first is the inevitable, "is this even possible".  Smith's book draws on all sorts of different kinds of evidence, from letters to newspaper and magazine articles, and paintings.  He's also able to draw on the perspectives of a wide swath of the 19th c. US.  As always, we don't have the same quantity of material, and the perspectives are much more limited.  What's more, even if there is considerable variety in the kinds of literary evidence that we have from the sixth century, and if it comes from all sorts of different people, that late antique swath wasn't all interested in the same things.  We may have monks and officers and local elites writing about all sorts of things, but it's still a restricted group of people who write about war:  historians, though not always, and the occasional poet.  We do have letters, of course, both the more polished published ones (say of Augustine), and seemingly more authentic ones preserved on papyri, but even when we have letters with military figures they're not writing home about war.  So, we're still restricted:  we have well-educated men, writing in Greek and Latin, operating in an archaic, by their own day, literary world, with some exceptions.  This makes it tough to get a balanced picture.

Another thing that has struck me is related to the first.  Most of our evidence for combat comes from literary descriptions that, for right or wrong, follow a traditional model.  The bulk, majority, even all the writers were classically educated, and well-versed in rhetorical exercises.  Those rhetorical exercises, when they were discussing battle or not, emphasized the sensory.  Indeed, battle itself was classed as an ekphrasis, and the purpose of an ekphrasis was to bring the thing described before the eyes of the reader or listener.  You could, too, extend the eyes to the mind - the reader/listener should be able to imagine what they're reading/listening to.  And, while a great deal of attention is placed on the visual, some of the language is directed towards other senses, like sound.  The conundrum, then, should be all too obvious.  I'm looking for evidence of the sensory experience of battle.  To find it I'm having to rely on, by and large, literary accounts that are, in turn, heavily dependent on classical models that emphasize the sensory.  How do you separate the literary from the historical?  Book 8 of the Wars and Agathias' History provide very descriptive sensory accounts of combat, which aren't dissimilar from the literary flourishes of Corippus, the epic poet, in his Iohannis.  Is it possible to disentangle this material?

One last thing I want to draw attention to is the character of Smith's book, at least so far.  It seems to be heavy on description, and short of analysis.  Granted, the purpose seems to be to get a sense of what it was like to experience an historical event, in Smith's case the Civil War (US), based on what evidence and tools we have at our disposal.  In the case of war, however, this seems to be a version of Keegan's "face of battle", which advocated approaching battle from the perspective of the common soldiers rather than the officers and generals that had featured so heavily.  I am, then, struggling to see what makes this sensory history unique.  Granted, I've read almost nothing, and none of it has focused on antiquity, but at this point I'm quite sceptical. 

I have a growing list of items to read, one of which combines archaeology and the senses.  Indeed, when I decided to give it a go, I thought about how I might find comparative evidence to support (contradict, or other) what I find in the literary accounts, and the physical evidence seemed to be a way forward.  I've thought about the kinds of weapons that we're likely to be used, and what sorts of sensations they were likely to give:  what do iron swords sound like when they crash together, what does it feel like when 100s or 1000s of horses come barrelling down a hill, what does it taste like to have your face in the dirt as you're trampled by your comrades in the midst of mad dash to escape?  If I know something about the environment of a battle (near a city or out in the middle of nowhere), the season (what temperature might it have been, and what sort of precipitation might they have had to deal with), the time of day, the number of participants, and their constituent parts perhaps I can draw on this factual material along with some comparative evidence (the feel of 100s/1000s of horses) perhaps I can write a sensory history of sorts. 

At this point, however, and to be perfectly honest I'm not sure.  Indeed I might be able to pull this off, though I might also end up writing an essay that all-but-slams this approach to history.  And yet, on the other hand, while my mind says yes, my heart says no (don't do it) - this has often been what I'd like to know most.  What was it like to be alive and experience a particular epoch?  Well, perhaps I'm finally about to find out.

Procopius on the Battle of Satala

Surprise, surprise, I'm not done with Procopian battles yet.  More of the historical in the sequel, however, and less of the military historiographical.

In the first book the idea was to try to discern something of Procopius' military mind, and how that fit into larger cultural and historiographical trends from his era.  Reading through these same accounts again, and in the same kind of detail, but with what I guess you could call a more balanced perspective, thanks in part to all the work I've done in between finishing the PhD and finishing the book, I'm encouraged to see that I'm still seeing that P has understood combat in the way that I surmised.  In other words, my head isn't in my hands and I'm not shouting, "Oh God, what have I done/what was I thinking?" It's tempting to say too that, in hindsight, it seems to have made a lot of sense to have tackled "Procopius on War" aspects in the order that I have.  Understanding something of his approach to describing and explaining combat should now make it easier to make sense of what he says.

I've just taken a look at the Battle of Satala (530) again, which you can find around 1.15.1ff.  For Procopius, the battle seems to hinge on the bravery of one elite Roman individual (a Florentius - 1.15.15), who charges the Persian line, at a point when no one side seems to be making much headway, and manages to seize the Persian general's standard (to strategikon shmeion) and thrust it to the ground before meeting his fate.  The Persians panic, freak out, and return to base in light of this, before heading home the next day.  And the battle ends.  For Procopius individuals, especially those in command positions, are important, and with in mind it's no surprise that things turned out the way they did.  But while this might tell us something about what Procopius and some of his peers thought about what happened and understood as important in what happened, does it tell us anything about might what have happened?

The trick, this time round, is to cut through what Procopius says, and I confess that upon looking it over it's more than a little maddening.  Still, there are some things we can pick out.  We find, for instance, the importance of numbers.  Procopius' implies that the Persians had almost twice as many soldiers as the Romans (30,000 to less than 15,000), and that they were all cavalry.  Whether these numbers are feasible or not is something that I'll have to look at later.  For the moment, while the difference does seem to be significant, it's also important to note that Procopius himself seems to imply that both sides are perhaps less than aware of some important details about each others' contingents.  Procopius (1.15.12) claims that the Persians couldn't work out how many men the Romans had - aided in part by the all the dust kicked up by the conditions, though I suspect too by the speed of the Roman advance, as well as their height advantage.  There is then a hint of the sensory here - sight, sound (implied if not stated), and perhaps too taste (we could imagine the taste of the dust on a hot summer's afternoon).  We also get some of the concerns highlighted by the authors of military manuals (Vegetius and Maurice):  conceal your numbers, especially if you're at a disadvantage.

I've been reading Decker's book on Byzantine warfare, and he implies that the Byzantine state (which includes this era) was lacking exceptional commanders, but did have some competent ones.  It's hard not to think that this might be a bit harsh, or at least that we have evidence of some better-than-competent performance is on view here, if Procopius is anything to go.  For we also read that the Roman force had been split up, with a comparatively small contingent (about 1000) sent up high onto the hills that surround Satala (and you can see them on Google Earth), while the rest moved inside the city walls.  The barbarians had moved outside the city walls when Sittas' force came down upon them from on high, as noted earlier.  He also split it in two - this allowed him to use gravity and the conditions to his advantage against a clearly superior-in-numbers foe.  It also seems to be the case that the Persians were amassed in some sort of confined space round the city walls, which meant that they were bunched up.  Indeed, if you take a look at Satala on Google Earth (best I can do without going there), the ancient city is in a little valley, with a plain, and is surrounded by hills.  In other words, it's easy to imagine this happening, especially if the Persians had as many men as Procopius claims.  So while Sittas may have had more than 1000 with him, contra Procopius, the conditions all seem to support Procopius' claims:  Persians crowded together, backed up against the city walls on one side, looking up at the hills on another side, and seeing an indeterminate number of men charging down on horseback, in the middle of a large dust cloud, and then another army charging out from the city gates.  It's easy to think that the Persians would have been terrified, as Procopius implies.

While the Persians may have had the numeric advantage, everything else so clearly favoured the Romans - spatially, they were much better off.  It's hard to work out (impossible really) what the units were at the Romans' advantage - 15,000 seems a large garrison for Satala, and one wonders when all the soldiers arrived and whether any were based there (that's something to check).  Interestingly, Procopius says all the participants on both sides were horses, which seems astonishing to me.  Either way, he also says that the battle became fierce, but even, with both sides constantly, owing to their abundant cavalry, charging and then withdrawing.  In this I'm reminded of Van Wees' suggestions about Homeric warfare, for which he drew on research on warfare in Polynesia (or, well, somewhere).  Basically, there's a lot of each side sitting back while contingents, individuals, what have going forward regularly to charge and so forth.  Not sure if the Homer/Van Wees/Polynesia (somewhere) parallel works - quite different kinds of soldiers involved (see Procopius' preface even).  It seems to imply not a lot of tactical wizardry, however, at least based on how things were going.  So maybe I'm coming round to Decker's claims (competent but not exceptional leaders - still, given they were outnumbered).

I better wrap this up - and so, this is the historical that I can deduce so far (at this early stage).  Procopius's account is short on detail, full of drama, but most certainly plausible.  This brings us back to the charge of Florentius:  is this not, then, too a plausible outcome for why the Romans won?  Given that the two sides seem to have been evenly matched based on all the other available criteria, if Florentius' charge is all that's left, might it not be the reason for the outcome?   This battle may not tell us too much about how the Romans waged war in the sixth century, but I think it does point to the veracity of Procopius' writing, which in turn would lend greater credence to those other, more detailed battles that he describes.  They'll all have to be checked independently and compared with all available evidence, but suggestive.  NOTE:  I tend not to edit these posts, so apologies for typos/moments of awkwardness. 

Finding Evidence for Strategic Thinking in the Age of Justinian

Besides the aforementioned Roman military textbook, I'm also working on the follow-up to book one on Procopius.  The follow-up exists - something I've referred to in past blog posts - because of some of the troubles I had with that earlier project.  Basically, it nearly fell off the rails completely, then I attended a conference in Oxford (2014 on Procopius), which got me back on, by which point I had already made plans to go in a different direction.  The result was that the original project was rejuvenated, while the new one became a follow-up.  In a nutshell, that's why it exists.

Anyway, I happen to be on sabbatical, and so I have the time to work on these two projects, and if all goes well I'll have made considerable progress by the time the period draws to a close in July.  Like a lot of things, my enthusiasm waxes and wanes depending on my progress, but there is as much positive as negative, which is more than I can say about the hockey I've been watching most of the year (and am right now - mostly negative).

Today, and presumably for the next little while, one of the topics in that project that I'll be working is strategy, fortifications, frontiers and Procopius, in part because I've been (re-)reading Procopius' Buildings, with what could be considered a fine-tooth comb. A number of things are jumping out at me this time round, and one that I'll be devoting more attention to, and which I want to flag here, is his emphasis on defence.  In particular, my reading of Procopius' Buildings so far seems to point towards a strong emphasis on defence in east Rome, and there is a real sense that the purpose of the fortifications was both to monitor and to prevent/check incursions of Saracens and Persians.  Now, maybe this isn't all that surprising.  The Buildings is on, well, buildings, and so of course he's going to talk about fortifications, and if you're talking about fortifications it seems self-evident that you'll be talking about their defensive properties, particularly based on the character of late antique fortifications.  So, of course its defence, and scholars have argued in support of this defensive mentality for quite a while - Luttwak and defence-in-depth, Greatrex more recently on a longer-term defensive mentality. 

Now, in this book/project, the idea is to test as often and wherever possible Procopius' views/comments/descriptions/ with other evidence, whatever shape it comes in.  How do you do this, however, when your subject is strategy?  Given I'm dealing with Justinian, what I'd like is his memoirs, commentarii, or some such thing that sets his foreign policy thinking.  Of course, these things don't exist.  Now, if I'm arguing for, or better testing for whether the strategic mentality with respect to the frontiers was defend and if I'm taking as my starting point the Buildings, there's always the Wars to compare.  I could (will) take a look at all known conflicts in the east and identify who in each case is the aggressor.  If you're always been attacked, then a defensive mentality would seem likely.  On the other hand, it is presumably more than a little bit sketchy to check Procopius by means of Procopius.  In other words, it would be easy enough for him to make sure his statements in one of those works support his statements in the other. 

Thus, I'll certainly have to take a look at the other accounts we have, works like those of Count Marcellinus, Malalas, Pseudo-Joshua, Pseudo-Zachariah, and Agathias.  It would be helpful to visit all known fortifications, but of course this isn't feasible (cost, political situation, etc.), so I suspect that Google Earth and assorted published excavation reports and otherwise will become my friends.  On the other hand, a fort on its own can't say what a fort is doing, and that's where things get stickier.  I could also take a look at Justinian's legislation - does he delve into defensive concerns at any point in his massive collection of Roman law, and if he does is it the case that this reflects a defensive strategic mentality?  There's what evidence of propaganda I can find too - though would you emphasize a defensive mentality?

If I adopt the definition of strategy that I've adopted in the past (following Kagan's 2006 article), that would mean that I should look for evidence of the Roman state using its resources to pursue various foreign policy ends, and in the earlier Roman imperial situation we have all sorts of really good evidence for troop movements, dispositions, and so forth.  In late antiquity, especially after about AD 400, the situation is dire.  The Notitia Dignitatum is a fabulous piece of evidence, and recent research has emphasized the accuracy of the list as we have it for the east (based on examinations of the situations in Egypt and in the Caucasus).  Should we really expect the list as we have it to still be applicable by the time that Procopius is writing though, nearly 150 years later?  Perhaps not, or not exactly, and unfortunately we just don't have something from the sixth century that I'm aware of that provides the desired level of detail.  What are we, then, to do?  To be honest, I'm not sure yet, though I'll be getting to this issue soon enough.

If the defensive approach does turn out to the case at least with respect to the east, that makes for a nice contrast with the wars in Africa and Italy, so clearly offensively-minded, at least on the surface.  I was wondering if these could be taken as attempts of Justinian to counter criticisms that he was too defensively-minded.  If that were true, however, why not take a more offensive approach in the east rather than the west?  Also, if all anyone has known for some time was a defensive approach in the east, who would really criticize a presumed-defensive mentality? 

So, I anticipate a considerable amount of trouble with this topic, and more so than for some of the others that I have in mind.  Only time will tell, I guess, whether I can't find some sort of resolution.

Procopius' Wars: Second Edition

At some point after writing the first seven books of his Wars, Procopius published them, and apparently to widespread acclaim.  Lo, he was so successful that he decided to write an update, of sorts, book 8.  Book 8, as Procopius readily admits, is something of an anomaly.  For him it was the organization that stood out:  he struggled finding a way to update the material of the first seven books, and must have reckoned that tacking them on to the first seven, or each war, wouldn't have worked that well.  Instead, then, he lumped it all together in one book:  8.  Once he decided on this, he did, at least at the most basic of levels, proceed to arrange it (book 8) as he'd done the first seven.  So, the first chunk of book 8 is devoted to PW matters, a wee paragraph is devoted to VW matters, and the last chunk to GW matters.  All good.

When we take a closer look, however, things are rather different.  Yes, there are lots of battles and sieges, much as there had been before - and given that it's a history of war it well should have this sort of stuff.  But, his descriptions of combat in book 8 aren't consistent, at least for the most part, with those in books 1-7.  Rather, it's more of a hodgepodge, with an especial emphasis on the factors he raises in the GW (for more on this, for the moment, see the relevant chapter here: (http://wrap.warwick.ac.uk/view/theses/Department_of_Classics_and_Ancient_History.type.html)

There's plenty more that's different in book 8, however.  For one thing, there are far more methodological statements than we find, at least per capita, in the first seven books.  I would suggest that there are also far more "philosophy of history" statements.  Along those lines, we find a number of cases where our narrator feels the need to set the record straight:  "this or that matter has been discussed in a variety of ways by various sources, and they're generally wrong.  Here's how it really is."  That sort of thing.  We might well expect these sorts of statements to pertain, by and large, to key historical events, like battles.  And, near the end, in his description of the Battle of Busta Gallorum/Taginae, we find just such a comment, and it pertains to the various reports concerning the death of Totila.  It seems reports differed, and given the comparatively detailed account he presents first, I'm inclined to believe that it's the one he liked best.  Interesingly, however (and in Herodotean vein), he doesn't take a stand - he mentions the other version, and provides some detail, and then lets is stand for the reader to sort out, at least indirectly (as noted, I think he's pointing towards option 1).  Much more often, however, he chimes in when the matter pertains to matters of geography, less often ethnography, but quite too often mythology.  He's not unusual in this - again, this is very much a Herodotean thing.  What is unusual, however, is that Procopius himself tends not to do this in the first part of the Wars (books 1-7).

There are other unusual things.  There is far more attention on geography, again per capita, and on sensory aspects, at least from the perspective of combat.  In fact, you would be no worse off in writing a "face of battle" account of Justinianic era combat using book 8 alone than you would if you only had books 1 through 7.  There's also all that myth.  We read about Jason and Medea, Orestes, Agamemnon, Iphigenia, Odysseus, Aeneas, and so forth.  The placing of his discussions of myth does make sense:  for the first of the lot, it comes in the heart of his Lazican discussion, and the setting for those myths tends to be in the lands that are the focus of that part of the war with Persia.  The same's true for the war against the Goths and Italy-based myths (Odysseus' voyages primarily).  So, all well and good, as I suggested.  But, why didn't he do the same in the first seven books?

The Procopius of book 8, then, is, for all intents and purposes, not the Procopius of books 1-7.  Why is that?  What made Procopius adopt this notably different approach, an approach that on the surface (and possibly deeper down?) is much more Herodotean than the very Thucydidean (even Polybian) first seven books?  It could be that in the absence of autopsy Procopius sought to supplement his narrative with details that he could provide given the resources at his disposal, ie the ancient/classical texts that he alludes to throughout book 8. 

But, I wonder if there isn't another possibility, one that doesn't necessarily preclude the former, though which might seem to contradict Procopius' statements at the start of book 8.  He claimed that his work was popular, and there might be something to these claims, but its appeal might not have been quite as universal as he had imagined.  In other words, some - many? - might have criticized the historian.  Reading Procopius again in full (in translation, admittedly - Kaldellis' new one) for a seminar I'm teaching, it's clear that he isn't for everyone.  Indeed, if you're not terribly interested in military history, it's hard not to read the Wars as little more than "one damned thing after another", where the thing, or things, in question is combat (and its attendant battles, sieges, and campaigns).  I hate to admit it, but even my eyes glossed over a little from time to time.  Maybe, then, there were others who lampooned Procopius for just this problem, and so to counter this - and to reach even greater renown - he sought to add extra episodes of interest, the types of scenes that would appeal to a broader audience.  What with all the myth, geography, and literary argumentation it's hard not to think that these were included for just this purpose.  Secular military history wasn't as popular in the sixth century AD as it was in the early fourth century BC.  Readers (and listners) had other options, even if Procopius was part of a grand tradition, and even if he is succeeded by Agathias, Menander, and Theophylact,  In sum, I read book 8 as a response to Procopius' critics, even if its character is to some degree conditioned by his resources.  Perhaps this pseudo-Herodotean approach might also reflect the appeals of his similarly-educated readers, those who spent years pouring over rhetorical treatises and argued over the respective merits of different figrues from myth.  Maybe they expected more of this, and told Procopius to include it in his update.

I realize that this reading is conditioned by my own circumstances - not everyone loves Procopius, and Herodotus is undoubtedly the most popular of classical historians, as evidenced by the success of Holland's recent translation.  What interests us, then, might not have interested Procopius' peers.  Still, might be worth considering - or exploring in more detail (at some unspecified point in my future, if I still have the fortitude to persevere with these Procopian projects).

Procopius' Use of Autopsy

When the issues of veracity and reliability in ancient historians surface in the scholarly literature, discussion regularly turns to three ways that an ancient historian gathered (invariably) his information:  autopsy, oral accounts, and written sources.  Autopsy is usually, but not always, the highest ranking of the lot.  

Although seemingly straightforward, autopsy has different meanings.  There is the careful examination of a corpse - this is not what is meant in these cases, obviously.  It can mean the personal observation or experience of a thing (or what have).  But it can also mean the critical examination of something (subject, work).  So, it should be clear that the autopsy referred to by scholars could fall into either of those second two categories; and, it should be clear why the lack of clarity might be a cause of concern.  When the word opsis is used, it's easy to see what the person has in mind.  But in others it's less so.  With that said, most modern scholars usually have the former in mind:  personal observation and experience (there is a significant discussion of it in Marincola's 1997 book that I must have read a decade or so ago, but which is a bit hazy in my mind at present).

In both cases, it can be hard to work out which one an ancient historian is employing.  If it's the former, sometimes ancient historians will make comments in the first person or otherwise which imply that they had seen something which makes it easy enough to determine.  If it's the latter it's a bit trickier, but sometimes historians will make a comment about something they've read or seen and what they think about it.  They'll even make comments, rarely, about competing accounts.  The one historian who seems to be explicitly engaged in a fair amount of autopsy of both kinds of Herodotus, and his impact has been significant.

I've already made some comments in an earlier post - and will do so in more final versions of all this - about Procopius' own experiences, which in turn hinted at autopsy in the Wars (I've left out the Buildings and Secret History, though my first impressions that is that with the SH much of the information is purportedly autopsy, and that it is harder to say with the Build.).  Procopius does hint at the role of autopsy in his own account, as one (ancient historian) should, in the preface.  He says he's well suited to the task, writing the wars of Justinian:  "Furthermore he had assurance that he was especially competent to write the history of these events, if for no other reason, because it fell to his lot, when appointed advisor to the general Belisarius, to be an eye-witness to practically all the events to be described" (1.1.3).  So, pretty explicit stuff.

As I said the character Procopius acts on occasion in the Wars, though given his position in Belisarius' army and what he's said in the preface, there has been little doubt that he did see a great deal of what he describes.  Even for Procopius himself, then, autopsy ranks highly - following in the vein of Herodotus and Thucydides, amongst others.  Now, this second large project, well, like most of my other work, deals with military stuff, and so that includes battles, sieges, campaigns, and the like. But we know, and have known for some time, that these things are hard to describe in part because of the mass chaos that ensues, especially in combat.  This might not apply quite so much with respect to campaigns (marching, supply gathering, etc.), but still things might not have been as straightforward as they appear.

One question/issue that springs to mind with all of this is:  where would Procopius have been when all the action was going on?  If he was the advisor/secretary to Belisarius, then he was invariably engaged in all sorts of important tasks, and would have been in a position (here, more metaphorically - not physically but vis-a-vis his relationship to Belisarius) to acquire good information.  When it came to witnessing things, what then?  If we accept that one of Procopius' duties was to write up battle reports - and some think he was at least responsible for sending the letters that sometimes pop up in the Gothic Wars - is he much more likely to have been in a position to see things with his own eyes - engage in this autopsy?  In a battle then, if we assume a Hellenistic or Odyssean general is assumed we he be seated on a horse at the back of the Roman side beholding all that transpired before him?  In this case it would matter a great deal if the topography of the site enabled such a vantage point.  It would be easier, too, to wittiness combat in a siege if he was on the defensive side, like Rome in 537/538.  One could easily imagine a Procopius on the walls looking down on the Goths with appropriate record-keeping materials observing all that transpires.

Yet, those sorts of positions, at the back of a battle or at the walls of a city during a siege, aren't the safest of places in the best of times.  If he had been in those positions from the get-go, and if he was simply a writer with little combat experience or ability, it is something of a surprise that he was able to survive all of the engagements that he described.  Is this reasonable?  Well, yes:  not all war reporters are killed in war zones.  Procopius could have survived all such instances.  With that said, it is not more reasonable to assume that he wasn't close by watching, but rather safely ensconced in the camp or within the city walls when skirmishes were breaking out?  How much autopsy then went into his battle descriptions?  Perhaps not a whole lot.  Even so, it would be difficult for anyone to describe any of these battles or sieges, whether simply a participant relaying activities to friends or family, or a general or member of staff reporting the results to the higher ups. This also raises questions about what might actually have been in the battle reports that might have been made.  Could there have been any expectation that there would be any real detail in these?  Or would they be the bare bones, the most relevant of details (as many have surmised) instead?

On the other hand, does this then take things too far into post-modern territory?  In other words, can we recover nothing?  I don't think so.  There's just a number of interesting questions that pop up in these sorts of discussions.

More to come...