Fireside Friday, April 12, 2024

Fireside this week! Apologies for having so many of these so close together, but the recent car troubles I’ve had have eaten into my time quite a lot. At the same time I am getting ready for the annual Society for Military History conference coming at the end of next week. In an effort to make a virtue of necessity then, I’ll muse a bit on the topic of the roundtable at SMH that I am moderating, “Warfighting other than Battle in the Late Classical and Hellenistic World.”

We seem to have gotten more Percy pictures lately, so here is Ollie resting a bit after a hard day’s worth of resting a bit, but he moves on to his arduous post-nap nap.

I was actually brought in somewhat late to fill in as moderator for the panel so I didn’t have a choice in the title, but I actually think the title is very well and carefully chosen. There is a tendency to talk about these kinds of non-battle military actions as ‘irregular’ or ‘unconventional’ in some way, and I think this is actually a mistake in essentially any period, but especially for pre-modern armies.

Of course the first problem is one of framing. To imply certain kinds of warfare (generally warfare focused on raiding, ambushes or popular resistance to imperial authority) are ‘irregular’ or ‘unconventional’ is to set out an unexamined assumption that the other kind of warfare – large armies meeting in pitched battles or sieges – is ‘regular’ or ‘conventional’ which is to say normal or typical. But in fact ‘unconventional’ warfare, as we discussed with my loose concept of the ‘First System of War‘ is the oldest form of warfare, the oldest convention, as it were.⁵⁹² Instead, historically speaking it is the battles-and-sieges agrarian system (what I’ve termed the ‘Second System’) which is the newer one.

But even within ‘second system’ armies – the armies of, say, Alexander or the Romans – soldiers are doing a lot of ‘warfighting’ that resembles, when it isn’t identical to, supposed ‘unconventional’ or ‘guerrila’ warfare. We imagine raiding and cattle rustling to be the kind thing done by bandits or by unsophisticated non-state ‘tribal’ peoples (and they do do that!) but this was also a core part of how supposedly more sophisticated large ‘conventional’ state armies worked! A big ‘conventional’ Roman army, moving through enemy territory would be raiding the villages and towns it moved through, stealing foraging food from the locals, grabbing moveable wealth and also, of course, abducting and enslaving people.

Likewise, it isn’t like big armies don’t try to surprise or ambush each other, but rather than very large armies struggle to surprise each other and well commanded, which is to say surrounded by a cloud of scouts, they are also hard to surprise. Though they can surprise civilians in villages, which loops right back in to the point about foraging. Finally, ‘policing’ actions in antiquity are also often not very different from banditry. While sometimes troops deployed this way are enforcing laws more broadly as we’d understand them, generally their primary purpose is to assure the regular collection of tribute and to employ violence – or at least the threat of violence – to make sure it gets collected.

This isn’t to say there’s no difference. Roman armies do not seek to conceal themselves in the civilian population, for instance and the taking and holding of territory is a meaningful difference as well. But rather that we’re not looking at a ‘bright line’ between what big state armies do in battles and sieges and what smaller forces do in raids, ambushes, banditry or resistance. It’s a continuum of grey.

And that problem is made harder by a consistent rhetoric turn in a lot of our sources, which of course tend to be written by the literate, wealthy administrators of these big empires: the rhetorical turn to represent any resistance or opposition for anything that isn’t a peer big empire as just ‘banditry’ (e.g. Latin, latrocinium). You can see the propaganda value of this as such a label inherently delegitimizes what might be popular movements by re-classifying something like resistance simply as ‘crime’ (though we should be quick to note that there was plenty of actual banditry in antiquity as well!). But I think it was also often a sincere (but motivated) position for military aristocrats who wanted to separate the thing they did – honorably wield violence on behalf of the state – from the thing others did – dishonorable wield violence without the sanction of the state. That said, our aristocratic sources are also perfectly happy to classify local resistance as ‘banditry’ too, even when the targets of this ‘banditry’ are traditional military targets in warfare in this period, like raids against forts or garrisons, or violence against state officials like tax collectors, or efforts to seize population centers.

That said, this tendency to reduce almost any form of non-state violence (or of non-recognized state violence) to ‘banditry’ can have adverse impacts on our understanding of warfare. A good example of this is in how generations of scholars have regarded Roman fighting in Spain. For a long time, the native Spaniards (Iberians, Celtiberians, Lusitanians, etc. etc.) were often regarded as ‘irregulars’ or ‘guerrilas’ in part because our sources keep calling them bandits and in part, I suspect, from the long shadow that actual Spanish guerillas fighting Napoleon in the Peninsular War (1807-1814) cast. Scholars looked at these ‘bandits’ in their sources and said, “ah yes, the venerable ‘Spanish guerilla’ from antiquity to today.”

Except – as Fernando Quesada Sanz has been pointing out now in his lonely crusade for roughly two decades – these ‘guerilla’ armies of ‘bandits’ in fact often fought in pitched battles! When they fight the Romans, they aren’t usually skirmishing or ambushing, but forming into main battle lines or resisting the Romans in sieges (like that at Numantia, famously). Absolutely, these armies also engage in raiding, but so do the Romans and one man’s raid is another’s ‘foraging operation.’

Finally, much of the time ‘warfighting other than battle’ flies quite under the radar in our sources. We catch glimpses of some of this low-level violence in our sources when things ‘blow up’ in a region or when, by some accident of preservation, we have local records (mostly this happens in Egypt). What we see is actually quite a fair bit of low-level violence as part of the ‘maintenance’ of empire: taxes and tribute were generally not popular and so force might be required. That might produce resistance, including armed resistance, which in turn produced a lot of low-level fighting which was nevertheless important for the continued function of the larger imperial state. The impression one gets is that the Romans achieve a bit more compliance than most ancient empires, but only a bit. I’ve recommended it before, but if you want to get a sense of the kind of regular use of force the Romans required to administer their empire – even in the minimal, generally indirect way they did so in the early empire – the book to read is C. J. Fuhrmann’s Policing the Roman Empire: Soldiers, Administration and Public Order (2012).

On to Recommendations:

The latest Pasts Imperfect has an interesting short essay by Tim Whitmarsh musing on the complexity of authorship in the context of Candida Moss’ God’s Ghostwriters (which I have not read) on the likely role of enslaved scribes in the production of classical texts, particularly the Bible. The issue also notes – and this is well worth relating – that the Getty has made some 88,000 images downloadable under a Creative Commons license (CC0, in fact). Included in the Getty’s collection and the new image release are some notable ancient artifacts. Of particular interest to me is the decorated bronze shield-cover generally known as the ‘Shield of Pharnakes,’ as its inscription declares it to belong to King Pharnakes, which would be Pharnakes I of Pontus (r. c. 190-155).

Also on the Classics front, Peopling the Past had a fascinating blog-essay a couple of months back (which I have only now gotten around to) by Melissa Funke on trying to put together the life and legacy of the famous hetaira (as Funke defines it, “an upscale female sex worker” which is, I think, sometimes a clearer definition than ‘courtesan,’ a word that few use today and many students will not be able to parse the precise meaning of) of Athens, Phryne. In particular, Funke – whose book on the topic, recently out, I have not yet had a chance to read – I think brings out really well the contrast between the almost legendary Phryne of the literary tradition on the one hand and the marginal, sometimes perilous legal and social conditions under which she would have worked, where hetaira, generally being metics, lacked the protections citizen women would have.

In a more military-history focused vein, Alexander Burns posted on Twitter some of his thoughts on, as he puts it, “his students who are “into” military history” (Burns teaches at Franciscan University of Steubenville). I think his assessment of the basic stages of knowledge, moving from ‘paradigm invocation’ (the ‘received opinion‘ buttressed with lots of standard facts) to ‘paradigm rejection’ (having seen the received opinion critiqued, it is rejected wholesale) to a more sophisticated social/cultural contextualization (‘actually, the rivet-count of a T-34 matters less than these other social factors…’) and finally a more mature ‘measured appreciation’ of the breadth of the field. I’ve seen those same stages in my students too and there’s nothing wrong with the stages of development, so long as one understands that you are supposed to mature out of each.

For this week’s book recommendation, I’m going to recommend one of the books I leaned on for the last fireside on Roman values, C.A. Barton’s Roman Honor: The Fire in the Bones (2001). I studied under Barton as an undergraduate at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, but only looped back around to fully read her book on Roman honor during my Ph.D studies. This is a book about Roman culture and the Roman worldview – or more correctly the way the Romans view themselves and more crucially their innermost selves. This is an important exercise for the student of history, because, as L.P. Hartley famously put it, “The past is a foreign country; they do things differently there.” And so part of what the historian aims to do is not merely know what happened, but in order to understand why it happened, to be able to get into the minds of those people in the past, doing things differently. To put another way: we must also understand the vibes. This is a book about some serious Roman vibes.

The focus of Barton’s book, of course, is the Roman concept of honor and the whole constellation of ideas and concepts that circle around it (virtus, pudor and so on). For Barton, the Roman lived for the discrimen or certamen – that moment of testing and decision for which we have so many well-worn phrases (‘sorting the wheat from the chaff’ ‘separating the men and the boys’ and so on).⁵⁹⁴ It is in that moment that the Roman is, in a sense, most alive, propelled forward by virtus, guided by the other virtues, to pass the test and thereby win honor.

Two things, I think, distinguish Barton’s approach. The first is a focus on how these ideas make Romans feel and act; the man of honor shines, he is fiery, he glows. He stands tall, while others defer to him. The man filled with shame is the opposite. Understanding how real these ideas could be in Roman culture is in turn important for understanding how the Roman state – republic and empire – works, because it is predicated on those values, on the assumption that those not yet tested defer to those with honos who have been so tested and have shown their virtus. Second, the way Barton engages with the sources leaves a strong impression: the reader is bombarded with quotations (translated in the text, original in the footnotes) where the Romans can speak themselves about their values. And goodness do the Romans ever speak for themselves – almost never one example but half a dozen or more.

That strength can also be a weakness: to get that many references, Barton has to cast a wide net, especially chronologically and it isn’t unusual to see different examples for a point covering centuries, for instance from Plautus (late 3rd cent. BC) to Seneca (mid-late 1st cent. AD) in the same paragraph. That somewhat weakens the book’s ability to address chronological change, though Barton does work a bit of that chronology back in some of the later chapters. That said, Barton’s conception remains rooted with the bulk of her sources in the Late Republic (c. 133-31 BC) and while she stretches beyond this and notes some changes, this is fundamentally not a chronologically focused work. On the upside, the book is printed with footnotes (often taking up half a page or more!) with both original text for the translations and other useful notes, so for the student a trip from Barton’s prose to the original sources is quick and often quite fruitful.

Barton’s prose is very readable. As someone who sat in her classes, I can hear her lecture voice in the pages – she is well-known among the students as a passionate lecturer (now retired) who would shout and gesture, jump up and down and even get a bit misty-eyed at the fall of the Gracchi. The passion, I think, comes through in the book as well, to its benefit and that’s important, because this is fundamentally about things the Romans themselves were passionate about. I will also note, I think this book combines well with J.E. Lendon’s Empire of Honor (somewhat harder to obtain) to give a the fullest picture of honor in Roman affairs. But for someone looking to understand how the Romans thought about their own inner-lives and emotions, Roman Honor is, I think, the place to start.