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.

Anna on War

The term's over and we're well into exam season.  More importantly, I'll be on leave soon, which means I hope to get back to posting blog posts regularly after a prolonged silence.  It's been another helluva year.  But the teaching has gone better than last, I think, as I've adjusted to life with two wee, wonderful children.

Not only is it exam season:  it's also rejection season.  I invested lots of effort in a big grant (SSHRC Insight) back in the late summer.  But to no avail.  After getting the bad news, I considered abandoning my proposed research project (the follow-up to all this stuff I'm working on now).  With the size of these grants and the lag time between proposal, application, success, and funding, you gotta think long term - or plan for things way down the road. 

Anyway, I considered shifting to Agathias.  It's definitely something I plan to do someday, and I thought this might be the time.  I also considered turning to the impact of war in the age of Justinian project, which I paused with the publication of Heather's book.  In the end, however, I've decided to stick with a big, long-term project on Ammianus Marcellinus.  I've already got some revisions already, which I think will make it a much better proposal when I reapply in the fall.

So what does all this have to do with Anna (and by Anna I mean Anna Komnene)?  Well, I also contemplated the merits of jumping to the middle Byzantine period, something else I've contemplated.  In the end, it seemed to me that too much work would be required of me to get it ready in time to reapply in October:  while I wouldn't entirely be starting from scratch, it wouldn't be far off.

One thing that has struck me, however, while thinking about this Ammianus project and thinking vaguely about later Byzantine historiography has been some of the points made by Nadeja Williams in this excellent article in Eidolon:  https://eidolon.pub/there-are-more-women-military-historians-than-ever-before-why-hasnt-the-field-noticed-1c26f62f2d4.  In that article, Williams says,

"women are socialized differently, their scholarship on military history is often different from the scholarship traditionally done by men. Put simply, women tend to ask different research questions about the nature of war than men have done, and tend to be more interested in the human experience and the reality of suffering in war for all who experience military conflicts."

One of the angles to my Ammianus project is a consideration of his interest in the human experience of war, which seems much more pronounced than Procopius', though which might be comparable to Agathias'.  While all three are men, of course, we do have one later female historian, namely Anna Komnene.  Can we find a different approach to combat in Anna, one that differs from the typical male approach we find in other classicizing historians, whether early or middle Byzantine? 

Unfortunately, my only frame of reference is the earlier historians, so I can't compare her account with her contemporaries and near contemporaries (something for another day?).  But, I thought I'd take a look at one battle, and one that jumped out was the Battle of Kalavrye fought in 1078 between the the forces of Bryennios and those of Alexios.  A civil war battle, yes, that comes early in the Alexiad, but one that she describes in some detail.  And, although she can make no claims to being there, she obviously had good access to one of the principal participants (her father), if not both (if Bryennios was her father-in-law).  Before I raise a few points, I should say that some have disparaged her accounts of battle:  the translators of the revised Penguin version called her descriptions of battle "the least impressive passages in the history" in the midst of an otherwise glowing assessment.

In this one case, is Anna more interested in the human experience of war, at least in this one battle (described at 1.4.1ff)?  Well, at the start she includes some expected elements, like relative deployment and composition of the two forces, and a comment or two about the fortune of war.  Not surprisingly, she does tend to single in on individual soldiers, and officers, and her father at that (the heroic lead of her Alexiad, and by her reckoning an equal to Scipio Aemilianus or even Hannibal (1.1.3)).  It's not surprising, however, because this is what "good" Byzantine historians had been doing for centuries, as tradition dictated.  That said, Anna includes some remarkable descriptions of the human experience of combat. 

In the midst of the catalogue of forces, for instance, Byrennios, "circling round in their midst like some Ares or a Giant standing out head and shoulders above all others, taller by a cubit, was in truth an object of wonder and dread to those who saw him" (1.4. - all translations from the updated Penguin edition). A little later, while the battle is well and truly under way, we get this:  "Seeing all this Alexius covered his face, drawing down the vizor fastened to the rim of his helmet, and with the six men I spoke of before rushed violently against them" (1.5).  Alexios single-handedly emboldens his side by snatching the the emperor's horse and leading it back to his men.  Then,

"Wherever they happened to be they stood motionless, looking back to the rear and amazed beyond all belief by what they saw. It was indeed an extra-ordinary sight: the horses on which they rode were gazing to the front, but the faces of the riders turned backwards; they neither advanced nor had they any intention of wheeling about, but just stopped, dumbfounded and utterly unable to understand what had happened. The Scyths thought of home and were already on their way; they had no further interest in pursuit, but far off from both armies wandered around at random with their booty."

Anna doesn't fly around from general to general, but zooms in on smaller groups with their officers and focuses on their experiences - physical, emotional, and pyschological.  She has any eye for the vivid detail too.  A bit later, having switched to Bryennios, we find this episode:

"He himself, the deviser of the whole stratagem, followed immediately behind them with as many soldiers collected from his scattered forces as the circumstances demanded. At this point one of the ‘Immortals’ serving under him, a hot-headed, reckless fellow, spurred on his horse in front of the rest and slackening rein charged straight for Bryennius. He thrust his spear very hard at Bryennius’ chest, but he, drawing his sword quickly, before the spear could be driven home cut it off above the point, struck his attacker by the collar-bone, and as he bore down with all his might severed his whole arm, cutting right through his breastplate. Meanwhile the Turks riding up one after the other covered the enemy with showers of arrows. Bryennius’ men were overwhelmed by the unexpectedness of this onslaught; nevertheless they recovered and re-formed ranks. Calling upon one another to endure like men they bore the shock of the attack."

Things get worse for the general a bit later:

"But when his [Bryennios'] horse grew weary, unable either to flee or even pursue (for it was almost at its last gasp through constant chargings) Bryennius reined it in, and like some noble athlete stood ready for combat, challenging two high-born Turks to fight. One struck at him with his spear, but was not fast enough to give a heavy blow; instead he received a heavier one from Bryennius’s right arm, which, too quick for him, cut off his hand with his sword, and hand and spear rolled to the ground. The other Turk leapt down from his horse and panther-like jumped on to Bryennius’ mount, fastening himself on its flank, and there he clung desperately, trying to climb on its back. Bryennius like a wild beast kept twisting round and tried to stab him off with his sword, but without success, for the Turk behind him kept swaying to avoid the blows. Eventually his right arm tired of striking at empty air and himself worn out with fighting, Bryennius surrendered to the main body of the enemy. They seized him and like men who have won great glory took him off to Alexius. The latter was standing not far away from the place where Bryennius was taken and was at the time marshalling the Turks and his own men, encouraging them to fight."




This is remarkable stuff.  There's nothing quite like this in Ammianus, Procopius, and Agathias, so far as I can remember.  I'll have to look closer at Anna and her contemporaries' and near-contemporaries' accounts, but Williams' comments might not only apply to modern scholarship, but to medieval authors too.  More to come...eventually...

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? :)

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!

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...)

End of Term, Continued

The term may be over, but the deadlines remain.  Besides the pile of marking that awaits, I have a conference paper to write, two book chapters to finish/tweak, a pile of research grants to review, a volume's worth of Phoenix articles to read, and a webinar to think about.  And all of this is due by the 10th of May. 

All that being said, and perhaps not surprisingly, I want to start with Netflix.  I waited with eager anticipation for the arrival of the new Troy show.  The first episode left me wanting, though I was surprised by how varied the quantity of myths connected to Troy they included (death of Menelaus' father, Paris' first love as a shepherd, the Odysseus' madness and his son story).  Because I wasn't enamoured, and all I really want to do is travel the stars, Lost in Space stole me away a little into episode two of Troy.  I'm more than halfway through, and am thoroughly enjoying it.  Admittedly, I tend to like shows like this more for how they stir my imagination (what would it be like to travel the stars) than anything else. 

Anyway, I did manage to go back to Troy, and I think the second episode was thoroughly enjoyable, at least what I've seen so far.  Although Agamemnon was underwhelming at first, once the issue with the winds cropped up, and the decision was made to sacrifice his daughter, I was impressed with how they presented it.  I wondered too, like the fate of the Trojans as a whole, if it was somehow more emotional (for me the viewer) because I knew what was going to happen.  To have to meet Iphigenia, and see how she reacted to her father's confession - and his anguish, Clytemnesra's pain, Odysseus' subterfuge:  that scene to my mind was something else.  Suffice to say, I'm now hooked, even if I've always wished the Trojans had won.  They may have left out ole smelly-foot's abandoning (Philoctetes), or the thrilling landing on the shore at Troy, but I'm looking forward to what comes next.  It's definitely something I'll be using in myth class next year - and Troy as a whole will be getting much more attention. 

Over the next few days, I need to do some thinking about Procopius, as I'll be participating in the Virtual Centre for Late Antiquity's first webinar on Monday (10:30...or 10am CST) on said historian.  We have a few bigger themes that we're going to discuss, and I guess I should get a better handle on where I land on all of them, or even if there is somewhere I land.  I don't want to give the game away - is it possible to build up suspense for a webinar on Procopius - but they're big issues, some I've been thinking about for the purposes of this SSHRC grant that is getting closer to its end.  Along those lines, rather than spilling the beans, I'd like to highlight a question I asked an undergraduate student (Dan Russell) who defended his honour's thesis just a few days ago:  how would you approach the subject if you didn't have Procopius?  Because the central item (Procopius book one sequel) that will emerge from the grant deals with him, I've started wondering that myself.  How would a monograph-length account of military matters in the sixth century East Roman Empire look if you didn't have Procopius?  To some degree, I'll be answering this in my follow-up, which will focus more specifically on limitanei (think all these trips to Jordan).  But it's easier to do in that case as you have inscriptions, papyri, and the physical remains of fortifications, some of which have been fully excavated.  What do you do if you want to focus on matters that pertain to war and that have a direct impact on the heart of the state, and the central activities that an army is engaged in?  Battle would be difficult, though not impossible, without Procopius:  you'd still have Maurice, Pseudo-Joshua, and Agathias for instance.  You could even cover aspects of Justinian's reconquest thanks to authors like Malalas, Corippus, and the author/s of the lives of the Popes.  It would be easier still if you used Theophanes, though given he both quoted and paraphrased Procopius it would seem a bit like cheating.  This (leaving out Procopius) is an easier question to ask/issue to tackle if you're not interested in war.  It's much more difficult if you are.  Would anyone read/accept an article on the things Procopius covers that doesn't include Procopius? Maybe I'll do a post on this over the weekend to get me thinking about the webinar.

I'm going to stop there.  For all the challenges I faced with my Roman army (and myth) class this year, the former's essays were just about the best, collectively, I've ever read.  I'm not sure if this is because I've gone soft, I've forgotten past years, they're cheating (some), or the abstract/outline assignment actually worked, but I'm pleasantly surprised.  And with that, I'm going to do some Procopius reading/thinking, at least when I'm not thinking about the Jets' playoff run - one more tangent.  I seem to have reached a stage in my sports-fan life when there are very few teams that I really care about (i.e. there used to be so many more):  number one the Sens (Ottawa Senators), two the Jets (Winnipeg Jets), and three the Jays (Toronto Blue Jays).  I used to be much more into certain national team things, and random teams from other sports, but really it's Sens, Jets, and then Jays.  Who was I kidding?

Till next time...

Procopius Revisited

Time for some more reflection.  First, I love the fact that Cameron's and Kaldellis' chapters bookend the book.  I also confess a great love - too strong? - for reading about how scholars came to their chosen topics/views.  Reading Cameron's discussion of how she came to Procopius were fascinating.  At the same time, I like Kaldellis' idea that more of us (those writing about Procopius) ought to say why we like reading him.  I admit in my own case I was influenced by three things.  I knew little about late antiquity (why did we cut off there?), but I started doing some background reading to bring myself up to speed.  One particularly influential book for me was Cameron's first edition of the Mediterranean in Late Antiquity. In that book, this fellow Procopius kept popping up.  While I don't remember what stood out, I do remember the sense that he seemed an intriguing figure who deserved closer attention.  I seem to recall too that some of the formative thinking about this took place on a stationary bike at the McMaster University athletic centre (circa 2001, 2002).

Second, I love these sorts of chapters/papers:  ones that highlight key aspects of a topic, some gaps in the scholarship, and avenues for future work.  More often than not, these are the ones that have the most scribbles in my copies.  Given my love for Roman military things, historiography things, and late antique things, it's no surprise that these chapters here really float my boat.

Third, I want to go back to a couple of points that both Cameron and Kaldellis have made (separate ones, more or less), which have given me much to think about.  One is Cameron's emphasis on narrative and storytelling, that I mentioned in my woe-is-me post (which also has me thinking:  what sorts of efforts should we make to publicize our books, and how can I make my work reach more people?).  Cameron notes that his narrative approach relates to writers of sixth century history as well as other types of Byzantine prose writing, like hagiography.  That's a fascinating idea, and I'm sure not wrong.  I remember coming across all sorts of useful discussion vaguely related to these comments in Clark's 2004 book, History, Theory, Text.  Maybe this is one avenue that deserves more exploration:  Procopius and hagiography.  After all, Procopius spends a lot of time characterizing a few individuals in his Wars, to say nothing of his Secret History.  In crafting his portraits of Belisarius, has Procopius adopted and adapted some of the techniques employed by hagiographers? 

Cameron also draws attention to Procopius' writing practices, especially with respect to what he chose to include and exclude.  I talked about this a bit, but I'll be touching on it even more in the sequel.  It seems to me that one of the hardest things to grasp (and it's almost certainly impossible) is why Procopius left things out, and one particular topic I'll be looking at in the book is recruitment.  I suspect that as work continues on this sequel, I might have to address quite regularly why things were left out:  did it suit his literary objectives somehow, is it a desire to make his work more palatable to his audience?  There's so much he likely did know, even the regularly military stuff I'm interested, that he doesn't discuss. 

Yeah, I seem to be trailing off so I'll move on to the next topic.  Cameron stresses that all three of Procopius' works are anchored in material life, while Kaldellis (following Turquois) highlights the materiality of Procopius' writing.  This is how he "structures, textures, surfaces, and fleshes out a world for us" (Kaldellis 2017:  265).  His point is that Procopius has produced a literary simulacrum of sixth-century experience, and he draws attention to a number of topics for which this might be true including weapons, wounds, and forts.  What I need to do, clearly, is read Turquois' thesis in its entirety and bear her conclusions in mind when looking at all the war stuff.  One current project, stemming from the grant, is on battle narrative in late antique classicizing historiography. It might be worthwhile to consider all this as I examine (or continue - it's well on its way) my intended subjects, Ammianus, Jordanes, Procopius, Agathias, and Theophylact.   As it happens, when it comes to open or pitched battle, Procopius might well be one of the weaker ones of the group.  I think, if anything, Agathias and Ammianus might be the strongest in this regard, though only time will tell (and more reading). 

Unfortunately now Cameron and Kaldellis have me wanting to write a third and fourth sequel of my Procopius book, the third on narrative techniques in the Wars as a whole (maybe narrative and character), the fourth on the materiality of warfare in Procopius.  But then I'll never do any of these other things.  Maybe I could combine the two into my eventual study of Agathias?  If nothing else, this book has so far reminded me why Procopius might still be one of my favourite topics.  It's also been a very challenging year or three professionally, and it's stimulating discussions like these that keep me going.

The Monograph Do-over

I've been reading some of the chapters, particularly the opening and closing sections, in Lillington-Martin and Turquois' new edited volume on Procopius, and a few things have jumped out at me, much as I suspected they would.  For one, it's a bit disappointing my book came out as late as it did, as the gestation period of the edited volume meant that no one really had the chance to digest what I had to say.  On the other hand, had the edited volume come out before the book, there's every chance I might have seriously considered tweaking (to put it mildly) some of the book to respond to the interesting points that have been made.  One other, general observation:  some of the avenues for future research proclaimed in this book I have already embarked upon.

Let's begin with the first point.  A couple of contributors (Whitby and Kaldellis) draw attention (or at least refer in passing) to the heroic, even Homeric, character of the Gothic War narrative, especially as it applies to the siege of Rome (537/538).  I discuss all this in detail in the book (chapter 4).  Somewhat frustratingly, I'd initially stumbled across this character to the narrative back at the start of the PhD in 2006.  But things being what they are, Hornblower managed to comment on it before I did, at least in print, owing to the publication of his contribution to the Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Warfare.  Still my chapter, a revised version of what was in the original PhD, discusses this in detail. 

Indeed, Kaldellis (2017:  261) notes that Procopius' "coverage has breadth and detail in the right proportions as a military historian".  That, in a nutshell, summarizes what I argue on the book, though my focus is more narrowly on battle.  To complicate things, the follow-up, or sequel (which I've discussed regularly in this blog) as I'm thinking about it, will look at this more broadly, though more on this a bit later.

Another point that Cameron, Van Nuffelen, and Kaldellis draw attention to (to some degree or other) is the relationship between author and text.  On the one hand, there's caution about how much we can take an author at his word (Cameron, Kaldellis).  On the other, Van Nuffelen notes scholars have hardly ever heeded the advice of literary scholars that author and text are two different things.  I did - and had planned to do more of this in the monograph.  My desire to do so, however, was regularly tempered (by others) at the various submission/revision stage, such that I ended up including a background chapter (one that I'd planned to add to the end - after the reader had seen what I had to say about the text). 

The narrative structure of Procopius' works features too, unsurprisingly.  There's a sense that more could be done on this.  Cameron (2017:  15) identifies this as an approach that "seeks to analyse the techniques by which narrative is constructed" and highlights his techniques of narrative and storytelling , while Kaldellis (2017:  261) says that Procopius' "ontology of action" remains to be studied.  Although my focus was narrower (combat), this, again, is precisely what my book does.  I ask (or answer), how does Procopius tell the story of battle, and what sort of narrative techniques does he employ?  See, for instance, the second sections of my second, third, and fourth chapters.  It involves bringing some narrative theory into the discussion, though also hints of rhetoric and classicism, among other things. 

On the other hand, doubt is cast on the value of genre in understanding a text.  Admittedly, I stressed the importance of genre in understanding how Procopius describes and explains combat.  I even went so far as to claim that Procopius was constrained by his chosen genre (classicizing history).  I think my point, however, was that this explained why he didn't include all those little details that military historians are often so keen on.  Indeed, I also tried to show that for all this influence of genre, he was able to craft some truly remarkable accounts of battle, and that his latent classicism didn't necessarily mean that he couldn't represent reality truthfully (Van Nuffelen 2017:  40 - the prologue, section four in my introduction, and chapter six).  Additionally, I spent a good part of the time showing what makes his accounts of combat in the Wars such dramatic narratives (section three in chapter two, and sections 2a, though maybe 2b and 2c too, in chapter four).

Then there are the avenues for future research (they are many), some of which I've started to take up (or will do soon).  Cameron (2017:  18) says it's inadequate to evaluate Procopius' three works in terms of reliability and truth-telling.  This had been my intention with the follow-up, under the preconception that people would rather read that sort of thing than what I had done in Battles and Generals.  Some months ago that approach seemed better left for something else (a commentary, maybe), and some sort of unifying theme would make for a much better project.  Well, lo and behold, that's when I stumbled across the emphasis on fear, raiding, booty, and defence that unifies all three texts, at least if your focus (like mine) is on military issues.  Along the way I plan to situate Procopius' writing on war in the real-world context.  This means, to follow Kaldellis (2017:  269) to some degree, to look at the sixth century empire's military institutions through an analysis of the papyrological, legal, and narrative evidence, though I too will be using, where warranted, the epigraphic evidence.  Increasingly, it seems, scholars are seeking to understand the relationship between Procopius and Justinian's laws (Kaldellis 2017:  268), and I plan to do this, where possible, and where it pertains to military issues, in the sequel.

So there's me responding to what I've read so far.  There's more, and there will be more, but my bicycle's busted and I think my youngest daughter (all of 1.5 months) may soon crack.

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.

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.