Hey folks! The conclusion of our look at the Siege of Eregion in Rings of Power will have to wait a week because I am off to a conference this week, the annual meeting of the Society for Military History, this year in Mobile, Alabama! I’m set to talk about how Roman military commanders were prepared for command (below), but as I type this, we also had a fascinating early morning roundtable, organized by Lee Brice on the concept of discipline in ancient Roman and Greek armies; Clausewitz was invoked (drink!) as was Sunzi (that is, Sun Tzu) and even Foucault (bingo!). But it was a fascinating discussion where I think the big takeaway is how – despite efforts to treat ‘discipline’ as a single cross-cultural concept – discipline is both several conjoined ideas (synchronization, obedience, systems of rewards and punishments, etc.) and also substantially culturally contingent.
I had hoped to get the blog post done before leaving, but alas, it was not to be. But, so that I don’t leave you with nothing to read, I figure I can give you the abstract to my talk, some of the charts and diagrams I made to illustrate my points, and then a few interesting links.
So my talk for SMH 2025 is “Learning Imperium: Command Preparation in the Middle Republic.” Here is the abstract:
Through the Roman Republic’s remarkable string of military triumphs during the third and second centuries B.C.E., the Romans could boast of relatively few ‘military geniuses.’ Instead, the Roman aristocracy proved itself remarkably adept at churning out a procession of effective, if uninspired, workmanlike generals who were up to the task of managing the increasingly complex logistics and tactical system Rome relied upon for success in conducting simultaneous military operations in multiple theaters at considerable distance. The Romans lacked, however, formal institutions for officer training, a flaw that has been cited as evidence of a more general Roman inability to think and plan strategically. This paper argues that the customary military-political career path of the Roman Republic, the cursus honorum, functioned in the place of such formal institutions, structuring a Roman aristocrat’s career as a series of apprenticeships under the eyes of more experienced commanders. Performance was in turn evaluated through elections by Roman voters and through assignments by the Senate, while time spent as ‘back-benchers’ in the Senate between assignments served to homogenize strategic vision. This system served to ‘mass produce’ Roman generals who, if not endowed with genius, were nevertheless capable and reliable instruments of Roman strategic policy as set by the Senate.
Now I can’t share the full text of the talk – like most conference papers, it is preliminary and very rough around the edges, representing the beginning of a project that is still under development. But for the presentation, I did draw up some basic charts which I thought might interest you all, so here they are.
Let’s start with this one, a graph of all attested Roman commands (defined here by me as a magistrate or promagistrate confirmed to have either an army or a territorial provincia) by year for the good stretch of Livy we have from 218 to 167. There are some gaps – those sharp downturns in the 170s are mostly instances where Livy hasn’t reported what the praetors are doing or is giving an incomplete picture of pro-magistrate assignments, so the real line should probably be a bit steadier and somewhat higher on the back end.
I also made, simply for illustrative purposes to help an audience mostly of more modern military historians keep track of how the Roman career path works, a chart of the standard progression a Roman aristocrat’s political-military career might take (though I have stuck to militarily relevant roles, thus the absence of aediles, tribunes of the plebs, etc):
And finally, to illustrate a point about how an up-and-coming (rather than senior) Roman aristocrat might experience the Senate, I decided to make up a chart of the ‘typical’ composition of the Roman Senate in the Second Century, given our typical assumptions about life expectancy and mortality in the Roman world and assuming most of these fellows are holding their offices at or near the earliest eligible age. The result is a very approximate breakdown, but perhaps a useful one:
Finally, some links!
First off, I’ve been on some podcasts! On the fantasy front, I recently talked Tolkien with the folks over at the Prancing Pony Podcast again, this time about some of the early history of Gondor and Rohan contained in the appendices and Unfinished Tales. On the ancient history front, I also had a long discussion with Liberal Currents’ Samantha Hancox-Li on everyone’s least favorite murderous Roman dictator, L. Cornelius Sulla, both on what he did and a bit on why the newest new right seems oddly obsessed with such a negative figure.
And for something to read, data journalist and podcaster David H. Montgomery over with YouGov put together a fascinating survey of American’s attitudes towards the European Middle Ages. Some expected, if unfortunate results, in that Americans still very much believe in a ‘dark ages,’ but also some surprises, like the relatively low recognition of Saladin, who I had thought had a bit more pop-cultural presence as the archetypal ‘noble Muslim ruler.’ For more learned commentary on the results, David Perry and Matthew Gabriel (the authors of The Bright Ages) discussed the results in some interesting detail.
So we’ll be back next week, when we’ll close out our look at the Siege of Eregion in Rings of Power. After that, I am planning at least a brief discussion on the non-existence of ancient ‘special forces,’ mulling over a ‘Brief History of Classical Decadence’ and there’s also been requests for a deeper look at the Carthaginian military system of the Punic Wars. So more to look forward to, once I am back from Mobile!
