Fireside this week! I am still a bit behind after attending the annual meeting of the Society for Military History – conferences always leave me a bit tired and slow to get back to writing, even as they also stimulate my thinking – so the conclusion of our look at Rings of Power must wait another week. Nevertheless, I thought I’d share some of the thoughts that SMH has sent percolating in my head.
For this week’s musing, I thought I might continue some of my general thoughts from the really interesting roundtable at the Society of Military History organized by Lee Brice on the nature of ancient discipline. I think ‘discipline’ is one of those concepts that is both quite important, but also ends up turned into something of a totem, where folks confuse indicators (often visual indicators) of discipline with the actual outputs they expect from discipline. And that is in part because ‘discipline’ means a set of inputs (rewards, punishments, regulations), a set of outputs (collective battlefield maneuvers, cohesion and obedience) and also the process by which the former can produce the latter.
So let’s try to pull those apart a bit.
Our word ‘discipline’ comes from Latin, disciplina. And immediately the challenge is that the normal historian’s “resort to the original language” for greater precision is unavailable, because disciplina is every bit as broad as ‘discipline’ and in most of the same ways. At its root, disciplina means ‘teaching’ (from disco, discere, “to learn,” thus a discipulus is a student (‘learner’), etc.) and so in a military concept – because this is a word that does appear outside of a military context – it means something at its root like ‘training’ – both in the sense of the act of training and also in the sense of the knowledge imparted by training.
But it clearly also comes to include something more: the result (or expected result) of training. Disciplina militaris, ‘military discipline’ thus comes to mean a code of behavior rather than merely drill, something emperors can ‘restore’ when they reform an army. And as J.E. Lendon demonstrates at length in Soldier’s and Ghosts (2006), disciplina is the thing in the Roman mind which tempers courage, zeal and ability (virtus): it holds a soldier back when he needs to be held back. And we know from other authors, particularly Polybius, that the Romans created this disciplina in part through a system of rewards and punishments, although here an immediate caveat is necessary: Roman ‘discipline’ in this sense is proverbially harsh because that is how Polybius presents it, but in actual practice we know that many of those brutal punishments he discusses were basically never used. The vision of the Roman military as swift to punish and fierce in punishments isn’t quite true, at least for the Middle Republic.
Nevertheless, one sees both in historical militaries and in modern discussions of military issues, this sort of fetishization of ‘harsh discipline,’ by which is meant punishments, strict regulations and so on, as the way to produce what we might call ‘combat discipline’ in the sense of soldiers that comply swiftly and effectively with orders.
So as a matter of cognitive hygiene, I think its worth parceling out the different sorts of discipline, because while discipline as a single idea is useful, we also want to make sure we can break it up into its component parts to understand what we mean.
First, we have a category of ‘input discipline,’ which we can break down further. First, there is ‘discipline as teaching,’ which I’d further break down into individual training and group drill (this distinction matters for the outputs!). Then there is ‘discipline as rewards and punishments’ – with much of the attention often incorrectly placed on punishments – which I might call corrective discipline. Then finally, there is ‘discipline as regulations and life habits (habitus), which is, I think, distinct from corrective discipline. This is the category for things like Roman generals restoring ‘discipline’ by having their soldiers build lots of field fortifications or restricting their diets to essentials and thus inuring them to hardship and encouraging obedience. This is a tricky category, the one where I think there’s the greatest temptation to fail to consider if the input is actually connected to the output and to instead make a fetish out of the input. In any case, I’d call this regulatory discipline.
Then, of course, we have ‘output discipline,’ which are the results that ‘discipline,’ broadly construed, is supposed to produce. The most prominent of these is what Wayne Lee calls collective, synchronized discipline, the ability to get units of soldiers to fight together in a synchronized, mutually reinforcing way at greater and greater degrees of complexity. That may perhaps be related to, but is not the same as obedience to discipline, the quality of an army which obeys the orders it is given, even when they are unpleasant or difficult. This latter point is something that jumps out at descriptions of the Roman army in Greek writers (particularly Polybius and Josephus): they are shocked by Roman generals’ ability get their soldiers to do uncomfortable things, like dig earthworks, carry their own supplies, eat simple rations and carry lots of tools. But note how, while obedience to discipline and synchronized discipline are often conflated, they’re not the same: a lot of early modern pike-and-shot armies had tremendous synchronized discipline, but were mutiny-prone and it was often difficult to get them to do things like haul their own supplies or prepare their own food.
Finally, we have the ‘outputs’ that get associated with discipline but which do not require it: individual combat skill and cohesion. The association is really strong because in the early modern European military tradition (itself imitating the Roman military tradition), these values were produced through drill (which also produces synchronized discipline) and regulatory discipline. But equally, we see high combat skill in societies which do not practice drill (non-state warriors are an easy example) and high cohesion from societies which lack either drill or strong regulatory discipline (hoplites, for instance).
So ‘discipline’ as an intellectual category still has value, not the least because our sources often think it does, but we should be mindful that it is more of a category than an object: a set of interrelated ideas, rather than a single practice. And in particular, that category is a set of ‘inputs’ which military leaders assume (sometimes wrongly!) reliably produce a set of desired outputs that in turn they imagine make armies more able to win battles, which is the thing they want.
On to recommendations:
First off, in my last roundup, I forgot to include yet one more podcast I did: I was on Tides of History with Patrick Wyman talking about the military of the Roman Republic (particularly the Middle Republic during the Punic Wars). And for those who enjoyed that, I am set to record a follow-up episode next week (to go up some time later than that) to cover the other side and talk about the Carthaginian military during the Punic Wars! I’m quite excited for that, because I think the common understanding of Carthage’s armies (‘mercenaries!’) is actually mostly wrong – a point on which we may return for a blog post later in the year.
Meanwhile, just yesterday we got the latest edition of Pasts Imperfect and it is a doozy of a crossover as the team behind another ACOUP favorite, Peopling the Past popped over to discuss their project and what they have coming up. Also via Pasts Imperfect, I want to shout out the Mapping Color in History database which tracks the use of different pigments in different Asian paintings. As we talked about with textiles, in a world before synthetic dyes, pigments and colors were a product of the materials you could get and those pigments mattered a lot, so this is a fascinating database of what could be used (with an outside-of-Europe perspective, no less – valuable because most of the scholarship on this topic focuses on Europe).
Also via Pasts Imperfect but worth pulling out, an open access study, “Geochemical and Pb isotpic constraints on the provenance of the Lupa Capitolina bronze statue” (2025) has shown that – to the surprise of few Classicists, but I imagine many other folks – that the famed statue of Romulus, Remus and the she-wolf at the Capitoline (the Lupa Capitolina of the title) is, in fact, not ancient. Neither Roman, nor Etruscan, but rather High Medieval, probably made with copper from Carolingian/French/Holy-Roman-Imperial Europe.
Finally, for those on Bluesky, Evan Schultheis (M.A. Winthrop University) posted a fascinating thread on Byzantine swords, with quite a lot of detail and pictures, discussing their design and development. I found it quite informative, so I imagine many of you will too!
And for this week’s book recommendation, a mix of literature and history, John Garth’s Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth (2003). This is the sort of book that is both exactly its title and at the same time quite a bit more than its title. There is, of course, a necessary caveat: the reader who goes into Garth’s work hoping for a history of the First World War will be disappointed, as the narrative remains fixed on J.R.R. Tolkien and while Tolkien saw far too much of the war, he also didn’t see a very large portion of it. This is a book about Tolkien in the Great War, not Tolkien and the Great War. There was, I should note, an attempt to make a film out of this book, which turned out alright, but lost much of the power of the book in the translation to the compressed medium that is film.
It is also not just a book about Tolkien or the ‘Threshold of Middle-earth.’ Garth follows Tolkien from his youth to his demobilization in 1919, but the scope here is wider, encompassing the core four members of Tolkien’s circle of friends, the “Tea Club, Barrovian Society” (T.C.B.S.) as they emerge, begin to write and display brilliance and depth of feeling and then of course as the Great War gets to the grim business of killing nearly all of them. The book is really about the T.C.B.S. – particularly its core four, Tolkien, Christopher Wiseman, Geoffrey Bache Smith (d. 1916) and Robert Gilson (d. 1916) as much as it is about Tolkien. The narrative is, in its own way, that single tragic line from Tolkien’s own foreward, “By 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead” expanded into a book, and there is value in that. In the process, Garth walks the reader through the slow genesis of Tolkien’s legendarium and his development as a myth-maker, presenting the developments of Tolkien’s writing side by side both with the snippets of his colleagues writing and the narrative of Tolkien and his compatriot’s lives.
Garth’s book is, of course, illuminating for any fan of Middle Earth who wishes to understand how their favorite ‘secondary world’ came into being. The book seems to set out with the goal to trace the First World War’s influence on the legendarium and does so, particularly in its last chapters as the gloom of war quite visibly seeps into the formation of the foundation stones of the legendarium, the Fall of Gondolin and the Tale of Túrin Turambar. But I found just as valuable and striking the many short passages of works not just by Tolkien but also by the other T.C.B.S.ites Garth sprinkles through the text, a glimpse into a literary and moral universe interesting on its own. The reader may be tempted to skip these excerpts (they do come quite frequently and dense in much of the book) but ought not; they produce much of the point and poignancy of the book.
It is oddly fitting, in a book about how Middle Earth came to be, to thus feel the anticipation of the creation of something wondrous, dyed completely through with the dark shades of grief at the world of myth and poetry and possibility that was lost to the hell of war.
