Soldiers and War in the Madrid Skylitzes: some comments from an amateur

I haven't posted much in a while, again.  It's been a struggle to keep up with everything.  So, having sent off three things today, I thought I'd blabber on about something, and I'm going to talk about something vaguely related to my last post (mid-Byzantine things).  Where that was about one fabulous text/history, this is about one fabulous manuscript that illustrates a history. 

One of the things I submitted in the past few weeks is a review of Brill's Companion to the Byzantine Culture of War, ca. 300-1204 (https://brill.com/view/title/22983?lang=en), and it includes all sorts of interesting stuff (my review will appear in the English Historical Review).  So, during a lull, and to break up the run of usual stuff, I took a look (brief glances, really) at the dozens and dozens (hundreds even) illustrations of the Madrid Skylitzes.  They can be viewed, for free, here:  http://bdh.bne.es/bnesearch/detalle/1754254.   It's probably the most remarkable illuminated manuscript from the entirety of Byzantine history, though I gather there are far fewer of these to go on than there are for the medieval west. I confess I'm coming to this as a novice, and those in the know will probably find this all very familiar.

Anyway, the text illuminated is the Chronicle of John Skylitzes, an 11th century author, and an important source for the emperor Basil II, better known as the Bulgar slayer.  Given all his discussion of war, quite a lot of the illustrations depict war and soldiers in some capacity or other.  The rarity of illuminations of works of Byzantine history has given this manuscript considerable importance.  The images contained therein have served as importance sources for those looking to reconstruct the appearance, equipment, and armour of mid-Byzantine soldiers. 

As someone approaching all of this as someone much more familiar with (earlier) Roman history, it reminds me of the comparable place of the friezes from Trajan's Column to our understanding of the appearance, equipment, and armour of high imperial Rome's soldiers.  Scholars have treated the images in the manuscript as pretty accurate representations.  Haldon, for one, one of the most esteemed Byzantinists in the world, used it as an accurate indication armour of Byzantine cavalry from the 9-11th centuries in his chapter on early Byzantine arms and armour (Haldon 2002:  78, https://www.academia.edu/33042359/Some_aspects_of_early_Byzantine_arms_and_armour_2002_).  Kolias' Byzantinische Waffen (https://books.google.ca/books/about/Byzantinische_Waffen.html?id=n6neAAAAMAAJ&redir_esc=y) discusses its value in various places, and even includes some choice plates from the manuscript.  Even more recently, Grunbart's chapter on depictions of enemies in Brill's Companion to the Byzantine Culture of War touches on the value of the manuscript's illustrations.

Now, I must stress that this is as far as I've got, and Kolias' book I've only glanced it, though he seems to have recognized some of the restrictions of the images.  Down the road, I'd like to look into the matter in more detail, possibly/probably in concert with my desired study of Anna Komnene.  So, it could all be a lot of bollocks, or even something (or some things) that some scholars have already said.

To get back to Trajan's Column, one of the growing views out there is that the soldiers so depicted are in no way representative of second century CE soldiers such as we know them (Michael Charles, https://www.jstor.org/stable/i40074597).  Some of the points about that column might be valid for the material on the Madrid Skylitzes.  Would the army of illustrators for the manuscript really have made their images with the intention of making them as accurate as possible?  Or would they have tried to depict them in such a way as to be recognizable to whomever the manuscript was intended?  But it's also worth asking if the two questions are mutually exclusive.

There are all sorts of interesting questions that these images generate.  For one, we have little in the way of Byzantine physical evidence for arms and armour in the mid-Byzantine era.  Instead we have this manuscript, some coins, and a variety of texts, especially Anna Komnene's Alexiad, though also some military manuals.  So we have to use evidence like this.  But despite the many different illustrations contained therein, they don't come together in the same sort of sequence as we find in Trajan's Column.  Indeed, the difference in medium made producing the same sorts of images impractical if not impossible - and the chronological gap and cultural differences were significant too.  So, the artists were forced to make due with the space allotted, and were likely hamstrung by what was written on the page.  There were also two different groups of images too:  those with a western origin, and those a Byzantine one. 

Tsamakda's (https://books.google.ca/books/about/The_Illustrated_Chronicle_of_Ioannes_Sky.html?id=-STrAAAAMAAJ&redir_esc=y) seemingly impressive study (seemingly because I haven't really read it, though I've glanced at it and its beautiful illustrations) does catalogue just about everything in the manuscript.  It includes type scenes, which I'll have to look into.  She seems to suggest in places (many places?) that the items catalogued in some scenes couldn't be identified with anything known.  There is a great deal to consider about these illuminations, and when the time comes, I'll see what I can find, though it's possible it's already been said.  Whatever comes out of this, if any of it sounds vaguely interesting you should check out the illustrations yourself in the link noted above.

Isidore of Seville and Vegetius

No trees yet. I think a post on trees is coming - it'll mostly be pictures - but not yet.  I want to see out this thread, in part because I had more to say after completing the last post.

In the last post I noted the discrepancy between Isidore's figures for the subdivisions of the legion and Aulus Gellius', my possible/probable source.  The number of centuries and maniples seemed fine, but the number of cohorts was off, turmae were added, and Isidore gave a troop total, namely 6000.  Where did the extra material come from?

One reasonable possibility is Vegetius, the famed and popular (in the medieval era) writer of the Epitoma Rei Militaris.  Vegetius, as I'm sure I've mentioned before (and as you may already know), spends a good deal of time in his work discussing the ancient legion, which Sylvain Janniard has identified with the legion of the Severan dynasty.  While Janniard doesn't argue that Vegetius' legion is a bang-on copy of that earlier one, he makes a good case.  At the same time, there's still scope for other legionary components to find themselves in Vegetius' corpus. 

First, Vegetius isn't the source, it seems, of Isidore's definition of a maniple, which runs (9.3.50, trans. Bentley et al.):  "A maniple consists of two hundred soldiers soldiers. These troops are called maniples either because they would begin a battle in the first combat, or because, before battle-standards existed, they would make 'handfuls' for themselves as standards, that is, bundles of straw or of some plant, and from this standard the soldiers were nicknamed 'manipulars'."  Isidore then gives a quotation from Lucan (1.296), which mentions maniples rallied around standards, and which seems only vaguely related.  That said, one of the definitions for manipulus in the Lewis and Short reads as follows:  "B. Because the ancient Romans adopted a pole, with a handful of hay or straw twisted about it, as the standard of a company of soldiers; in milit. lang., a certain number of soldiers belonging to the same standard, a company, maniple; generally applied to infantry, and only by way of exception to cavalry".  So Isidore and Lewis and Short seem to agree, at least in part, on the origin of the term maniple.  For Vegetius, however, a maniple could be a couple of things:  first (2.13), it could be another word for contubernium, or at least an earlier form of that term.  Secondly, he conflates century and maniple (2.14).  Why the discrepancy?  I think it's due to the same reason that Isidore explains maniple (manipulus) in terms of first combat (manus), as the translators have it.  He says the contubernium used to be called a maniple because they found in groups (manus) joined together.  What we seem to have is some disagreement between Vegetius and Isidore over what manus means in this military context, or at least this organizational one (both are right).

Just because they disagree over maniples and manus, that doesn't exclude Vegetius as a potential source for Isidore's much larger legion (in Isidore's 6000 range) and its attendant turmae.  Vegetius (2.2) gives the size for a legion as 6000 (2.2 - sena milia), and the passage in which we find this is not unlike Isidore's (9.3.46), a point not lost on Milner (p. 31, n. 7):  both refer to the regiments of Macedonians and Gauls, though Vegetius includes many more.  Vegetius' (2.6) legion only contains ten cohorts, however, not Isidore's twelve, and it could have as many as 6100 men and 726 cavalry.  Seems reasonable (though nothing like conclusive) to suppose that this is the source of Isidore's 6000 soldiers.  And, as noted in the previous post or two (can't remember), Isidore would seem to be modifying his source material as he sees fit.

But Vegetius doesn't append turmae to his legion, and speaks of legionary cavalry solely in terms of numbers of soldiers, at least when he first brings them up at 2.2.  That doesn't mean he leaves out turmae; rather, that he saves them for a different discussion.  At 2.14, he has a section entitled "On the Turmae of Legionary Cavalry" (XIIII. De turmis equitum legionariorum).  Therein he says that one turma contained thirty-two men, just two off Isidore's thirty (9.3.51).  The rest of the discussion concerns the duties of decurions and ideal types - it reminds me of Procopius' horse-archers.  Anyway, it's easy to imagine Isidore taking the number and rounding it out to better fit the other figures he gave for the legionary divisions, though it doesn't quite explain how he got to 200 turmae.  When he discusses their 30-man size, he's reasonably accurate, and his vague connection (in my mind) of turmae with republican politics isn't far off the mark.  What he might have done, then, is simply conflated the 200 cavalry usually associated with a legion and forgotten that a turma isn't applied to individual soldiers.

So there we go:  the first half (or its original incarnation) of that little phrase in Isidore possibly/probably from Cincius via Aulus Gellius (not listed as a citation in the translation I'm using), and the modifications from Vegetius.  Of course, there could even have been an intermediary, like Cato, who's work on military matters is lost.  For the moment, I'll stick with what I've got.  Ultimately, too, this should help me to understand how Ammianus uses forms of manipulus and legio, believe it or not.  To close:  I enjoy looking into Roman military divisions and subdivisions more than most things.  Next...maybe tonight...trees?

Isidore, Aulus Gellius, and Cincius Alimentus

My perusing of parts of Isidore's Etymologies has led me to some more uncharted waters, namely those of Aulus Gellius and Cincius (?).  I'd been "aware" of Aulus Gellius before, but I've never given it much thought.  I think too - and I'm certain I've done this a few times - I'd thought it was some sort of novel until I checked and discovered it was an, well, encyclopaedia of sorts:  I'm sure my thinking had been, why is X in a work like Y?  Then I'd check and discover:  oh, that's not what I thought this was.  That being said, the name makes some sense.  Anyway, enough of my convoluted thinking.

While thinking more about Isidore's division of the 6000-man legion into cohorts, maniples, centuries, and turmae, I stumbled across a comparable quotation from Aulus Gellius.  It comes at the end of a long series of quotations of a work called, On Military Science (De Re Militari), by a Cincius (possibly Lucius Cincius Alimentus), and includes snippets of a few sections of that earlier work.  You can find more of the text at Perseus.  As for the parts I'm interested in (translated) here they are, in segments.

"CINCIUS writes in his third book On Military Science that the war-herald of the Roman people, when he declared war on the enemy and hurled a spear into their territory..."  The tossing of a spear as a declaration of war in the republican era was an established practice we know well about, and as far as I know Aulus-cum-Cincius' words on what was said might be true enough. 

Cincius also discusses the levy, the oath a soldier would declare in book four, which also stressed the importance of appearing before the consul once they had been enrolled.  There are also several excuses for missing the day in question that could be acceptable.  This too, so far as I can tell, is fair enough, even if some of the details turn out to be misleading.  I should say too that it'd be interesting if any of this material served as the foundation for later Roman military law, but that's another issue (it discusses desertion and branding, for instance).

Next we come to the possible source of the Isidore passage, and I quote:  "Also in the sixth book we find this: “The columns of cavalry were called the wings of the army, because they were placed around the legions on the right and on the left, as wings are on tile bodies of birds. In a legion there are sixty centuries, thirty maniples, and ten cohorts.”"  In the end, then, we get a pretty close approximation of Isidore's "A legion has sixty centuries, thirty maniples, twelve cohorts, and two hundred squadrons" (9.3.46).  In case there's any doubt, here are the two passages, side by side, in Latin (look, I'm experimenting with links!). 

First Aulus Gellius:
In legione sunt centuriae sexaginta, manipuli triginta, cohortes decem. 

Now Isidore:
Legio habet sexaginta centurias, manipulos triginta, cohortes duodecim, turmas ducentas.

So, pretty similar.  The numbers, however, are off, and both have still put centuries and maniples in the same legion, though in differing quantities.  Isidore's phrasing is slightly different, he's tweaked the numbers, and added an element.  If he was a student, I'd given him credit for not providing a direct quotation, though at the moment I'm tempted to say that this was probably the source of Isidore's information.  As it happens, not only have I discovered, recently, that Lucan was popular in late antiquity, but so too was Aulus Gellius.  Given the two works are not dissimilar, I can understand Isidore's decision. 

All this being said, the passage from Aulus Gellius creates problems of its own.  First, like Isidore, is the information it provides.  The grouping of a century, maniple, and cohort into a legion seems spurious, and at least on the surface seems the questionable part of this series of passages that he's included from Cincius.  But even his alleged source opens up an interesting problem.  A quick google search and an inevitable stop at wikipedia "revealed" that the Cincius in question was a Lucius Cincius Alimentus, a mid-republican individual who had military experience in the Second Punic War.  This man was evidently wrote a great deal, only a portion of which have survived, including many (?! - I'm sceptical) works on military science.  His context, the Second Punic War, makes sense of the content from Gellius' quotations:  the tossing of the spear, the appearance before a consul on a given day, and the appearance of a maniple all make sense in the context of the mid-republic.  This makes the identification of this Gellius Cincius with that republican Cincius believable.  That said, the cohort-maniple situation still creates problems.  How can there be these two subdivisions in one legion, even if the timing is right (generally speaking - it's murky) for the replacing of the latter with the former?

On the one hand, this could be a case of faulty transcription.  Gellius might have had access to the original text (some 300 or so years old) when he composed his work, and a later copyist might have erred in some way or other.  After all, the maniple might have been familiar as a republican thing, and in a gap in the text the copyist might have inserted maniple. 

On the other hand, there are other issues with the quotation.  For instance, how many men did the Cincius think were in a legion?  Polybius (1.16.1ff) says that a mid-republican legion numbered about 4300, 5000 in times of turbulence (6.20.1ff), while Livy (22.36.2-3) says it was 5300 late in the Second Punic War, with an additional 300 cavalry.  When 4300 or 5300, is divided by 60, 30, and 10 we get some odd numbers indeed. 

So if there is a mistake, where is it?  A mid-republican Cincius with real practical military experience seems unlikely to have made this kind of mistake.  It could then be that Gellius' Cincius is not the earlier one.  That said, if it is accurate (or matches Cincius exactly, and Cincius was mid-republican and knew what he was talking about), it could be things were never as fixed as we sometimes think they are.  Those 4000-5000-strong legions were only ever approximations, and the arrival of the cohort might have come about in a random sort of way alongside the maniple. 

There's also a way to make sense of the three divisions, 60 centuries, 30 maniples, and 10 cohorts in a legion:  make it 6000-strong.  In that case, we get centuries of 100 men, maniples of 200 men, and cohorts of 600 men.  These figures are much more in line with what we know about these sizes of these divisions.  Centuries are usually in the 100 range (80-100), maniples in the double century range (160-200), and cohorts in the 500 range (600 for double-cohorts - I know the number is off).  This solution, the 6000-man legion, would make sense of Cincius' numbers.  We could also do it the other way, however, and work backwards:  if the centuries contained 80 men, that would give us about 4800-strong legions.  The 160-man maniple and the 480-strong cohort make sense too - and the chronology works well, as noted earlier, for all these items being together (see Sekunda p 356 in this, admittedly not in the preview).

This brings us back round to Cincius:  even this, on the surface, odd bit in book seven would seem to be pretty accurate.  The association of Cincius the military writer with Cincius the mid-republican praetor works, at least on the basis of the accuracy of what he says and his subject matter, assuming Aulus Gellius has quoted him accurately.  What it doesn't do is help us to understand how Isidore got from Cincius-via-Gellius' figures to his own.  The 6000-legion is still too big.  A 4800-legion would also be big too for the seventh century (the 4th-6th century ones were 1000-1500).  Even if the maniple continued to be used into the imperial era in some capacity or other, other numbers are off. 

What might have happened is that Isidore took this nugget from Cincius-Gellius (he might have got it direct from Cincius, a possibility I have not yet entertained, in part because of the popularity of Gellius in late antiquity), and then attempted to update it with more recent material.  Speidel, for instance, has argued that the paper strength of a legion was closer to 6000, which would make Isidore's total much closer to reality, though it wouldn't explain how he arrived at that total.  It could be the figure is hiding somewhere, and I'll just have to keep digging. 

Suffice to say, interesting stuff (to me) - and quite a roundabout route it always is, with the focus ultimately still me trying to come to grips with Ammianus' use of "legions" and indirectly "maniples" in his Res Gestae.  Next time, perhaps, trees!

Isidore of Seville on War Part 1

Lately, Ammianus Marcellinus has been on my mind for a number of things.  I'm working on a paper on Ammianus for a conference in July that focuses on his discussion of legions.  To that end, I found myself looking through the admittedly much later Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, composed, it seems, in the first quarter of the seventh century.  Isidore has a section on military terms, and another on war. Isidore's discussions are interesting for a number of reasons, and I want to highlight a few features.  One of the interesting questions is where he gets his material, and as the examples I highlight will show, it's an eclectic army that he describes.

As I said, my interest was in his use of legion.  Not surprisingly in a work on Latin terms, Isidore defines quite a few divisions in the Roman army.  Surprises include the size of the legion he gives (6000), and its Romanity (Isidore lived in post-Roman Spain - all 9.46).  What's more, he says the legion is comprised of 60 centuries, 30 maniples, 12 cohorts, and 200 turmae.  A legion was comprised of centuries and cohorts, and at one stage maniples.  But turmae?  And were maniples and cohorts ever part of one legion, and one that numbered 6000?  Turmae were usually cavalry squadrons - he says so as much a short while later (9.51).  Could it be he's referring to the cavalry attached to the legion?  That would make sense, though 200 turmae, which says comprised 30 horsemen, would seem high (that makes for 6000 soldiers).  There's also no 30-man unit within the legion:  there's the 80-100 man century, and the 8-10 man contubernium.  So the 200 30-man turmae (10 is better) is a mystery.

The size of the cohort (500-men) and the century (100-men) are fine, at least at a basic level.  The 6000-men legion and the 200-man maniples are harder to understand.  The imperial-era (Lucan and Tacitus) legion was about 5000 or so (closer to 5200) strong.  The mid-republican was usually about 4200 ordinarily, or 5000 in emergencies in the mid-republic, the era of the maniple.  By the second Punic war the cohort had been introduced, and some speculate that by its conclusion it was already used widely.  The maniple as a word gets used much later than the maniple as pre-cohort division survives.  It's hard to say (and I haven't really checked), but it might well continue to be a division in the Roman navy well into the imperial era (a few inscriptions imply as much).  That doesn't explain its association here, however.  It's used by Ammianus occasionally, sometimes just for a generic unit, though also in a phrase he repeats a few times before speeches ("centuries, cohorts, and maniples").  Did it continue to be used long after its death, only it effectively disappeared from contemporary records?  Is that how we should understand the discussion of maniple here, and how we should understand the regular usage of commanipularis in imperial-era inscriptions?  I suspect, however, that the latter's appearance was more a matter of tradition than its continued usage.  

For Isidore, a camp, the place a soldier was stationed, was given that name (castra) because it was as if they were chaste (castus) or they might be castrated (castrare).  That, in turn, was due to women never entering a camp (9.45).  Now there's been a lot of debate on the presence of women in Roman military bases, and it now seems pretty clear that they were there.  So on this matter he's wrong, but was he basing his estimation strictly on what he knows about those other words?  Or was he using one of the many earlier Latin texts he refers to, like the works of Lucan, Sallust, or Vergil?

Anyway, just a sample.  There's much more interesting nuggets in the Etymologies, and I've only been focusing on military things.  More work to do!

Back to the Future: More Battles

It turns out, at least for me, that moving from one kid to two kids is a lot more draining than the shift to one.  I've had lots of ideas cross my mind, but I haven't had a chance to write anything down.  At the moment, the dog's locked in the basement, the youngest is happily bobbing away behind me in her chair, while the eldest is sorting out dinosaur-themed number cards.

This term I'm teaching a course on Hannibal, and it's been a great experience for all sorts of reasons.  For one, it's allowed me to revisit a topic and period that I'm very interested, but not thought about for a long time.  While I've sometimes thought that the mid-republic and Punic wars were a bit saturated, it seems clear there's still things to be said.  I've been struck by all the exciting new finds that have added to our understanding (the wrecks of ships of the Egadi Islands from the First Punic War, the remains of Roman and Punic camps from Baecula in the Second Punic War).  As before, I've been fascinated by all the research on the wider context of the wars:  the demographic challenges, the international relations issues, and the difficulties with the historiography.  In fact, in terms of the latter, I find myself contemplating undertaking a lengthy of study of Polybius (and if you've read this blog you know where I'm heading):  Polybius as military historian, with an emphasis on his love of all things tactical and generalship-y, and whether we can deduce underlying hints of his lost Tactica (or how many of it we can).  On the other hand, whenever I decide to write this large book on Justinian's wars of reconquest, I've often thought I'd draw heavily on all this interesting work on the impact of the Hannibalic wars.  So, like I've said, very useful.

I'm in the middle of a discussion of Cannae in the class, which is a bit concerning if only because we've only got a few weeks left.  That said, it's been useful for thinking about this Sensory History of War popular-history book, as well as one of the grant offshoots, the book on battle in classicizing histories from late antiquity.  While preparing for the class I've had the fortune of reading Ted Lendon's new two-part study of ancient battle, which was originally, I've deduced, meant to appear in the Wiley Encyclopedia of Ancient Battles.  My name appears in the study (a bit of a thrill), and he makes, not surprisingly (I'm quite receptive to his views), quite a lot of insightful comments. 

One of the points he argues, which I brought up in class, is that we can't or shouldn't expect to know anything about the specifics of any individual battle from antiquity with a few exceptions.  We can know a lot about the generalities - and so here he's in keeping with work by Goldsworthy and Hanson on the face of ancient battles - but the ancient accounts are just too vague and stereotypical to get much deeper.  He also, quite wonderfully, illustrates and introduces the point by referring to Lucian's True History, which includes some fantastical battles between the people of the Moon and the Sun.  I read it all last academic year in my second year Greek class, and I'll be doing the same again next academic year (2018-2019).  Like him, I noticed all these cliched battle (and historiographical) elements, which added considerably to the story.  I can see myself drawing on it at a later point.

Anyway, I think Lendon's points are well-taken, and it's had me wondering what to do with the late antique battle book.  That book will include, essentially, a series of case studies of big ancient battles in late antique classicizing authors (Ammianus, Jordanes, Procopius, Agathias, Theophylact).  It aims to show the variety in approaches those authors adopted (they're not all the same stereotypical accounts), while staying true, so to speak, to the conventions of the genre.  It'll bring in some narrative theory, look at rhetorical practices, contextualize in terms other late antique approaches to battle (panegyric, imperial monuments, epic poetry, chronicles), and make some comments on the classical tradition.

For all the generalities, there are still a fair few idiosyncrasies in the classical tradition, at least that I've picked up on.  Few of the later historians seem to have adopted Herodotus' specific approach to combat.  There aren't many episodes, like that post-Marathon involving Epizelus, where classicizing historians include anecdotes that could be likened to instances of PTSD.  Herodotus' attention to individual casualties from the Battle of Thermopylae also stands out.  While you could make the case that Herodotus includes this because of the gravity of the situation, it's hard to argue this wasn't the situation in many later battles.  Why no catalogue of the fallen in later historians?  While they often do highlight the exploits of elite individuals (cue Lucian), the regular folk get left out, or grouped together at the very least, with some exceptions - I confess that as I write this I'm revisiting my views on the roles of all those bodyguards in Procopius.

Reading Livy and Polybius in tandem has been useful for this too.  My class was divided into two parts and each told to focus on one version or the other of the Battle of Lake Trasimene.  Because the battle takes place in a fairly distinct spot, at least in geographical terms, we can use those two authors to pinpoint the precise location (a valley and then a plain along the lake on the side closest to Cortona).  While the two accounts are hardly long and detailed, they do indicate that there is quite a lot more room for teasing out the individualities of specific battles than Lendon suggests, even if, in this instance, it is largely a question of location.  On the other hand, this might well be what Lendon was implying:  you can find the specifics by looking for the unusual in the battle accounts.  If an historian mentions things that aren't part of the usual battle fodder, then that probably means that it was something that happened in that particular engagement.  We'll see if there's anything in those five case studies that bear this out.

So, all this is to say that not all is lost.  I'm back to battles a lot more than I'd planned on being.  I've also left out my planned inclusion in an SCS panel on lesser battles (I'm going to write on the Catalaunian Plains, believe it or not), which has given me much food for thought. 

Even Further Reflections on the Roman Military Panel

Black to the blurbs...

Cary Barber, "The 'Lost Generation'..."
Barber noted the extreme war time losses during the Hannibalic war, which might, in the case of senators, have meant a depletion of as much as 60% of their numbers.  The senate, in general, had a regular cycle of death of renewal, but this was thrown off by all the deaths in the war.  For the years from 366-218 BC, there were fewer and fewer men repeating the consulship, in part (or largely?) the result of the Lex Livinia. All the deaths threw this off, and Romans were willing to let men repeat consulships as a result of all the Hannibalic madness.

Michael Fronda, "Titus Quinctius Flamininus'..."
Fronda highlighted the looking at old questions in new ways that seemed to dominate discussion so far.  He commented on narratives and the memories of war, with the triumph itself serving as a kind of narrative (an interesting point - has me thinking about the varied narratives of war in the age of Justinian).  Allies participated in some triumphs, though generally irregularly, starting in 187 BC (probably).  The idea is that Flamininus' triumph in 187 was an experiment in just this (bringing in allies).

Jessica Clark, "Anecdotal History..."
There were a handful of papers that touched on the social war, this being one of them, with her aim being to meld history and historiography.  She noted the Social War was a difficult event to grasp, with some modern scholars starting their discussions before it, or after it.  Evidently, Diodorus Siculus called the war the greatest war that was ever known - and not at the start of his entire work, but just that section.  Struck me as very preface-y, (and I jotted lots of Procopius-themed points, surprisingly) though I gather there are all sorts of problems with the text as is (still I might have to come back to this).  The evidence for the social war is problematic, and she asks whether we'd understand it better with more evidence - though another question is whether we should be asking different questions.

Nathan Rosenstein, "Tributum, Latin Revolt..."
He said two great questions for the republic were:  how did it get such a great empire, and what caused it to fall apart.  Says war and military service played a role in all this, which is part of the reason why they're worth studying.  Touches on the communicative turn (not convinced by), and says warfare was (one of?) the best way(s) for individuals to interact with each other.  This, to me, was a fascinating point, and I think Milne brought up something comparable, either in her talk or in her questions.  While soldiers did spend time fighting, much of it wasn't.  And even when they were at war, they often had to travel to get there (set up camp, etc.).  So, there were plenty of opportunities for men to chat (and sing).  Back specifically to Rosenstein:  Livy provided lots of evidence of the deaths of military tribunes, which suggests they didn't hold back when fighting.  Additionally, war (and the Hannibalic war too) was a means for elites to prove their worth.  Along those lines, cavalry provided many more opportunities to prove all this than service in the infantry (in lines, part of a group, etc.).  Rosenstein notes the changing culture of the soldier in the 1st century BC, though also the 2nd century BC, and the 3rd century BC (and so on).  This brought up an interesting question (in my mind at least):  what would my three men for my army textbook think if they were transported into each others' Roman worlds?  I believe we were into the discussion now, but when soldiers came back from war, how did they integrate back into regular life?  Is the biggest change from the Social War (in terms of military stuff) the integration of all these Roman and Italian men?  Were men recruited from all over?  These last couple of points surprised me (my ignorance) - I'd assumed republican recruitment was more uniform, and hadn't appreciated all this complexity.

Francois Gauthier, "The Transformation of the..."
In this paper he basically says we shouldn't give all this credit to Gaius Marius for his late second/early first century reforms.  I had done, to some degree, in the past, but found his arguments convincing.  Rather, to pick up the social war theme, he said this was the turning point.  I discovered that Roman citizen cavalry hadn't been replaced in the first century BC (or earlier) by allies (this from McCall's book).  Allies were apparently much cheaper to use than Roman soldiers, because they paid for themselves, apparently (to do with taxies, indemnities, and such, I think - plus they pay for their own men and equipment).  There were some useful references to chase down:  Front. 2.3.17, Cic. Verr. 5.60 (can't remember why).  Also, intriguingly enough, Pompey's armies were allegedly comprised of men from 33 ethnicities (this following an article in Historia from the 60s - have to track it down).  There were lots of comments about paying for soldiers, and the challenges this provided.

Jack Wells, "The Lessons of..."
His paper was about Augustan historiography, and really about Roman beliefs about where they came from.  Lots of ways to tell a story, and one interesting figure with a fascinating backstory is Servius Tullius, both a slave and divine.  Most sources rate him highly.  He notes the weirdness about Rome:  any foreigners who show up in early Rome could be made citizens, which wasn't the case for slaves.  Additionally, it was fortune that made you a slave (contra Aristotle's natural slavery views).  If you're a slave captured in war, you've proven some form of honour (this the view of Dionysius on early slaves).  Some interesting points about Dionysius of Halicarnassus, whom I'd never thought much about before:  he does apparently try to explain how the Romans do things to a Greek audience (an interesting point).  One of the big takeaways is the permeability of categories in all this.

Brian Turner, "'Bloodless Victories..."
There are a host of examples in which battles were won but the Romans hadn't suffered any casualties.  All sorts of interesting comments here (like all them, again).  Claudius celebrated taking Britain without any losses, and Turner asked whether the Romans were losing their appetite for war.  Bloodless victories are apparently found in every decade of Livy's book, and apparently Sallust gets into it too.  Men wanted to limit their own losses, and it was asked if there was a practical component to this.  He touches on Mons Graupius, Josephus and Jotapata, Tactius, Civilis, and the Batavian uprising, the Adamklissi monument, and he asks if the discourse of bloodless victory (he's influenced by John Lynn) could influence how a general performed.  One point raised in discussion (and which I hadn't considered), was that Lendon's view of combat was too elitist (all this virtus stuff - did ordinary soldiers really care about it?).  There was a question too about whether all this bloodless victory stuff was really about hiding losses.

Sara Phang, "Reviewing the Marriage..."
An update, of sorts, following her book on marriage.  All very convincing (read her work).  She notes the importance of documentary sources for the imperial era.  She asks what the most useful approach is to studying women, families, and the army.  She gets into who's serving and where are they from.  She sees epitaphs as cultural patterns, and looks at the changing depictions of soldiers on epitaphs - very interesting.  Think I'd contemplated it before, but not really given it much thought.  I think I'd like to get my hands on as many depictions of soldiers on epitaphs as I can find.  Anyway, she notes the contrast between epitaphs, which involved lots of choice on the part of the individual, and the diploma, which was a legal document that allowed for limited choice.  She compared Hdn. 3.8.5 saying soldiers lived with wives to Eck's comments (2011) about a diploma of 206 which suggested that soldiers still lacked conubium at this time.  Noted too Allison's book (2013:  353) where she said women made up 5-24% of the inhabitants on bases.  All sorts of strong evidence for women on bases (skeletons, shoes, jewellery, spindles and textile-production items, children's clothes, infant burials).  She implied too that women were involved in some of the production of military things, which I hadn't considered (and which I should touch on in later studies).

Allison Keith, "Love's Figures..."
A fascinating paper, though I'd really flagged by this point.  My expertise in Latin poetry also happens to be lacking.  Anyway, she looked for epigraphic evidence (in Italy) for some of the slaves alluded to in classical-era Latin poetry.  The few names we find on epitaphs are resonant of Roman imperial conquest - and they could be seen as a celebration of the spoils of war.  Nemesis, evidently, was a popular name.  Inscriptions, as it happens, offer a useful social context and comparanda to what we find in the poetry.  They give us something of the human costs to Roman conquest and imperialism, and this is definitely stuff I want to use in my textbook (and updated chapter for a textbook).  She argues that the contemporaneity of the names in poetry reflects the slaves/people captured in war.  Very useful bibliography including, especially, all the work by K Gaca (only read one of her papers, I think).

Justin Ryan James, "Expressing triumph..."
This about the images of the turn of battle in Roman imperial-era art.  Fascinating stuff.  They show the moments before the turn of battle - and this reminded me of the scenes of myth from Roman art, where they tend to show the moments before the bad shit happens.  I brought this up in discussion, but I'm not sure I was terribly eloquent:  my point was is this a wider genre thing (where the genre is the visual arts generally, perhaps a bit too specific), where there were established topoi, motifs, and tendencies across different themes in art.  Anyway, continuing on from the turn of battle, he noted that cavalry always went from left to right on scenes, but infantry could go in any direction.  The commander is usually the largest person.  There are some images he had which I hadn't come across before, like the Tropaeum Alpium from La Turbie, France, the Etruscan Celtomachy from Florence, Tiberius' Arch, and the architrave from Mantua.  He referred, too, to something from Glanum (Roman legionaries marching?), and Romanius Capito, a grave stele dated to 60-65.  Lots of emphasis on cavalry on these monuments.

James Gersbach, "A reinterpretation..."
His paper was about the war-cry, though he preferred the term "battle expression", which covered everything from sound, to a song, dance, silence, and any sort of experience.  His paper was chalk full of interesting references to sounds and the like.  He argued that these were rehearsed, and that served all sorts of purposes.  Lots of juicy stuff here for my sensory approach to battle book.  Gersbach argued that the socio-political force of these cries were missed by some scholarship.  He asked, too, who is likely to have initiated these cries (this garnered some discussion - spontaneous - paraells to haka and European football chants).  Were they organic - again, like football chants?  Many of my notes are copies of references.  Will have to come back to these.  Intriguing - evidently he's doing a whole thesis on ancient battle cries.

Me..blah, blah blah...eurasian, blah, cavalry.
For me, the very last speaker, I want only to note the great questions I got so that I don't forget them.  There were questions about specialization (greater or lesser in the sixth century), and whether dragoons were a thing (a question that's come up elsewhere - Alofs, for instance).  Justin noted some interesting material about the training of Ottoman horsearchers.  Hmmm...most of the questions might be lost to the sands of time.  But, someone did ask about how professional the men were, and how this might have varied between the ranks.  Were they all professional?  Only some?  I'd mentioned recruitment a little, which seems both haphazard and more official in the sources:  when it comes to the Gothic Wars, it seems a bit haphazard, for generals are often sent to the Balkans to round up men.  On the other hand, we know a bit about the official parts of recruitment from the law codes - and we even seem to have a relevant papyrus, a probatoria (the document even says so), that describes this.  So mixed image.  What do I make of Procopius in these instances?  Is he glossing over official practice for the sake of the narrative?  Are the troops they're getting of a lower quality because of the needs of the situation? - and this reminds me of his comments on the Lycaonians at Callinicum, which he'd said had only just enlisted.  The cost issue surfaced too. I don't know how many horse archers there were (don't seem to be significant), but they would have costed a great deal, especially if the horses were covered with armour, so they never could have that many.  This, then, too, casts doubt on it being an age of Hippotoxotai.

The end.  That's it.  Lots to digest.  Extremely useful for all the things I have on the go.  I'd thought about making a post about raids and early and late Rome, its increasing and then decreasing civility, etc., but my eyes are fuzzy and I should go to the gym to process.

Hannibal Eras Course - What I got from the Roman Military Studies Panel at CCC 2017

As I mentioned in the previous post, more than half of the presentations at the Montreal Celtic Conference in Classics 2017.  Additionally, as I might also have suggested, many of the papers gave me lots to think about for the new 3rd/4th year course I'm teaching in the fall, Hannibal.  Though  Hannibal dominates the title, it's less, specifically, about the man, and more about the three wars between Roman and Carthage.  Hannibal is merely meant to suck people in (though it's not yet clear if that's happening).  The point of putting this here is that it forces me to go over the notes I made, and it allows for something like an outline to come together.

In essence, a number of questions in the papers gave me some questions that might be worth tackling in the course including, in no particular order, and from the specific to the general:

1)  How was the army of the mid-republic organized and how did it fight?  (brings to mind Daly's books - how much face of battle business ought I get in to?  And there's the maniple/phalanx business, discussed by Polybius and Koon)

2)  Why did they (the Romans - it's a Romanocentric course for any number of reasons) go to war at all in each of the three cases (first through third)?  (brings to mind the imperialism discussions - the Romans were excessively bellicose a la Harris, maybe they weren't a al Eckstein)

3)  What were the costs associated for all those involved (the Roman government/state, its people, and more)?  (farms were deserted in the aftermath, maybe they weren't, and what role do slaves play in all of this)

4)  What does it mean for our understanding of things if we're so reliant on later (save, to some degree, Polybius) information (Livy, Appian, etc.)?  How do they colour how the war was initially received?  And they need not be histories alone, for the story of Aeneas and Dido from Vergil's Aeneid provides an interesting case.

5)  Is it at all possible to provide balance to a discussion that will be dominated by pro-Roman sources?

6)  What role did the war play in the expansion of the Roman state and its development?

There are some basic questions, which I jotted down at the conference, though which I'd thought about before, like:

7)  What are the sources for the war/s?

8)  What shape was the Roman state in when they started?  In between?  At the end?

9)  What was the course of events in the war?  This is perhaps the most obvious of questions, and it will undoubtedly make up a big chunk of our discussion.  But I'd like quite a lot of our time spent discussing the big issues.

Then there are some additional notes that I made, relevant, though less questions, per se:

10)  Worth discussing whether there was a religious component to the wars, and what it was.  This could range everywhere from the rituals performed before battles (the sacred chickens) to the opening/closing of the doors of the Temple of Janus.

11)  Evidently, both Livy and Polybius note deserters in the war:  if/when I find the references, it would be worth bringing up and connecting it to how Roman soldiers (regular ones) might have experienced the wars.

Finally, some interesting comments.  One is an interesting characterization of the second Punic war  from Michael Fronda - or at least it's jotted down on his handout. 

12)  The 2nd Punic War could be seen as the "big die off".  

13)  The period after that second war was described as one of innovation.  Along those lines, many people (invariably men) come up and become prominent who have no established background.

14)  There's a big boom in Hellenization after the war, though what kind of Hellenization that might have been wasn't clear to me.  Presumably the bringing of all the art to Rome (conquered Greece quote from Horace), though also the (continued) use of Greek as the language of choice for Roman writers, to a point, and the increasing number of Romans educated by/in Greeks/Greek.

And that's that.  I also made a reading list (which might be too ambitious in the time I have, but it includes books by Eckstein, Rosentein, Hoyos, Lazenby, Fronda, Drogula, and maybe too Boronowski, Levene (how much Livy versus Polybius discussion ought I have?), and the various entries in the Wiley companion).  Here's to hoping these points help make for an interesting course, which proves useful not only for the students, but me too.

New Directions in the Roman Military and the Celtic Conference in Classics

When I signed up for this conference (i.e., sent in an abstract in the hopes of sharing the fruits of my SSHRC labours, pre-acceptance), I only had 1 daughter and wasn't sure I'd be going (been turned down before).  The abstract was accepted, and I now have two wonderful daughters.

The call papers stated they (the organizers) were looking for work that presented new research and covered any point between about 500 BC and AD 500.  Fortunately I had new work, and my subject matter wasn't too late.  What neither I, nor the organizers, expected, however, was that the topics would land so heavily on the republican (and earlier) side of things.  Once the dust had settled, perhaps just two papers could be classified as expressly imperial (my own included), with at least three that dabbled in the republican and imperial eras. 

On the one hand, this left me with little meaningful to contribute in the first two days' worth or so.  I taught a full-year history of Rome class back in 2009-2010.  Before that, my last serious dabbling in republican matters came in 2003, in my "Roman Constitution" graduate seminar.  So, not a lot, though I've done some reading here and there (and I'm teaching a course on Hannibal in the fall).  On other hand, getting to listen to all this new work on vaguely similar, though still different, subject matter has proved a boon.  I'm still working on the textbook, which will begin with the late republic, so I've been provided with some new ammunition.  Plus, there's that Hannibal class - and I now have a big list of big issues I want to raise with those few students who take the class (and right now it's only a few, sadly).  One last note:  I just saw Dunkirk in 70mm (not showing that way in Winnipeg), and it's a powerful movie.  So I have that side of war floating around my head too.  In sum:  a very fruitful full days.  A number of threads ran through the papers, and I want to get some of them down before they're lost forever.  I hope to return to these again in the next few days, especially as I continue plugging away on other projects.

In early Rome warfare seems to have been dominated by warlords with private bands, and most of it consisted of raids, and little of it consisted of set-piece battles.  This was, then, a stark echo of what I've discussed before (and am building towards) in this project on Procopius.  It's not all entirely new (the late antique stuff), but it does deserve stressing.  In fact, in private discussion (on the Metro no less), Jeremy Armstrong (the organizer) noted that in some (many?) ways the big wars and battles of the mid-to-late republic with their large armies and pitched battles were the exception to the norm of pre-modern combat.  In some ways, then, warfare in early Rome was very much a reflection of wider practices around the Mediterranean (and beyond?), and warfare at the end of antiquity represented a return to this. 

As someone with surface knowledge of the republic only, it was intriguing to hear about the stress upon the Punic War and the Social War.  I knew about some of the important things that happened in the Punic War and their role in later events, but not all of them - or I'd long since forgotten.  And here's where Dunkirk (and the major war that preceded that war) comes into it.  There was general acceptance that the elites of mid-republican Rome, to say nothing of the regular folk, suffered serious losses during the war, and to such a degree that we can speak of a "lost generation" or two.  What's also interesting about this, however, is the impact that this might have had on the usual pattern of republican political offices, or at least the pattern at the time.  There were so many losses (here consuls and praetors - from the senatorial families) that there was a return to repeated terms of office (checks had been put in place for this some 100 or more years earlier.  Once the war was over, there is even evidence for a strong dissatisfaction amongst the regular troops for all the fighting.  In these matters, then, the republican soldiers and their officers are perhaps not so different from their 20th century Anglo-saxon ones.

To touch briefly on the Social War:  it was this that had a significant impact on the transformation of the Roman army near the end of the republic, not the sole efforts of Martial, though they would have played some part.  People who had been allies were now fighting with each other, and it wasn't only Romans versus Italians, for there was a great deal of mingling.  But also too - and I hadn't considered this - Rome found itself with an economic-military problem at the end of the war.  Evidently, it had long been cheaper for Rome to supplement its military with allied forces.  They paid for themselves, both in terms of salary and equipment and arms.  When the number of Romans jumped at the end of the war, suddenly the Romans had to find a way to pay for a huge number of troops (much more than before).

One final point for now:  after this point I'll have to consult my notes (and that requires additional effort).  It's remarkable how evidence contributes to the kinds of questions that scholars pose.  This gaggle of republican scholars were asking the sorts of questions that are vaguely relevant (or more so) to late antique scholars - it's a shame more late antique scholars don't draw on the comparative material of the republican era (but don't worry, I will).  After all, both groups are generally left with lots of texts to work with (the assorted classical, classicizing, and other texts).  But the imperial scholars can't look at those same sorts of issues:  there's very little evidence about the details of the practice of warfare, but quite a lot on organization and social matters, among other things.  In fact, I guess that's where being a late antique person you get to draw on a bit of both (there are some inscriptions, some more papyri, and lots of legal evidence). 

Anyway, as I say, that's enough for now (going on too long - need to finish this cider and head to the hotel to catch a taxi to head to the airport to head home).  Montreal is beautiful.  I had planned a post on it, but it'll have to wait (if it comes at all).

Dating Vegetius' Epitoma Rei Militaris: some circumstantial evidence

I'm getting closer to being ready, or as ready as I'll ever be, to write my Celtic Classics Conference paper for late July.  Whatever I don't get around for the conference, I'll be sure to get to when I work on converting this into a book chapter.

Today, among other things, I've been reading a couple of papers, one a recent by Janniard on the steppe influence on Roman war making, the other, ostensibly, on Procopius' "new" Byzantine army by Breccia (2004).  While reading these two papers (admittedly a touch more to go with Breccia) I've come across some interesting references to Huns I'd likely forgotten about. 

There is, for instance, some extended discussion in Zosimus' New History on the Hunnic incursions in the last third of the fourth century (4.20ff).  A cursory glance suggests to me that he either got some of his information directly from Ammianus Marcellinus, directly from Eunapius (fragmentary so hard to say), or even some sort of intermediary source.  Much earlier in the text, while discussing Aurelian and his trouble with Palmyra, he also gets into some interesting - and ultimately successful - cavalry tactics.  It turns out the Roman cavalry, when up against the Palmyrene heavy cavalry, employed the steppe-feigned flight.  This interesting episode (1.50.3-4) raises three questions:  is this just a stratagem employed by Aurelian for this specific context; is it a regular tactic employed by Roman cavalry in the third century; or is Zosimus projecting contemporary tactics (late 5th/early 6th century) on an event?  I suspect we'll never know, though I'm sure someone or other has delved into this more deeply.

The Vegetius references to Huns are short and sweet:  there are only two, one at 1.20.2, the other at 3.26.36.  For all intents and purposes, what Vegetius says is that the Roman cavalry of his day is so good that the ancients have nothing useful to add that would be of use.  He implies, too, in the first passage that this improved cavalry performance is attributable to the Goths, Alans, and Huns.  In the second passage, where he repeats his belief that the cavalry of his day is sufficient in quality, Vegetius says that emperor (who's elusive, hence the dating issues - we don't know when it dates, late fourth century, first half of fifth century) is as good at archery as the Persians, and as good at horsemanship as the Alans and Huns.  The implication of all this is that the Romans have adopted something of Hunnic cavalry tactics.  Indeed, in his treatise on veterinary medicine (sadly I'm stating this secondhand), Vegetius praises Hunnic horses even more. 

Before I turn to the dating question, much of what I've been reading about Rome's adoption (to whatever degree) of steppe cavalry tactics varies as to when and to what degree.  The most recent case (save Breccia) is Janniard's, and he sees their big change as coming fairly quickly from the late fourth (first coming into contact with Huns c. 370 or later) into the fifth century.  By the time they meet the Huns under Attila at the Catalaunian Plains, their tactics (and assorted things) have improved to such a degree that they're able to emerge from that battle victorious.

So let's now go back to the date of Vegetius' military treatise.  For some, even most, it's the last quarter of the fourth century, and for even fewer it's some point in the second quarter (or so) of the fifth century.  This new-found awareness of Rome's adoption of steppe tactics has me leaning even more heavily towards the fifth than I had been before.  As you can see, these are extremely circumstantial pieces of evidence.  We have two comments in Vegetius that imply they've already made big changes to Roman cavalry, and that they've adopted a Hunnic-approach.  Given that the Huns first enter history for the Romans around 370 (some might differ on this date), and then peripherally, at least for a few years, it seems unlikely that the Romans would have made wholesale changes before really meeting them in battle.  Ammianus implies that the Romans hadn't really come up against the Huns before Adrianople, despite what Zosimus might be implying (and there are all sorts of questions about the reliability of his text).  If full interaction doesn't take place until the end of the 370s or even the 380s, though more likely the former, how likely is it that the Romans would have been able to make progress with their cavalry thanks to the Huns (Veg. 1.20.2 - nam licet, exemplo Gothorum et Alanorum Hunnorumque, equitum arma profecerint) between the late 370s and the death of Thedosius I, 395 (the latest possible date for the early-dating folk)?  Guess that largely on how quickly they could change their cavalry.  Given too that the Notitia Dignitatum (ND), which for the east is now thought to be spot on, the half of the empire most likely to need steppe tactics, and that we see little evidence for an overwhelming shift in that direction, I think we have to entertain the later date far more seriously than most scholars usually do.  Indeed, most of the steppe-like units that we find in the eastern half of the ND are based in the east, not in the Balkans.

Yes, this is all mostly (entirely?) circumstantial evidence, but I think it makes the case for a later date for Vegetius' Epitoma Rei Militaris all that more likely.

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.

Qasr el-Hallabat and the Edict of Anastasius

Last spring, an internal grant allowed me to make a grand tour of the UK, which included stops at Roman military sites, and some libraries (London, Oxford).  At the Institute for Classical Studies Library in London, I spent some time pouring through its excellent collection of published volumes on epigraphy in late antiquity.  One inscription I came across was the Edict of Anastasius found in Qasr el-Hallabat.  I had already spent a bit of time reading about the similar edict (or one of several edicts) Anastasius had published at Perge, so coming across this other one was something of a boon.  I made some notes, made a scan, and determined to come back to it at a later date.  Needless to say, I would never have expected that I'd be able to visit Qasr el-Hallabat, an unknown entity to me in early May of 2016, only nine months later.  I owe that opportunity to a major external grant I never imagined I'd get.

When in Jordan I put a visit of Qasr el-Hallabat near the top of my list.  And on the fourth day, it was our first top, sometime after 8:30am.  We were just about the only ones there, barring a few people working at the beautiful welcome centre.  The site itself is some ways up from the centre, and it sits on a little plateau with spectacular views of the surrounding countryside.

Once I made it to the top I resolved to make a tour of the walls, which included a stop at the "Roman" crane in righthand side of the photo.  I then plunged in, eager to find traces of the edict.  Much of the structure, which at various times was an imperial-era (Roman) fort, a late antique quadriburgium, a monastery, and eventually an Umayyad (?) palace, had been reconstructed and reinforced.  The presence of the crane suggests that more is planned.  Among the many interesting things I stumbled across were yet more mosaics, in this case carefully protected behind a gate.

If the mosaics are, roughly, in the eastern section of the structure, the fragments of the edict are in the southern section.  Several pieces are fixed into the walls.  Some were placed in the middle of other bricks, as below.

Some are placed with the letters oriented as they should be, like the photo above.  In other spots, the letters are upside down.

In yet others, the letters are sideways, and even partially cut off.

As it happens, these fragments are, well, only a fraction of the original total, and by all accounts they seem to be in situ, at least with respect to the time when these blocks were fixed into these walls at el-Hallabat.  Many more fragments, however, had toppled over, and though these particular fragments were visible to early excavators, those that had fallen over were not.  Although I don't have any visual evidence for what the pile of rubble is likely to have looked like, there are other sites in Jordan, military ones too (it seems), that are overrun with blocks, and which are undoubtedly concealing all sorts of wonderful things.  For instance, the fortress at the heart of the World Heritage Site of Umm er-Rasas is strewn with blocks.

This is in contrast to many of the surrounding structures, many of them churches, which are filled with incredible mosaics, like those below.

Anyway, in good time many more fragments of the edict were recovered, and these have been fixed to a wall in the visitor centre.  A picture of one of those fragments is below, with a shot of a good portion of the total below that.

One feature that stands out about these fragments is their colour:  it contrasts, sharply, with the limestone found in the modern visitor centre (above), and the majority of the blocks in the reconstructed structure.  A little detective work determined that these blocks had likely come from Umm el-Jimal, some 20km down the road (a fair distance by car, as it happens), and just south of the modern border with Syria (and not far from a Syrian refugee camp incidentally).  Umm el-Jimal, a remarkable site itself, and with hardly a visitor, me aside, is filled with these black basalt blocks.  Note, for instance, the photos below, the first a shot of the town, the second a larger house/villa.

Archaeologists four blocks from the larger edict at Umm el-Jimal, and largely on that basis (and the coloration), it seems likely the edict was initially posted at this larger, and seemingly more prominent centre.  Umm el-Jimal was at the halfway point (roughly) on the road between Bosra and Gerasa, unlike Qasr el-Hallabat.  A copy of the edict is posted on a wall on the visitor centre at Umm el-Jimal.

Now, we don't know where the edict was originally posted, though the suggestion that it was posted at the praetorium (headquarters) at Umm el-Jimal, which happens to be near the main gate to the town, seems sensible enough.  At present work continues on the edict.  Professor Denis Feissel, along with Drs. Ignacio Arce and Thomas Weber, have been working away, and it seems that a complete edition will be published before long (a precis http://www.klassische-archaeologie.uni-mainz.de/Bilder_allgemein/Hallabat_Report_2013_2014Final-lightVersion.pdf I found of theirs forms the basis for this post).  Regrettably, the easily accessible (free, online) version of the text contains only a portion of the total - fragments discovered later have filled out our picture of the original, though 20% of the total remains lost.  You can see that earlier version on the link below.

http://epigraphy.packhum.org/text/321948?hs=96-108

A majority of the fragments remain at Qasr el-Hallabat.  Some more are scattered at Umm el-Jimal, and assorted museums, universities, and military (contemporary) mess halls in Jordan.  It's hard to overstate the importance of this text.  While there are other comparable edicts from Anastasius, including an English translation of a comparable edict found at Cyrenaica (Libya) below, this particular edict seems particularly important for some of the administrative and military-organizational changes implemented by the emperor. 

https://books.google.ca/books?id=zBurLat60hIC&pg=PA253&lpg=PA253&dq=ancient+roman+statutes+anastasius+libya&source=bl&ots=gfQoq-N-ZX&sig=hLO_M4YB4rAu4hrrgrKHoNLYb98&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiIlpKE7bjSAhVB9YMKHeH2CCkQ6AEIHzAA#v=onepage&q=ancient%20roman%20statutes%20anastasius%20libya&f=false

We are told, for instance, that this edict, covers a number of issues ranging from the salary of dukes and assorted branches of the military administration in the east, to the regulations regarding soldiers unfit for service and the requirement that public money for churches not be funnelled to military issues.  Needless to say, I eagerly the publication of this edict, and for the time being will content myself on working my way through the currently published portion of the text.