I. General

FORMAL study of Greek and Roman warfare in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries was mostly the domain of pragmatic German academics and officers, who concentrated on broad questions of tactics and strategy, arguing over purely military or political issues often in direct reference to their own experiences and the general challenges of the contemporary German army. The studies of Delbruck, Kromayer and Veith, Bauer, and Kochly and Rustow have now been almost entirely superseded by the work of modern English, American, and French classical scholars who have integrated ancient war with larger economic and social interests arising from recent archaeological and epigraphical discoveries, if at times enhanced by comparative analyses from the social sciences.

This trend, while generally positive, has not been altogether without problems. Given the changing nature of war in the technological age, the general end of conscription in most European countries and America, and the growing material and ideological distance between soldiers and professors, it is unlikely in our lifetime that we shall see another generation of ancient military historians-as represented, for example, by N. G. L. Hammond or W. K. Pritchett-whose military service lent firsthand, common sense to their scholarship. Ancient military history in that sense is no different from general military history.

It is no exaggeration to say that all modern research on ancient Greek warfare now rests with the twenty-year monumental philologicalbased study of W. K. Pritchett, The Greek State at War, vols. 1-5 (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1971-91), which collates and reviews the ancient literary, epigraphical, and archaeological sources for booty, tactics, armament, logistics, religion, and larger issues of military organization, law, and ritual. Pritchett starts with the Greek vocabulary for particular military practices-e.g., trials of generals, surprise, wings of phalanxes, trophies, etc.-collects the ancient evidence, provides tables of citations, and then offers a brief summary of conclusions. Pritchett also has lengthy discussions of the location and terrain of battlefields, passes, roads, and harbors in his eight volumes on Greek topography, Studies in Ancient Greek Topography (vols. 1-6, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1965-89; vols. 7-8, Amsterdam: J. C. Gieben, 1991-93). His researches, which all begin with a review of the pertinent Greek vocabulary, have reestablished the general accuracy of ancient historians' descriptions of battles and serve as a warning against the modern trend toward more theoretical and sometimes fanciful recreations. Pritchett's work is currently the most used-and unfortunately not always commensurately cited-reference work on the ancient Greek world at war. His replies to some of his critics are published in a collection of essays devoted largely to military issues, Essays in Greek History (Amsterdam: J. C. Gieben, 1994).

No comparable scholarly study exists for Roman warfare-not surprising if we remember that there is a millennium of history from the early Republic to the end of Empire, in a geographic area ranging from Scotland to the Middle East, and Germany to North Africa. Thousands of archaeological sites are published in over a dozen modern European languages; hundreds of thousands of inscriptions and coins and a vast corpus of Greek and Latin literature have still not been adequately surveyed, much less incorporated into general scholarly histories. Roman military history is simply much more difficult to master in any comprehensive sense than that of the Greeks. Perhaps the best place to start to become acquainted with the primary sources are the summaries of E. Birley, The Roman Army: Papers, 1929-86 (Amsterdam: J. C. Gieben,1988); J. Gilliam, Roman Army Papers (Amsterdam: J. C. Gieben, 1986); and M. Speidel's superb ongoing Roman Army Studies, vols. 1-2 (Amsterdam: J. C. Gieben, 1984-92).

There are several one-volume introductions to Greek warfare for the general student. The most readable and lively is still F. E. Adcock's brief Sather Lecture, The Greek and Macedonian Art of War (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1957). Y Garlan's War in the Ancient World: A Social History, trans. J. Lloyd (London: Chatto & Windus, 1975) is not a comprehensive account, but provides an interesting hit-and-miss introduction to questions of slavery, class, and military law and custom. P. Ducrey, Warfare in Ancient Greece, trans. J. Lloyd (New York: Schocken Books, 1986) likewise is mostly concerned with social issues and contains a number of valuable diagrams and illustrations-it is the most readable and enjoyable of the several recent introductions to Greek warfare. French scholarship tends to be more speculative and attuned to questions of class, slavery, and the ancient economy, while English ancient military historians remain more empirical, concerned with traditional tactical and strategic questions within a wider political canvass.

For the Roman Republic, there are now more recent introductory books that supplement F. E. Adcock's The Roman Art of War under the Republic (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1940), and H. M. D. Parker's The Roman Legions, 2d ed. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971). While there are differing approaches in L. Keppie, The Making of the Roman Army (Totowa, N.J.: Barnes and Noble, 1984) and J. Harmand, L'Armee et le soldat a Rome de 107 e 50 avant notre ere (Paris: A. J. Picard et Cie, 1967), both take up the same theme of the gradual professionalization of the legions as public armies became imperial standing forces. Keppie has an especially useful and well-organized bibliography. The nineteenth-century thesis that the growth of the Empire and a professional army evolved into an ever more insidious relationship-more annexed territory demanded more professional troops, who required more pay and thus more taxation on ever more territory-may have been shown at times to be overly simplistic, but its general truth has still not really been questioned.

For the warring of the Empire itself, inexpensive versions of older editions-some revised, some not-have now appeared; see, for example, G. Webster, The Roman Imperial Army, 3d ed. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1998) and G. R. Watson, The Roman Soldier (London: Thames & Hudson, 1983). Both cover the main issues of armament, pay, tactics, strategy, and the political ramifications of professional troops, if giving us less information on how the legions actually fought. A still useful and very readable survey for the general reader is M. Grant's The Army of the Caesars (New York: Scribner, 1974), which emphasizes the great cost of the imperial legions. A similar introductory, more recent account with wonderful illustrations of a variety of Roman military practices is Y Le Bohec, The Imperial Roman Army (London: Batsford, 1994). The organization per se of the legions is treated more from an archaeological point of view by M. Junklemann, Die Legionem des Augustus (Mainz am Rhein: P. von Zabern, 1991).

All these volumes-despite the titles-share a similar emphasis on military organization, logistics, armament, tactics, and strategy, with less concern about the actual conditions of battle. For the general reader interested in a more battle-oriented approach, John Keegan is currently editing a multivolume history of warfare, which seeks to redirect emphasis to the soldiers in the ranks. Books in that series on Greece (V. Hanson) and Rome (A. Goldsworthy) are now in press and will appear in 1999. There are four chapters devoted to ancient warfare with plentiful illustrations (three chapters by V. Hanson from Mycenae to the third century A.D., one by B. Bachrach from 300 A.D. onward) in Geoffrey Parker's edited Cambridge Illustrated History of Warfare (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). K. Raaflaub and N. Rosenstein have edited a forthcoming collection of articles on war before the industrial revolution in a number of different cultures (War and Society [Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 19991), which emphasizes cultural commonalties about conflict, without unduly emphasizing the lethality of Western warfare.

In the last twenty years, there has been a veritable explosion in such illustrated introductions to Classical Warfare-often with impressionistic and sometime ingenious watercolor renditions. These books are intended for an apparently growing and now wide nonacademic readership. But in each volume the relationship between text and illustration varies widely depending on the desired level of readership. The most scholarly and reliable is J. Warry, Warfare in the Classical World (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1980), which has valuable maps and reconstructions of major Greek and Roman battles, and remains a classic example of the proper mix between accessibility and real erudition. Warry's box recapitulations of particular battles are especially helpful. P. Connolly, Greece and Rome at War (London: Macdonald, 1981) contains fascinating watercolor reproductions of men and equipment that are closely based on ancient art, literature, and archaeological finds. The illustrated essays in J. Hackett, ed., A History of War in the Ancient World (London, 1989) are very uneven, but there are at least strong chapters on hoplite warfare (J. Lazenby) and the legions (P. Connolly). R. Humble, Warfare in the Ancient World (London: Cassell, 1980) also has fine illustrations, though the narrative is not as scholarly as Warry's. While all these general accounts capture public antiquarian interest in Classical warfare, no introductory book as of yet has demonstrated how the Greeks and Romans created the foundations of Western military practice, how their warfare was a logical consequence of Western science, values, politics, and culture-and how such classical practices are still so influential today.

II. Bibliographies, Anthologies, and Source Books

Because ancient military history grew out of the German philological approach, the organization and methodology of research is still embedded within the practice of classical scholarship-and so assume knowledge of both Greek and Latin and the major research tools of the discipline. Thus, invaluable and lengthy articles on ancient war are to found in the nineteen-volume Paulys Realencyclopadie der klassischen Altertumswissenschaft, eds. A. Pauly, G. Wissowa, and W. Kroll (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler,1894), under particular Greek and Latin nomenclature, e.g., Phalanx, Legio, etc. No updated bibliographies of scholarly work on ancient warfare have appeared since F. Lammert, Jahresbericht ber die Fortschritte der Klassischen Altertumswissenschaft 274 (1941): 1-114 (Greek warfare from 1918-39); and C. Blumlein 201 (1925): 1-64; 218 (1928): 69-100; 248 (1935): 148-99; 274 (1941): 115-51 (Roman warfare until 1940)-except, in the case of the Greeks, for R. Lonis's "La guerre en Grace annees de recherche 1968-1983," Revue des Etudes Grecques 98 (1985): 321-79. Lonis's review and commentary is an invaluable guide to the recent expansion of classical military history beyond traditional concerns of tactics and strategy, and it has itself recently been updated by a useful essay by P. Ducrey, "Aspects de l'histoire de la guerre en Grace ancienne 1945-1996," in P. Brule and J. Oulhen, eds., Esclavage, guerre, economie en Grace ancienne: Hommages a Yvon Garlan (Paris, 1997)-a volume which itself has a number of other socio-economic studies of Greek warfare.

Two very recent and most useful, though brief, compendia of ancient literary and epigraphical sources are B. Campbell's valuable The Roman Army, 31 BC-AD 337: A Sourcebook (London: Routledge, 1994), and M. Sage, Warfare in Ancient Greece: A Sourcebook (London: Routledge, 1996). The latter is dependable, but far too short to provide a comprehensive view of how ancient Greek authors envisioned war. There are fine discussions of war's imagery in the Greek poets and philosophers in N. Spiegel's War and Peace in Classical Greek Literature (Jerusalem: Mount Scopus Publications, 1990), to be used in conjunction with D. Arnould, Guerre et paix dans la poesie grecque (New York: Arno Press, 1981). Greek and Roman war is also found in the year's review of classical scholarship published in L'annee philologique under the rubric art militaire; the promised completion of a computerized data base will allow easy retrieval and more prompt publication of the L'annee volumes (currently there is a delay of several years). Res Militares, a newsletter put out by the Society of Ancient Military Historians, carries brief reviews of recent work on classical warfare. In addition, the MHQ: The Quarterly Journal of Military History has dozens of illustrated articles on ancient battles and warfare in general, which can be accessed through a periodic index.

The last thirty years has seen renewed interest in social questionspartly in reaction against the perceived militarism of nineteenth-century Germanic scholarship, partly because of the invaluable primary research of just those same pragmatists. Thus classical scholars who per se are not military historians have contributed essays about war from their own areas of ancient expertise-religion, demography, sociology, literary criticism, law, and economics. Two volumes of mostly French essays, J.-P. Vernant, ed., Problemes de la guerre en Grece ancienne (Paris and The Hague: Mouton & Co., 1968), and J. P. Brisson, ed., Problemes de la guerre a Rome (Paris: Mouton, 1969), arranged in a rough chronological sequence, are of widely varying success in integrating matters of ideology, class, and technology. Similarly inspired, though more recent, collections in English are J. Rich and G. Shipley, eds., War and Society in the Greek World (London: Routledge, 1993), and J. Rich and G. Shipley, eds., War and Society in the Roman World (London: Routledge, 1993); the latter of the two Routledge volumes is the more helpful, without the theoretical superstructure that characterizes a few of the essays in the former. In the Roman volume there are also some superb discussions of philosophical attitudes toward Roman war and imperialism.

All of these more recent anthologies seem to accept the modernist assumption that warfare is an aberration and therefore a great tragedy that must be examined from the premises of human ignorance, exploitation, or greed-a somewhat problematic notion when the Greeks and Romans themselves, while deploring the violence and folly of particular battles, believed war was a natural occurrence, inevitable, and often a clear-cut and necessary struggle by good men to defeat reoccurring evil. In ancient military history, we have apparently gone from the implicit militarism of the nineteenth-century German dry handbooks to the explicit pacifism of contemporary sociological and anthropological collected essays of widely varying quality. What is needed is a true balance in form and ideology-a more realistic appraisal of how the ancients envisioned war, presented in a comprehensive, single-author format that is nevertheless not just a summary of equipment, tactics, and strategy.

Thus currently there is no single one-volume scholarly study of either Greek or Roman warfare akin to J. Kromayer and G. Veith, Heerwesen und Kriegfuhrung der Griechen und Romer (Munich: C. H. Beck, 1928) that has a lengthy chronological narrative, accompanied by illustrations, maps, an up-to-date bibliography, and full indexes and concordances. Given the massive bibliography of modern scholarship, including major work in Italian, Spanish, and increasingly Russian, the plethora of epigraphical and archaeological finds since World War II, and the vast amount of work devoted to related questions of economics and religion, it is hard to imagine that there ever will be such an accessible reference work again.

III. Specialized Fields

1. Ancient Military Literature

The vast majority of ancient military treatises is written in Greek or is Greek-inspired. D. Whitehead, Aineias the Tactician: How to Survive Under Siege (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990) provides a much needed commentary to, and translation of, Aeneas Tacticus, the only tactical manual other than the minor works of Xenophon (available in the Loeb series with English translation and facing Greek text) to survive from Classical Greece. Aeneas, apparently a Stymphalian general of the 360s B.C. who gave pragmatic advice to military professionals and their elite masters, comprises more than a manual of arms, but rather offers a masterful psychological glimpse of the paranoia and instability of the fourthcentury Greek city-state.

After the publication of the Loeb edition of the Greek texts and English translations of Aeneas Tacticus, Asclepiodotus, and Onasander (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1923), there mysteriously have been no further editions of ancient military writers in that accessible and handy format-a pity when, for example, similar publication of the Greek agricultural and medical writers in the Loeb series has done so much to reawaken interest in those fields. Ares Press of Chicago, however, has issued a number of new, moderately priced English translations of the tacticians. P. Krenz and E. Wheeler, for example, have provided a wonderful Greek text and translation (but no commentary) on Polyaenus's Stratagems of War (Chicago: Ares Press, 1994), which replaces R. Shepherd's unreliable 1793 edition (dedicated to Lord Cornwallis). The excellence of that edition gives one hope that they can continue their collaboration in offering new editions of the other tactical writers. J. Devoto has also edited and translated Flavius Arrianus's Tactical Handbook (Chicago: Ares Press, 1993), which heretofore had been nearly impossible to find in English. See now, too, A. M. Devine's new English translation of Aelian's Manual of Military Tactics in Ancient World 19 (1989): 31-64.

While none of the above works offers a single inclusive volume of Greek text, translation, and commentary, the effect of these new translations has been to rehabilitate the ancient tacticians and to suggest that much of their information on phalanx tactics, generalship, and drill are not (as once believed) merely stale Roman lecture notes on past Greek practice, but instead preserve bits of information that ultimately derive from contemporary Macedonian and even classical observations. What is desirable, of course, is a comprehensive scholarly volume on the genre of ancient tactical writing itself, which places it both in the larger intellectual landscape of Hellenistic and Roman Greece, and weighs the validity of this seemingly dry, academic research against the realities of the ancient battlefield. Such a new volume would not necessarily resemble at all H. A. T. Kochly's Die gri.eschi,sche Kriegsschrifsteller, 2 vols. (Leipzig: W. Engelmann, 1853-55). Indeed, what is needed is neither a dry scholarly treatise that traces extant work back to lost exemplars or new editions of the Greek texts in one volume, but rather enlightenment on whether such research was really ever descriptive of ongoing battle practice or served as an innovative forum for contemporary military experimentation.

There is a much welcomed new translation and commentary of Vegetius's Epitoma rei militaris by N. Milner (Vegetius: Epitome of Military Science [Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1993]); perhaps such an edition will help to spark a reexamination of Vegetius's sources, historicity, and influence on later theory and practice in the Middle Ages-few Latin authors have been so widely quoted and little read by modern scholars. Almost any general bookstore now will have attractive and accessible editions of the Chinese tacticians and Oriental military philosophers-and yet not a single paperback volume of Vegetius, who, far more than the latter writers, has influenced the tradition in which most armies of the world today organize and envision warfare. A new Latin text, translation, and commentary would also be useful for Frontinus; his Strategmata (also available in the Loeb series with Latin text and English translation), a first-century A.D. melange of exempla of generalship from Greece and Rome, contains some information found nowhere else. Some of the Byzantine military treatises pass on material on tactics that derives from classical sources; see, for example, G. Dennis, Three Byzantine Military Treatises (Vienna: Verlag der Osterreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, 1981).

2. The Battle Experience

After the appearance of John Keegan's classic The Face of Battle (New York: Viking Press, 1975), a number of attempts have been made to describe the conditions of ancient battle-a promising field of inquiry since hoplite and legionary fights were often gruesome head-to-head collisions in which the majority of the citizenry took part and the experience was often haphazardly chronicled in genres as diverse as epic poetry, tragedy, and biography. For the ordeal of the Greek hoplite, see V. D. Hanson, The Western Way of War: Infantry Battle in Classical Greece (New York: Knopf, 1989), which also argues that the origins of true shock warfare between heavy infantry-a trademark of Western armies-begins with the citizen militias of ancient Greece. Further investigation of the treatment of the dead, technology, music, generalship, votives, and sacrifice from the viewpoint of those fighting, is explored in a series of essays by military historians in V. D. Hanson, ed., Hoplites: the Classical Greek Battle Experience (London: Routledge, 1991). The essays in A. B. Lloyd's excellent edited Battle in Antiquity (London: Duckworth, 1996) also attempt to study the first-hand experience of soldiers, but with a wider chronological sweep from Egypt to the Roman period. Despite the title, a few of the contributions expand into larger social questions-the philosophy of warmaking, homosexuality, and the class and status of soldiers.

The pragmatics of Roman warfare had largely been ignored (but see the stimulating essay by A. D. Lee in Ancient Battle) until the recent appearance of A. Goldsworthy, The Roman Army at War, 100 BC-AD 200 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). While some may chafe at his revisionist argument that the Roman army was far less organized and orderly than usually assumed, his book is the first real account of the behavior of legionaries in battle exclusively from the point of view of the soldiers themselves. In time it will be appreciated as the only volume of its kind in the study of the Roman military. The field of the ancient battle experience is hardly exhausted, and a least three or four books could be written on wounds, casualty ratios, weapons handling and performance, and the psychology of battle of the Roman legions. In this regard, R. Gabriel and K. Metz's From Sumer to Rome: The Military Capabilities of Ancient Armies (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1991), though drawing exclusively from either translated or secondary sources, nevertheless provides some fascinating speculations on the lethality of ancient arms, the nature of wounds, and ancient medical care.

3. Tactics, Strategy, and Military Intelligence

After the appearance of the great handbooks of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, there has been essentially nothing written on Greek tactical doctrine. An exception is J. K. Anderson's insightful and often underappreciated Military Theory and Practice in the Age of Xenophon (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1970), which provides a fine presentation of the drill, deployment, and movement in battle of the classical Greek phalanx, with chapters on armament and logistics and special emphasis on Sparta's professional warriors. E. L. Wheeler's brief Stratagem and the Vocabulary of Military Trickery (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1988) is a very narrow discussion of the Greek and Roman vocabulary for ruse and suggests that Western battles were not always the open, upfront encounters that we usually assume. Wheeler promises it to be the first step in a larger more comprehensive study of Greek tactical and strategic doctrine. For now, a far more comprehensive account of the Roman use of military intelligence, and its role in formulating long-term strategy is found in N. Austin and N. Rankov, Exploratio: Military and Political Intelligence in the Roman World from the Second Punic War to the Battle of Adrianople (London: Routledge, 1995). B. Strauss and J. Ober, The Anatomy of Error (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1990) review some of the great losers of classical antiquity in formulating general explanations for why generals and their armies fail in any age.

There has been almost no recent systematic account of grand strategy in Greek warfare before Alexander, other than in relationship to specific wars, fortification programs, or particular generals. V. D. Hanson, Warfare and Agriculture in Classical Greece, 2d ed. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1998) argues that the strategy of agriculture devastation did not result in permanent destruction of orchards and vineyards in Classical Greece, and that the practice was originally more a catalyst used to prompt agrarian infantry to come out and fight in pitched battles than a systematic mechanism to ruin the countryside. Most discussion on larger Greek political and strategic issues-nearly all such controversy so far is found exclusively in journal articles-revolves around Pericles's radical decision to abandon the Attic countryside to the Spartans and ride out the invasion inside the walls of Athens. His supporters argue that, except for the plague, the gambit would have worked, adding that Thucydides and other contemporary observers often neglected the key role of cavalry patrols and seaborne raiding which made his policy more than mere defensivism. Some of these strategic controversies have now been incorporated in the books by Kagan, Spence, and Ober which are discussed below. B. H. Liddell Hart's Strategy (New York: Praeger, 1967) has some interesting observations about both Periclean strategy and Epaminondas's invasion of the Peloponnese, in relationship to the "indirect approach" as an alternative to massive and direct confrontations. See, too, his chapter on the Roman resistance to Hannibal.

In contrast, tactics and strategy of the Roman Period-but not the relationship between the agrarian economy and the legions-have been far more fruitful areas of inquiry. The main focus of investigation has been on two great issues: the character of Roman imperialism and a lengthy debate on the nature of the Roman frontier. W. V. Harris, War and Imperialism in Republican Rome, 327-70 B.C. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979), and his supporters have demonstrably shown that Rome knew what she was doing through imperial expansion, and the change from Republic to Empire was not a reluctant process of haphazard intervention to help beleaguered friends or preserve the general peace. The controversy over the frontier is closely connected with reasons for the Empire's fall in the fifth century A.D. Scholars cannot agree on the nature of Roman defense-was it defense in depth, an absolute line of fortified positions, or a porous perimeter anchored by a strategic reserve, or all or none? Lately, however, even the very notion of a frontier is under examination-by way of the rather bizarre argument that the Romans drew an arbitrary line between civilization and barbarism, a "construct" that served their own interests but had no fundamental relationship with the reality of defense or outside threats other than to subsidize a corrupt military establishment.

The nature of frontier protection is discussed by E. Luttwak, The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), who presents a typology of Roman imperial defense in chronological sequence. Luttwak's main military arguments seem to have endured all criticism. Some modifications of his views are found in A. Ferrill, The Fall of the Roman Empire: The Military Explanation (London: Thames & Hudson, 1986). In contrast B. Isaac, The Limits of Empire: The Roman Army in the East (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990) and C. R. Whittaker, Frontiers of the Roman Empire (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994), albeit in differing ways, question the very idea of a military frontier, and seek to explain Roman strategic doctrine in largely economic and social terms, rather than as a precise military response to a real menace. Thus Roman frontier research has now been firmly embraced by cultural studies, which seeks to study garrisons and response in terms of interaction with the "Other." A bibliographical survey of these various approaches to Roman grand strategy (sympathetic to Luttwak) can be found in E. Wheeler's articles "Methodological Limits and the Mirage of Roman Strategy: Parts I and II," Journal of Military History 57 (January and April 1993): 7-41, 215-40. Most recent frontier studies start with the premise of the collapse of frontiers-or the strange notion that nearly half a millennium of successful imperial defense in Europe, Africa, and the Middle East is somehow to be seen as failure because the Empire was at last superseded. Hugh Elton's Frontiers of the Roman Empire (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1996) is a valuable synopsis of the archaeological evidence, and more a rich social and economic account of frontier settlement than one of purely military practice.

4. Logistics

D. Engels's succinct Alexander the Great and the Logistics of the Macedonian Army (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1978) has received a great deal of attention, since it sought to explain Alexander's marches in terms of what was materially feasible-a pragmatic emphasis on logistical and troop strength that had been largely absent in studies of ancient warfare since Delbruck's work on the Greco-Persian wars. A great deal of romantic nonsense has been written about Alexander without proper attention to both the scientific and ruthless nature of his campaigns. Unfortunately, since Engels, there has been no book devoted exclusively to the physical limitations that faced ancient armies-an understandable lapse in classical times given the dearth of primary sources on supply, but inexplicable in light of the plethora of Hellenistic and Roman inscriptions and papyri. For interesting essays on taxation and budgetary problems in paying for troops in the field, see the widely divergent essays in the collection Armees et fiscalite dans le monde antique (Actes du colloque national, Paris 14-16 octobre, 1976 [Editions du Centre national de la recherche scientifique, 1977]). Y. Garlan's collection of previously published essays, Guerre et ,Economie en Grace ancienne (Paris: Editions La D6couverte, 1989), treats capital and warmaking pragmatically from an Aristotelian and often neo-Marxist perspective of simple material acquisition, and covers a wide range of topics from booty and provisioning, to pay and mercenary service. For the Roman army, the general introductory volumesespecially Speidel and Keppie-have informative chapters on horses, diet, and nutritional requirements, and there is now an appendix on logistics in Goldsworthy as well. We await a logistical history of the Roman Republic and imperial army that explains campaigning in terms of distance involved and material available, and the expertise or lack of it in combining the two. As of now, most studies are of the post-Augustan age; see, for example, J. Adams, Logistics of the Roman Imperial Army: Major Campaigns on the Eastern Front in the First Three Centuries (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1976). For camp followers and the dependents of the army and their needs, see J. C. Mann, Legion,ary Recruitment and Veteran Settlement during the Principate (London: Institute of Archaeology, 1983). M. Junkelmann's Panis Militaris (Mainz am Rhein: P. von Zabern, 1997) is an original review of the legionaries' diet and the infrastructure necessary to supply food to the soldiers in the field. Even cursory reading of these books illustrates the success of the Roman army; no ancient forces (and few modern) were so well supplied and organized over so large a geographical extent against such a variety of enemies.

5. Mercenaries and Manpower

Greek mercenary studies was framed by two classic books of the 1930s, G. T. Griffith's Mercenaries of the Hellenistic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1935), and H. W. Parke's Greek Mercenary Soldiers (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1933), the former beginning where the latter left off, roughly after the battle of Chaeronea (338 B.C.). Since the 1930s classical scholars have used the data from Griffith and Parke to debate the phenomenon in a wider neo-Marxist framework: does the explosion in the use of mercenaries reflect the need of the impoverished, exploited, and unemployed mass or simply the greed of an itinerant and thuggish class in service to a bellicose and murderous military elite? Did men enlist to ward off starvation or to find profit in killing? The most recent investigations suggest the idea of need, rather than simple greed, and argue (rightly, I think) that the early appearance of Greek mercenaries (seventh through fifth centuries) and the second wave of hired killers (the fourth through third centuries) were symptoms of either an embryonic or decaying polis.

In contrast, the strength of amateur hoplite armies, controls on military expenditure and agrarian exploitation, and strong local assemblies, as Aristotle saw, tended to discourage mercenary use in the late sixth through early fourth centuries. See now L. Marinovich, Le Mercenarr,at grec au IVe siecle avant notre ere et la crise de la polis, trans. J. and Y Garlan (Paris: Belles Lettres, 1988) and P. McKechnie, Outsiders in the Greek City-States in the Fourth Century B.C. (London: Routledge, 1989). While the ancients often described farmland and the Greek countryside in terms of its ability to produce specific numbers of hoplite infantry, as yet no modern study has combined recent breakthroughs in agricultural survey and demography to assess the relative army strengths of particular Greek states and ascertain to what degree particular societies mobilized their material and human resources. Yet such a comprehensive study that measures army size in comparison to territorial potential is now quite feasible for the Greek city-state. Some of the possibilities of that integrated research are briefly introduced in R. Sallares, The Ecology of the Ancient Greek World (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1991).

Far more has been done on the Roman side, perhaps because of P. Brunt's monumental Italian Manpower, 225 B.C.-A.D. 14 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), one of the most learned and sensible books about ancient demography, politics, and war ever written. A series of excellent ancillary studies have concentrated on terms of service, pay, and recruitment. See especially E. Birley, The Roman Army: Papers, 1929-1986 (Amsterdam: J. C. Gieben,1988); R. Davies, Service in the Roman Army (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989); and the earlier R. E. Smith, Service in the Post-Marian Army (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1958). Nothing comparable exists for Greece other than particular chapters in W. K. Pritchett's Greek State at War volumes.

For later social problems between civilian and legionary, cf. R. MacMullen, Soldier and Civilian in the Later Roman Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963), and most recently on Egypt, R. Alston, Soldier and Society in Roman Egypt (London: Routledge, 1995). It is a fair generalization that most studies of the Roman soldier of the imperial age are not primarily military; that is, they are more concerned with his integration within larger social and economic questions than with his experience on the line fighting battles. And this, in some sense, is as it should be, since after the second century A.D., the army for two centuries was faced with a myriad of social and cultural challenges as serious as the presence of enemy soldiers. From ancient accounts, albeit many of them rhetorical, one receives the impression that Roman deployments resembled European NATO bases in the Cold War period, where an array of dependents, cultural support networks, and a peculiar subculture were as daunting a challenge as preparing for the Soviet army.

6. Philosophical Issues

Until recently, classical scholars have been more interested in the relationship between war and religion in the ancient world (see, for example, R. Lonis's original Guerre et Religion en Grr-ece A l'epoque classique [Paris: Belles Lettres, 1979], and the third volume of Pritchett's Greek State at War), than in wider questions involving the purpose and ancient conception of warfare in the grand Enlightenment tradition of Locke, Montesquieu, and Kant. Doyne Dawson's The Origins of Western Warfare: Militarism and Morality in the Ancient Greek World (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1996) addresses much of our neglect of ethical and philosophical ideas about war in classical times, in arguing that the Romans combined the idea of decisive pitched battle inherited from the Greeks with a more holistic strategic doctrine of economic and social mobilization to invent the Western concept of total warfare, which has so terrified adversaries ever since. Donald Kagan's On the Origins of War and the Preservation of Peace (New York: Doubleday, 1995) has valuable chapters on the Peloponnesian and Punic wars, reminding us that the classical cultures were neither militaristic, barbaric, nor naive in their view that wars start from weakness and the failure of good men to be vigilant against evil. There is also a summary of various reasons why classically inspired Western military practice has proved itself to be so lethal and superior to the warmaking of other cultures during the last two millennia in V. Hanson and J. Heath, Who Killed Homer? The Demise of Classical Learning and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom (New York: Free Press, 1998).

It is a fair generalization to state that we have moved away from the sterile and fruitless pastime of either blaming Western culture for its military dominance or denying its singular lethality, to the more interesting intellectual query of why Classical warfare and later Western military practice were as a rule so much more dynamic than other military practices elsewhere-the answer need not be culturally chauvinistic but rather framed by the energetic and sometimes frightening European approach to government, economic practice, science, religion, rationalism, and individualism. It is often forgotten that the companion to the Great Books, the sometimes parodied, but extremely useful Synopticon (M. Adler, ed., The Great Ideas: A Synopticon of Great Books of the Western World, vol. 2 [Chicago: Encyclopaedia Britannica, 1952]), has a valuable entry on "War and Peace" that collates some of the major classical philosophical attitudes to war.

K. Welwei, Unfreie im antiken Kriegsdienst (Wiesbaden: Steiner, 1974) and P. Hunt's Slaves, Warfare, and Ideology in the Greek Historians (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998) are invaluable reminders of how vital-and forgotten-was the role of slaves in both Greek and Roman warfare, on both land and at sea.

7. Horsemen

Until the late 1980s, no real advance had been made in the study of Greek and Roman cavalry for several decades, perhaps reflecting the general scholarly consensus that, except for the Macedonian army of Philip and Alexander, classical Greek and Roman infantry usually relegated horsemen to a secondary role. Thus in some way or another, the recent series of books challenges that notion and seeks to bring cavalry to the center of ancient military studies. Reevaluation of ancient horsemen is a welcome trend, if we concede that there will inevitably be a degree of exaggeration in the claims of modern scholars for cavalry proficiency and dominance. J. K. Anderson's Ancient Greek Horsemanship (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1961) is a solid discussion of riding, equipment, and horseraising by a skilled classicist and equestrian, though not intended to be a study per se of cavalry or military usage in general. For the counterpart of such a study for Rome, see A. Hyland, Equus: The Horse in the Roman World (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1990).

After a century of neglect of mounted corps, suddenly there is a great deal of recent work on Greek cavalry. L. Worley, Hippeis: The Cavalry of Ancient Greece (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1994), I. G. Spence, The Cavalry of Classical Greece: A Social and Military History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), and G. Bugh, The Horsemen of Athens (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1988) are generally complementary rather than redundant. Bugh is more interested in the social status of Athenian cavalrymen, Spence in their military prowess, and Worley in mounted forces outside of Athens as well-all three are revisionist in the sense of arguing recent emphasis on hoplite monopoly of war in classical Greece has underappreciated the role of cavalry. Of course, it would be difficult to write an entirely new study of ancient Greek cavalry that essentially confirmed the traditional view that the wars of the Greek city-states were essentially wars decided by infantrymen.

Similarly, Roman horsemen had traditionally received far less emphasis than infantry. But recently K. R. Dixon and P. Southern, The Roman Cavalry (London: Routledge, 1997) and A. Hyland, Training the Roman Cavalry (Gloucestershire, U.K.: Alan Sutton, 1993) have shown that the adaptability and mobility of the legions were often due to the reconnaissance and protection offered by skilled riders. M. P. Speidel, Riding for Caesar (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994) is a fine study of the emperor's mounted guards and their role in imperial intrigue and succession. None of the above studies, however, explain in any detail why the classical cultures primarily put their defense in the hands of infantrymen, not horsemen-a question that lies at the heart of the unique social, economic, and political practices of the West itself. It is hard to gauge precisely the validity of the recent revisionists' claims for the critical importance of cavalry in the largely infantry wars of antiquity. The supremacy of infantry militias in the polis and Roman Republic is tied inextricably to the rise of a middling, property-owning citizen with civil liberties and civic responsibilities-a profile not found elsewhere in the contemporary Mediterranean.

8. Fortification, Siegecraft, and Artillery

Far more has been written on Greek than Roman fortifications, no doubt because after the creation of the Empire there was little to need to construct interior forts and walls. In addition, most ramparts on the frontier outside of Britain and in the desert have either not been well preserved or not fully excavated-in contrast to the intramural squabbling of the Greek city-states, where for over four hundred years over one thousand such communities sought to fortify their municipal centers and guard their much smaller frontiers. Special mention must be made at the outset of Y Garlan's encyclopedic study of classical and late classical siegecraft, Recherches de poliorcetique grecque (Athens, 1974), which is an underappreciated and often forgotten summary of the entire Greek evolution in defense strategy from the fifth to late fourth centuries, replete with careful analysis of contemporary philosophical criticism of the Greek fortified defense. It is the most used and least cited of any book on ancient Greek fortifications that I know of.

For a corpus of ancient walls and forts in Sicily, Greece, and Turkey, see A. W. Lawrence, Greek Aims in Fortification (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979); F. E. Winter, Greek Fortifications (Toronto: Toronto University Press, 1971); and J.-P. Adam, L'Architecture militaire grecque (Paris: Picard, 1982). J. Ober's Fortress Attica: Defense of the Athenian Land Frontier, 404-322 (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1985) is a superb catalogue of the system of forts and towers built on the borders of Attica in the fourth century as part of a more flexible policy of response that replaced hoplite exclusivity. M. Munn, The Defense of Attica: The Dema Wall and the Boiotian War of 37S375 BC (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), has questioned some of Ober's interpretations of these forts, but his helpful ancillary volume is really more complementary than revisionist, and likewise emphasizes the Greeks' emphasis on border defense during the fourth century B.C., often in preference to open hoplite battles. Oddly, we have at least three major studies of the interior fortifications of Attica, but until now no comprehensive history of either the Athenian Long Walls, or the relationship between municipal-harbor fortifications and the preservation of more radical Greek democracy. In general, the Greeks believed that municipal walls were symptomatic of the erosion of the old heroic code, the rise of democracy, and the diminution of agriculture in the life of the city-state.

On the Roman side, there is no comprehensive study of all Roman fortifications-an impossible task given the extent of the Empire, a millennium of political and architectural evolution, and the frequent redeployment and reworking of earlier Greek forts and walls. For a sampling of frontier walls and camps, see D. J. Breeze and B. Dobson, Hadrian's Wall (London: A. Lane, 1976); J. Fitz, Der romische Limes in Ungarn (Szekesfehervar, Hungary: Fejer Magyei Muzeumok Igazgatosaga, 1976); D. L. Kennedy, Archaeological Explorations on the Roman Frontier in North-East Jordan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982); and S. Johnson, Late Roman Fortifications (Totowa, N.J.: Barnes & Noble Books, 1983). The plan and structures of the legionary castrum are found in H. von Petrikovitis, Die Innenbauten rom.ischer Legionslager wahrend der Prinzipatszeit (Opladen, Germany: Westdeutscher Verlag, 1975).

The two volumes of E. W. Mardsen, Greek and Roman Artillery (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1969-71) still remain the standard scholarly work on Roman and Greek catapults, both torsion and nontorsion; it is replete with wonderful illustrations, diagrams, and (in the second volume) the texts of ancient handbooks. H. H. Scullard, The Elephant in the Greek and Roman World (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1974) is primarily concerned with military applications of elephants in the battles between Greeks and Romans; and while Scullard downplays somewhat unnecessarily the tactical and psychological value of elephants, he corrects the popular misapprehension that the elephant was the unstoppable tank of the ancient world.

9. Arms, Armor, and Military Equipment

Ancient authors believed-often correctly-that the technology of Western armies was superior to most equipment worn by their adversaries and that such advantage was critical on the battlefield. In comparison to the Greeks, Herodotus believed the Persians were essentially "unarmed," while Caesar and Tacitus frequently remarked on the inferiority of northern European tribal protection. The study of Greek arms and armor rests still on the pioneering work of A. Snodgrass, Early Greek Armor and Weapons (Edinburgh, Scotland: University Press, 1964) and Arms and Armor of the Greeks (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1967), which summarize much of his earlier studies drawn from the Pan-Hellenic sanctuaries and found only in journal articles. Some of this material has now been updated by E. Jarva's intriguing Archaiologica on Archaic Greek Body Arm.or (Rovaniemi, Finland: Pahjois-Suomen Historiallinen Yhdistys, 1995), which asks a variety of more pragmatic questions about the use and difficulty of armor, cost, construction, and performance, but whose statistical data sometimes is at odds with the author's very own summaries and conclusions. There is a recent reprint of G. Chase, The Shield Devices of the Greeks in Art and Literature (Chicago: Ares Press, 1979), that has some good line drawings and a valuable catalogue of vases-a new study of the variety and purpose of such shield insignias is clearly needed. The best illustrations and photographs of ancient Greek armor are found in C. Roley, Les Bronzes grecs (Freiburg, Switzerland: Office du livre, 1983) and H. Hoffman, Early Cretan Armorers (Mainz am Rhein: P. von Zabern, 1972)-the latter has a fine study of the corpus of curious Cretan belly and midriff plates. Both volumes raise, but do not answer, the question how utilitarian and available to the masses were such elegantly crafted and decorated bronze breastplates and helmets.

Roman military equipment is an altogether different story-the field is huge and growing, as excavation continues to increase the corpus of extant arms and armor. Indeed, far more Roman than Greek remains of weapons and protection have been uncovered, and the diversity in style, composition, and workmanship reflects the great duration and extent of the Empire. For general surveys, see the nicely illustrated H. R. Robinson, The Armour of Imperial Rome (London: Arms and Armour Press, 1975); M. Bishop and J. Coulston, Roman Military Equipment (London: Arms and Armour Press, 1993); and V. A. Maxfield, The Military Decorations of the Roman Army (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981). M. Simkins, Warriors of Rome (London: Blandford, 1988) is a brief but reliably illustrated introduction for the beginning student. The lengthy bibliography in even an accessible and illustrated survey such as Bishop and Coulston gives some idea of the enormous amount written in a half dozen languages on Roman equipment in the last decade. For a sampling of primary resources that can used for scholarly study of Roman arms and armor, see A. S. Anderson, Roman Military Tombstones (Aylesbury, Bucks, U.K.: Shire Publishing, 1984); and R. Fink, Roman Military Records on Papyrus (Cleveland: Press of Case Western Reserve University, 1971). There are also numerous collections of various international symposia and seminars in M. C. Bishop's edited collection, Roman Military Equipment: Proceedings of a Seminar held in the Department of Ancient History and Classical Archaeology at the University of Sheffield, 21 st March 1983 (Ryton, England: M. C. Bishop, 1989), and The Production and Distribution of Roman Military Equipment, Proceedings of the Second Roman History Equipment Research Seminar, British Archaeological Reports 275 (Oxford: B.A.R., 1985). Other prominent volumes in that latter series are edited by C. van DrielMurray (Oxford: B.A.R., 1989), J. Coulston (Oxford: B.A.R., 1988), and M. Dawson (Oxford: B.A.R., 1987).

There is an ever growing paradox in the study of ancient armor and weapons. Greek historians speculate endlessly on the cost and ubiquity of panoplies, and with scant success try to correlate what little we know about equipment to broader questions of status and class-all without definite conclusions given the paucity of information. In contrast, Roman military historians have been forced simply to catalogue and arrange the extraordinary amount of information from archaeological, artistic, papyrological, and epigraphic sources-the sheer effort needed to assemble and digest such a vast heterodox corpus of material has prevented much needed generalizations about the use and social significance of various Roman military equipment. We know the shapes, compositions, and variety of Roman infantry protection-but not exactly how effective were such models, why some varieties flourished, why others were discontinued, and the relative cost, comfort, and effectiveness of a particular style of arms and armament. Perhaps the difference between the study of Greek and Roman armor illustrates once more one of the fundamental contradictions in classical military history: too little information from the Greek city-state to support the frequent generalizations made about the pragmatics of Hellenic warfare, and too much data on Rome to allow a comprehensible and accessible synopsis from the Republic and Empire.

10. Ships and Seapower

It is a fair generalization to conclude-other than in a few instances, e.g., Athens, Corinth, Rhodes-that most of the capital and manpower for the defense of the classical world were invested in landed infantry. This was often a near fatal trend for both Greece and Rome when they met the seafaring, maritime empires of the eastern and southern Mediterranean, as the narrow escapes of the Greeks from Xerxes (480 B.C.) and the Romans from the Carthaginians in the First Punic War (A.D. 264-241) attest. Prior to the 1980s, there had been a number of fine studies of Greek triremes and Roman galleys, and their use as naval forces in a variety of intramural and foreign wars. For Roman ships and navies, consult L. Casson, The Ancient Mariners (London: Macmillan, 1959) and Ships and Seamanship in the Ancient World (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971); J. Rouge, La marine dans l'antiquite (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1975); and especially C. G. Starr, The Roman Imperial Navy, 31 B.C.-A.D. 324 (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1941). The Greek evidence is best summarized in J. S. Morrison and R. T. Williams, Greek Oared Ships 900-322 B.C. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1968). C. G. Starr (The Influence of Sea Power on Ancient History [Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989] takes the unique view that the subject of his inquiry-naval power in the classical Greek and Roman world-has often been overestimated in its role in military conflicts.

Because there had been largely only finds of Roman ships in the Mediterranean, there remains great controversy over the actual construction, deployment, and operation of the Greek trireme, a problem unsolved by existing artistic, epigraphical, and literary evidence. Thus, J. S. Morrison and J. F. Coates, eds., The Athenian Trireme: The History and Reconstruction of an Ancient Greek Warship (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), and An Athenian Tireme Reconstructed: The British Sea Trials of "Olympias," British Archaeological Series 486 (Oxford: B.A.R., 1987) are much needed practical discussions of the Greek warship, based on an operating replica of a reconstructed Greek trireme. And while much of the restoration has recently been called into question, the first-hand pragmatics gained from its operation proved to be invaluable-and a second-generation working trireme is promised.

11. The Great Captains

The nineteenth-century practice of personal military hagiography has now passed out of style. While great generals are the subject of study-e.g., Themistocles, Alcibiades, Caesar, Philopoemen-usually such biographies are more cultural and political than purely military. An exception is G. L. Cawkwell, Philip of Macedon (London: Faber & Faber, 1978), which even has a controversial appendix on the nature of hoplite battle. Alexander the Great, of course, who had little life outside of war, remains the other figure whose military career must take precedence. N. G. L. Hammond, Alexander the Great: King, Commander and Statesman (Park Ridge, N.J.: Noyes Press, 1981) reveals the author's lifetime mastery of the military life of Macedon, but offers an unconvincingly positive appraisal of Alexander's achievement, in light of the carnage of his murderous campaigns. Also still useful for strictly military issues is J. F. C. Fuller's The Generalship of Alexander the Great (London: Eyre & Spottiswoode, 1958). For Alexander's army on the move, an honest appraisal of Alexander's effectiveness and cruelty as a military leader is best found in A. B. Bosworth, Conquest and Empire: The Reign of Alexander the Great (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), who has done so much to dispel the romantic image of Alexander the Great as anything other than an energetic and gifted thug. Peter Green's Alexander the Great (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990) is also extremely well written and not encomiastic-despite occasional factual errors, it remains perhaps the best introduction for the nonspecialist.

As in the case of Alexander the Great, there are too many biographies of Julius Caesar even to list, but a number of monographs have focused on various aspects of his long military career; see, for example, P. Ellis, Caesar's Invasion of Britain (London: Orbis Books, 1978); J. Carcopino, Alesia et les ruses de Cesar (Paris: Flammarion, 1970); and H. Ottmer, Die Rubikon Legende (Boppard am Rhein, Germany: Boldt, 1979).

Unfortunately, perhaps the greatest general and statesman of the classical world, Epaminondas, has no definitive biography in English, and one must consult M. Fortina's Epaminonda (Turin: Societa editrice internazionale, 1958), a brief but well-documented and still valuable study. Obviously a comprehensive new biography of the brilliant Theban tactician, strategist, and statesman is long overdue. There is a short, but useful account of the fifth-century Athenian general Demosthenes (J. Roisman, The General Demosthenes and his Use of Military Surprise [Stuttgart: F. Steiner, 1993]), which rightly argues that surprise and trickery, for which Demosthenes was known, were much heralded innovations in classical Greek warfare, but in the end not very effective. C. Hamilton has a fine biography of Agesilaus (Agesilaus and the Failure of Spartan Hegemony [Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1991]) that features some very helpful maps of Sparta's fourth-century campaigns. H. Scullard, Scipio Africanus: Soldier and Politician (London: Thames & Hudson, 1970) offers a valuable treatment of the Roman campaigns in Africa.

General works on military command are more common. C. Fornara, The Athenian Board of Generals from 501 to 404 (Stuttgart: F. Steiner, 1971) remains an excellent account of the labyrinth of the Athenian strategia-now to be augmented by D. Hamel's Athenian Generals (Leiden: Brill, 1998). Both books suggest that Athenian generals were placed under democratic constraints and political limitations unknown even in modern times. In general, a book outlining the origins in Greece of the peculiar Western notion of civilian control over the military would be invaluable. W. Lengauer's Greek Commanders in the Fifth and Fourth Centuries BC: Politics and Ideology: A Study in Militarism (Warsaw: Wydawnictwa Universytetu Warezawskiego, 1979) seeks to show the influence of military command upon political careerism. There is a fine account of the historicity of the general's prebattle speeches in Greek warfare in R. Leimbach, Militarrische Musterrhetorik: Eine Untersuchung zu den Feldherren.reden des Thukydides (Stuttgart: F. Steiner, 1985). N. Rosenstein's Imperatores Victi (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1990) offers an intriguing investigation of aristocratic rivalries and the effect of military defeat on Roman political careers. For the command structure of the legions outside of political careerism, see J. Suolahti, The Junior Officers of the Roman Army in the Republican Period (Helsinki: Suomalainen Tiedeakatemia, 1955).

We have not had a broad comparative study of ancient generals and their craft-Themistocles, Alcibiades, Agesilaus, Iphicrates, Philip, Alexander, Antigonus, Fabius, Scipio, Marius, Sulla, Caesar, Pompey, Crassus, etc.-in nearly a century. The rise of specialization, the modernistic suspicion of war as a science, and the increasing divorce of classical scholarship from military history per se have made a survey of "The Great Captains" not only unpopular but perhaps impossible-interested military historians or former officers lack the acquaintance with primary sources and the vast bibliography of classical scholarship, even as ancient historians are without first-hand experience of military realities and curiosity about the history of tactics and strategy. Thus it is as rare to find an ancient military historian who has read Machiavelli, Jomini, or Clausewitz-much less served in, or been associated, with the militaryas it is to see familiarity with the Greek text of Thucydides or Latin of Tacticus in a general work on military strategy. Perhaps that imbalance explains why the reputation and popularity of Hans Delbruck have grown, not diminished, in the last few decades, as scholars increasingly appreciate just how unusual it was for an officer and military historian to read Greek and Latin as well as a number of modern languages.

12. Regionalization and Specialization

There are excellent studies on the regionalism and specialization in Greek warfare. For the peculiarities of the Spartan army, see J. Lazenby, The Spartan Army (Warminster, U.K.: Aris and Phillips, 1985), which is an invaluable collection of all the ancient citations. Lazenby serves as a valuable refutation of M. I. Finley's dictum that Sparta and its army were not that unusual by general Greek standards. J. Best, Thracian Peltasts and Their Influence on Greek Warfare (Groningen: Wolters-Noordhoff, 1969), is a fine account of the rise of lightly armed troops in the latter fifth and fourth centuries B.C. M. Vos, Scythian Archers in Attic Vase Painting (Groningen: J. B. Wolters, 1963), examines the use of archers as warriors and constabulary forces in classical Athens, with discussion of the sociological and cultural chauvinism of the Greeks in their association of the bow with Eastern femininity and less than martial valuesa lingering prejudice that would occasionally have disastrous consequences when classical armies campaigned in Asia. Finally, there is also a large and growing bibliography devoted to nonlegionary forcesostly attached to the Imperial army. G. L. Cheesman, The Auxilia of the Roman Imperial Army (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1914) has been updated and expanded with the inquiries of P. A. Holder, Studies in the Auxilia of the Roman Army from Augustus to Trajan (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), and more recently, D. B. Saddington, The Development of the Roman Auxiliary Forces from Caesar to Vespasian (49 B.C.-A.D. 79) (Harare: University of Zimbabwe Press, 1982). The effect of this recent research is to end forever the notion of the Roman infantry cohorts marching confidently alone into battle. Given the vast differences in terrain and the varying forces of the enemy, horsemen, missile troops, and lightly armed skirmishers took on an increasingly vital role in imperial defense. The tragic lessons learned by the Republic as the legions increasingly were deployed outside of Italy, were put to good use during the Empire.

IV. Brief Chronological Survey

1. Mycenaean and Homeric Warfare (160s700 B.C.)

There are general chapters for the non-specialist on the fighting of the ancient Near East, Egyptians, and Mycenaeans in A. Ferrill, The Origins of War: From the Stone Age to Alexander the Great (New York: Thames and Hudson, 1985), which attempts to rectify the neglect of the Near Eastern armies' influence on Hellenic warfare. According to Ferrill, the entire tradition of cavalry and mobile warfare, so critical to the balance of horse and foot in Alexander the Great's Macedonian army, derived from a much earlier non-Hellenic, near-Eastern military practice, in which enormous armies were balanced by large corps of heavy and light cavalry and chariotry. Ferrill is rightly impressed with the size of near-Eastern armies-perhaps predictable from what we know of their centralized and bureaucratic palatial structures-but he does not discuss the qualitative differences between large and mobile eastern armies and smaller, better protected, and far more ideological and flexible Western infantry militias.

The military fortifications of the Mycenaean palaces are discussed in N. Scoufopoulos, Mycenaean Citadels (Goteborg: P. Astrom, 1971)although the purpose and date of many of these massive constructions remain a mystery. The best recent survey of late Bronze-Age battle is Robert Drews's lively The End of the Bronze Age: Changes in Warfare and the Catastrophe Ca. 1200B.C. (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1993), which argues that the palaces became over-specialized and never developed a broad-based flexible infantry response-leaving the Mycenaeans vulnerable to a variety of infantry forces that were able to fight spontaneously and in shock formation, without reliance on horsemen or missile troops. Drews is not only convincing about the vulnerability of centralized and inflexible elite forces, but also explicatory of the weakness and sudden systems collapse of Mycenaean culture at large. In that regard, his End of the Bronze Age is a model military history.

P. Greenhalgh's sober Early Greek Warfare: Horsemen and Chariots in the Homeric and Archaic Ages (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973) sought to sort out the myriad levels of historicity-Mycenaean, Dark Age, contemporary eighth century B.C.-present in Homeric battle practice, and is generally on the right track in showing that much of Homer's seemingly anachronistic armor, chariots, duel and spear casting are not really Mycenaean relics as much as the understandable attempts at anachronism, which one would expect in oral epic poetry presented before a largely elite and perhaps reactionary audience. His volume contains an excellent collection of plates that are vital for any study of early polis warfare. Most of the discussion of early warfare in Greece is drawn from the Homeric poems, the Mycenaean Linear B archives, and archaeological finds of arms and armor from the Panhellenic sanctuaries and random burials. Consequently G. Ahlberg's Fighting on Land and Sea in Greek Geometric Art (Stockholm: Svenska Instituet i Athen, 1971) is a welcome and different approach via the ceramic evidence from Geometric vases. While tactics are nearly impossible to represent in any realistic fashion in early Greek art, the corpus of early painted military scenes emphasizes the haphazard nature of armament and body protection at the end of the Dark Ages-and yet in general such pictures still reinforce the Homeric and non-literary evidence of a gradual move to well-armored, heavy shock infantry.

The most recent and impressive reexamination of Homeric fighting is H. van Wees's Status Warriors: War, Violence, and Society in Homer and History (Amsterdam: J. C. Gieben, 1992). Van Wees offers an original review of Homeric battle descriptions, which puts into the proper perspective the presence in the Iliad of archaizing fantasy, historical artifacts, and contemporary warmaking of Homer's own late eighth century B.C. Once we understand the protocols of the epic genre, van Wees shows that Homer's elite warriors at the end of the Dark Ages may in fact have fought with, rather than apart from, their armies-in a manner not altogether too different from what would become later classical infantry practice. Of course, the realism argued by J. Latacz, Kampfparanese, Kampfdarstellung und Kampftirklichkeit in der Ilias, bei Kallinos und Tyrtaios (Munich: Beck, 1977)-the most important book written on Homeric warfare in two decades-earlier had gone even further. Latacz demonstrated that, aside from the expected poetical exaggeration and necessary archaizing, the entire notion of hoplite solidarity and mass collision is, in fact, present in the Iliad-just what we should imagine from an oral bard who composed contemporaneously with the rise of the city-state. Front-line fighters are not to be understood as integrated within the phalanx, but simply poetical distractions from the real collision of anonymous men whose uniform courage cannot properly be the focus of heroic poetry. Whether one follows the particular emphases of van Wees, Latacz, or Pritchett (cf. his War, vol. 4), the old idea that Homeric epic preserves the warfare of the Mycenaean palace of four centuries past, or even the feudal conditions of the Dark Ages of a prior century or two, rather than that of the fighting of the early city-state, is now, I think, demonstrably false.

For the corpus of Homeric battle passages, in light of solid philological and archaeological commentary, see H. G. Buchholz, Archaeologia Horru rica: Kreigswesen, vol. 1 (Gottingen: Vandenhoede & Ruprecht, 1977); a more literary approach which uses Homeric battle scenes to investigate formulaic oral composition is B. Fenik's Typical Battle Scenes in the Iliad: Studies in the Narrative Techniques of Homeric Battle Description (Wiesbaden: F. Steiner, 1968).

2. The Rise of the City-State (700-500 B.C.)

The main argument of V. D. Hanson, The Other Greeks: The Agrarian Roots of Western Civilization (New York: Free Press, 1995) is that hoplite warfare cannot be understood apart from the economic, cultural, and political agenda of a new group of middling agrarians, whose unique notions of private property, landed timocratic government, free economic practice, and distrust of rich and poor established the foundations of the Greek polis. The so-called hoplite reform, then, was not a movement by the radical poor to overthrow aristocracy, much less a reactionary movement to improve the military prowess of the entrenched elite, but rather a gradual rise of freeholding militiamen. Emerging farmers crafted new weapons and technology to reinvent the old idea of fighting in mass-hence the ethical protocols, more or less uniform panoplies, and simple tactics of the classical Greek phalanx.

Outside of countless specialized journal articles on the appearance of hoplites, there are no purely military book-length studies of Greek polis warfare before the fifth century. Until a comprehensive investigation appears on "Archaic Greek Warfare"-and such a book could be written-we must be content with the learned and judicious chapters on hoplites, early agrarian border disputes, and the role of tyranny in military reform found in C. G. Starr, The Economic and Social Growth of Early Greece, 800-500 B.C. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977); A. M. Snodgrass, Archaic Greece: The Age of Experiment (London: J. M. Dent, 1980); O. Murray, Early Greece (Brighton, England: Harvester Press, 1980); and A. Andrewes, The Greek Tyrants (London: Hutchinson's University Library, 1956).

3. Classical Greek Warfare (500-300 B.C.)

Besides general works on Greek military tactics, there are a number of studies devoted primarily to the wars of the Greek city-states. A comprehensive catalogue of Greek battlefields in English is desperately needed to update J. Kromayer and G. Veith, Antike Schlachtfelder (Berlin: Weidmann, 1903-31). In some sense, that desired survey is essentially already written-if W. K. Pritchett's volumes on topography were reissued by the University of California Press in paperback, with systematic rearrangement of the chapters, and a comprehensive index. R. Gabriel and D. Boose Jr. have very general accounts of a few Greek battles of classical times in The Great Battles of Antiquity (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1994); but without first-hand field reconnaissance or reference to primary resources, their survey's main contribution is limited to placing Hellenic warfare of the polis in a cross-cultural and comparative context with fighting in the Orient. The military campaigns of the Persian Wars are treated comprehensively in C. Hignett, Xerxes' Invasion of Greece (Oxford: Clarendon, 1963); P Green, The Year of Salamis, 480-479 B.C. (recently reissued as The Greco-Persian Wars [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997]); and most recently, J. Lazenby, The Defence of Greece (Warminster, U.K.: Aris and Phillips, 1989)-the latter is an excellent philologically-based narrative that never wanders far from the texts of Herodotus, Plutarch, and Diodorus. The former two books reflect the traditional picture of a free people of the West, fighting for the family, values, and property against an autocratic and imperial aggressor; Lazenby is cynicalperhaps far too cynical-in emphasizing that the role of chance, not merely the inherent dynamism of Western culture, might just as well explain the remarkable Greek victory.

D. Kagan's four-volume New History of the Peloponnesian War (Ithaca, N.Y: Cornell University Press, 1969-87) is a comprehensive treatment of some twenty-seven years of warmaking, and it offers valuable and often original reconstructions of the major land and sea battles-Delium, Mantineia, Sicily, Arginusae, Aegospotami, etc.-between 431 and 404. Kagan's work is the only military history that systematically ties particular battles to the larger political and strategic questions at hand. G. E. M. de Ste. Croix's The Origins of the Peloponnesian War (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1972) has as much information on the cultural aspects of Greek warfare as many purely military histories.

For very reliable and extremely detailed studies of the Greek sources for these main land and sea battles of the fifth century, see A. W. Gomme, A. Andrewes, and K. J. Dover, Historical Commentary on Thucydides, 5 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1945-1981), to be supplemented now with S. Hornblower, A Commentary on Thucydides, 2 vols. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992-1996). Comparable complete commentaries on Herodotus and Xenophon that might offer the same degree of philological detail of ancient battles during the Persian Wars, and from 411 to 362 B.C., married with up-to-date bibliography, are currently nonexistent. It is often forgotten that over half of G. B. Grundy's classic, Thucydides and the History of his Age (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1948), is devoted to a pragmatic account of the economic and political foundations of fifth-century warfare on land and sea. In some sense, his chapters still remain the best introduction to Greek warfare of the fifth century. A new accessible edition and translation of Thucydides (The Landmark Thucydides, ed. R. Strassler [New York: Free Press, 1996]) has appendixes on Greek land and sea warfare, cross-listed to passages in the English text of The Peloponnesian War. J. Buckler, The Theban Hegemony (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1980) contains a good survey of the rise of the Theban army and has accounts of Leuctra (371 B.C.), second Mantineia (362 B.C.), and the four Theban invasions of the Peloponnese.

No better investigation of fighting in Greece after the Peloponnesian War exists than P. Cartledge's Agesilaos and the Crisis of Sparta (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1987); scholars should not be misled by the modest title inasmuch as the book is essentially a comprehensive political and military history of fourth-century Greece. From 403 to 362, most of the major campaigning in Greece was characterized as war against or alongside Sparta-a society whose peculiar economic and cultural foundations, as Cartledge shows, had a direct effect on some three centuries of Greek military practice. Agesilaos should be reissued in paperback-albeit with a title that does justice to the vast sweep and erudition of the book.

4. Hellenistic War (323-146 B.C.)

Since the publication of M. Launey's Recherches sur les armies hellenistiques, 2 vols. (Paris: E. de Boccard, 1949-50), no comprehensive survey exists for the long and complicated story of Hellenistic warfarean inquiry that would involve a life's work of detailed research on siegecraft, cavalry, infantry, artillery, mercenaries, and naval warfare, from the Balkans to the Indus, including North Africa and Italy, and drawing on a vast quantity of epigraphical and papyrological documents, in addition to the traditional literary and archaeological sources. Such an investigation would require as much expertise in fiscal history-taxation, numismatics, and state expenditures-as knowledge of the battlefield itself. And it might end up as essentially a cultural and sociological study of mercenary service from the lowliest phalangite to the most sophisticated scientist.

Such an updated book on Hellenistic warfare is also desperately needed since literary and cultural scholars lately have taken up advocacy of the Hellenistic world as sort of a multicultural utopia, as the Greeks expanded across the Aegean to embrace the "Other." In fact, a sober military account would offer a quite different and unfashionable account of soaring taxes, enormous military expenditures, the end of ubiquitous autonomous local assemblies, and a general increase in material exploitation as kings and "their friends" devoted ever more human and material capital to warring with each other. Military history has a tendency to reveal the material conditions of the average citizen in a way literary theory cannot-and would offer a far more judicious approach to the Hellenistic world at large.

Those dimensions of such a comprehensive study were outlined in the now dated, but still valuable, lectures of W. W. Tarn's Hellenistic Military and Naval Developments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1930). Perhaps the best general history of Macedon that contains detailed treatment of the army is N. G. L. Hammond's The Macedonian State: The Origins, Institutions and History (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989)-which draws on the author's intimate knowledge of archaeology, Greek literature, and more than a half century of field reconnaissance in the southern Balkans. More specialized is the first volume of H. Delbrick's general history of war-Warfare in Antiquity (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1975)-which has some interesting ideas concerning pikemen and cavalry-infantry tactics. B. Bar-Kochva, The Seleucid Army (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1976), is the sole specialized book devoted to the armies of the Successors. There are helpful illustrations of uniforms and equipment in N. Sekunda, The Army of Alexander the Great (London: Osprey, 1984). A monograph devoted to Alexander's last great battle against Darius III is E. W. Marsden, The Campaign of Gaugamela (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1964). J. McCredie's Fortified Military Camps in Attica (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1966) studies some of the archaeological evidence for the Chremondeian War (260s B.C.) in Attica.

Because both A. B. Bosworth, author of A Historical Commentary on Arria.n's History of Alexander, vol. 1 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1980), and F. W. Walbank, who wrote A Historical Commentary on Polybius, vols. 1-3 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1957-79), are accomplished students of military history, their philological commentaries-like the Gomme and Hornblower editions of Thucydides in the case of classical warfare-remain about the best places to begin any investigation of particular Hellenistic battles. There is also a series of studies by A. M. Devine on the major battles of Alexander and the Successors in various issues of Ancient World (1985-89) and elsewhere. Those individual investigations have not yet been compiled into a comprehensive book on Hellenistic battle-a volume that is clearly needed.

5. Roman Republic (300-31 B.C.)

Besides the general surveys of the Roman republican army mentioned earlier, a number of specialized studies chronicles the legions' systematic aggrandizement in the Eastern and Western Mediterranean, North Africa, and Asia up until the ascension of Augustus. E. Gruen, The Hellenistic World and the Coming of Rome (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1984) is valuable for its narrative of the general history of Roman military intervention in the Eastern Mediterranean, but the effect of his discussion is to suggest that Roman imperialism and its accompanying militarism were almost accidental occurrences-which often seems naive. Military questions are discussed in greater detail in E. Gabba, Republican Rome, the Army, and the Allies (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), a superb and realistic account of how legionary proficiency opened up the Mediterranean. Also see the valuable monograph of J. Rich, Declaring War in the Roman Republic in the Period of Transmarine Expansion (Brussels: Latomus, 1976). A systematic survey of all battles between the legion and phalanx would be welcome; much is written about why Roman armies prevailed without a great deal being known.

The great conflict of the Republic was, of course, the war with Carthage. Although the bibliography of the Punic wars is immense, there is a readable survey in B. Craven, The Punic Wars (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1980). For more detail, see J. F. Lazenby, Hannibal's War (Warminster, U.K.: Aris and Phillips, 1978), a fine military investigation of the second Punic War (218-201 B.C.) now to be supplemented by his equally reliable The First Punic War (Warminster, U.K.: Aris and Phillips, 1996) on the initial Roman-Carthaginian encounter (264-241 B.C.). The latter has excellent chapters on the birth and development of the Roman fleet. Lazenby's method, admittedly conservative, is to collate all the ancient literary evidence and to adjudicate source controversy, but rarely to offer theoretical speculations or cross-cultural comparisons that are not supported by what ancient Greek and Roman authors wrote. One hopes that a third volume will appear on the siege and destruction of Carthage, prompting publishers to reissue a three-volume comprehensive and paperback edition of Lazenby's superb work. J. Peddle's Hannibal's War (Gloucestershire, U.K.: Alan Sutton, 1997) is an engaging and sympathetic account of Hannibal's efforts in Italy.

Arnold Toynbee wrote a vast study of Hannibal's long stay in ItalyHannibal's Legacy (Oxford: Clarendon, 1965). And while Toynbee is valuable for some of the more long-lasting political and military ramifications from the constant Punic presence and Roman mobilization in Italy, his thesis of a ruined Roman countryside, with years of agricultural depression and economic turmoil, is highly exaggerated. Few books show such wide learning and erudition along with so little common sense.

For an original discussion of Caesar's Gallic campaign, see J. Harmand, Une campagne cesarienne: Alesia (Paris: A. J. Picard et Cie, 1967). The domestic consequences of the foreign expansion and the relationship between war and politics is covered in E. Erdmann, Die Rolle des Heeres in der Zeit von Marius bis Caesar (Neustadt: Schmidt, 1972) and B. Schleussner, Die Legaten der romischen Republik (Munich: Beck, 1978).

6. Early Empire (31 B.C.-200 A.D.)

In addition to the general books on the Roman imperial army, and the more specialized work on the Roman frontier discussed earlier, there are a number of specialized studies of particular wars on the borders of the Roman world-the locus of legionary fighting other than the few attempted marches on Rome by disgruntled frontier generals. Because of the rich archaeological record, and the close proximity of the major English research universities, the first-century A.D. Roman invasions of Britain naturally have been particularly well studied. See most recently G. Webster, The Roman Invasion of Britain (London: Batsford, 1980); P. A. Holder, The Roman Army in Britain (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1982); and A. Johnson, Roman Forts of the Ist and 2nd Centuries AD in Britain and the German Provinces (London: A. & C. Black, 1983). The economic consequences of the legions' presence in Britain are found in a series of essays edited by B. Burnham and H. Johnson, Invasion and Response: the Case of Roman Britain, British Archaeological Reports, 73 (Oxford: B.A.R., 1979). As is true in general with frontier studies, the emphasis of recent research on the legions in Britain has not been so much from the view of the occupying forces, as from the social and economical impact of their stay on the indigenous populace.

More specific to the performance of the Roman army in the field against a variety of differently armed and equipped adversaries in especially brutal and dirty wars of attrition are M. Fentress, Numidia and the Roman Army, British Archaeological Reports, 53 (Oxford: B.A.R., 1979), and I. Rossi, Trajan's Column and the Dacian Wars (London: Thames and Hudson, 1971), the latter of which extrapolates much about Roman auxiliaries and support services that is otherwise not known from literary sources. Rossi has been somewhat superseded (in addition to new photographs) by F. Lepper and S. Frere, Trajan's Column (Gloucestershire, U.K.: Alan Sutton, 1988), to be used in conjunction with F. Lepper's earlier Trajan's Parthian War (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1948).

There are some wide-ranging socio-economic studies of Roman military encroachment in northern Europe in D. M. Pippidi, Assimilation et resistance e la culture greco-romaine dans le monde ancien: Travaux du VIe Congres International d'Etudes Classiques (Madrid, September 1974; Paris, 1976). The archaeological evidence of the Roman-Germanic frontier is found in C. M. Wells's excellent, The German Policy of Augustus: An Examination of the Archaeological Evidence (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1972); few scholars have a better grasp of the literary sources and archaeological evidence for the Roman frontiers. For the early imperial wars to the east, see the specialized investigations of J. S. Mitchell, ed., Armies and Frontiers in Roman and Byzantine Anatolia, British Archaeological Reports, 156 (Oxford: B.A.R., 1983), and P. Freeman and D. Kennedy, eds., The Defence of the Roman and Byzantine East, British Archaeological Reports, 297 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1986). J. B. Campbell's The Emperor and the Roman Army, 31 BC-AD 235 (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1984) is an original treatment of the legal sources that outline legionary rights and prerogatives under the emperors.

7. Late Empire (A.D. 200-600)

Three topics dominate the military history of the later Roman Empire-frontier defense, the massive incorporation of non-Latinspeaking recruits, and the effect of Christianity upon the morale and battle efficacy of the legions. Besides the specific works on frontier strategy of Luttwak, Ferrill, Whittaker, and Isaac mentioned earlier, and the surveys of the imperial army by Webster, Watson, and others, there are more specialized studies of these military problems particular to late antiquity. Much of the breakdown occurred in the east and is discussed by C. N. Lieu, The Roman Eastern Frontier and the Persian Wars AD 226-363 (London: Routledge, 1991) and S. T. Parker, Romans and Saracens: A History of the Arabian Frontier (Winona Lake, Ind.: American Schools of Oriental Research, 1986). Non-Roman troops are treated in M. Sartre, Trois etudes sur l'Arabie romaine et byzantine (Brussels: Revue d'etudes latines, 1982). A comprehensive attempt to reconcile the collapsing Empire, Christianity, and foreigners is J. H. Liebeschuetz's excellent Barbarians and Bishops: Army, Church and State in the Age of Arcadius and Chrysostom (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990); for earlier attempts at stabilization, see S. Williams, Diocletian and the Roman Recovery (London: Batsford, 1985).

The existence of a late fourth-century A.D. illustrated manuscript on the organization and offices of the Roman Empire, the so-called Notitia Dignitatum or "List of Offices," is critical to any understanding of both the strategic and tactical plan of the later imperial land army. An associated and similarly illustrated anonymous text, De Rebus Bellicis, "Concerning Military Matters," includes discussions of proposed military machines and equipment as well as imperial defense policy. See D. Hoffmann, Das spatromischen Bewegungsheer und die Not.tia Dignitatum, 2 vols. (Disseldorf: Rheinland-Verlag, 1969-70), to be used with R. Goodburn and P. Bartholomew, eds., Aspects of the Notitia Dignitatum (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976), and R. Ireland and M. Hassall, eds., De Rebus Bellicis (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1979). The other rich written source for the Roman army of the fourth century is the superb Latin history of Ammianus Marcellinus-extant books covering A.D. 353-378 (to the battle of Adrianople). See especially N. Austin, Ammianus on War (Brussels: Latomus, 1979); H. Rowell, Ammianus Marcellinus: Soldier Historian of the Late Roman Empire (Cincinnati: University of Cincinnati, 1964); and, more recently, J. Matthews, The Roman Empire of Ammianus (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989).

Much controversy exists over whether the Empire should be seen as "collapsing" rather than gradually metamorphosing into what would later become Medieval Europe-in language, customs, religion, and values not altogether different from Roman culture itself. A review of the controversy from a military point of view is found in B. Bachrach, Merovingian Military Organization, 481-751 (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1972) and Armies and Politics in the Early Medieval West (Aldershot, U.K.: Variorum, 1993). Bachrach would argue that Rome never really fell at all, its military organization at least becoming adopted as standard by European kingdoms for the next several centuries. Hans Delbruck's second volume, now translated as The Barbarian Invasions (Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 1980), is an engaging account of the traditional view of a disintegrating Roman army on the northern frontier.

V. Conclusion

Although the number of doctoral dissertations on classical military history is still small, and scholars who identify themselves (at least openly) as ancient "military historians" are rather few, the field is nevertheless in the midst of a scholarly renaissance-fueled in part by the popular interest of the general reader and the rising enrollment of curious undergraduates. New journals and newsletters are appearing for those inside and outside academia; new translations and editions of Thucydides and Herodotus now appear every year; university presses are expanding works on classical warfare; and the field has shed its once suspect skin of militarism to include wider questions of economics, social conditions, and the effect of battle upon soldiers and civilians.

Much more could be done on the Greek side (cf., e.g., "The Future of Greek Military History" in V. D. Hanson, ed., Hoplites: The Classical Greek Battle Experience [London: Routledge, 19911). In a purely military sense, monographs are needed on the Theban and Argive armies; both forces played important roles respectively during the rise and decline of the polis and for a time fielded ferocious armies. We have little knowledge about the degree to which Greek polis armies-from some one thousand plus communities-were armed and organized similarly. Recent archaeological surveys-over a dozen now completed-might be utilized to assess the recruitment and manpower of Greek armies, marrying the agricultural potential of the countryside to the size and nature of infantry in the field. There is still no comprehensive corpus of ancient Greek battles, which under one cover could provide a reference guide to twenty or so of the major fights, replete with primary sources, topographical summaries, and up-to-date bibliographies. The philologists' dream of new commentaries on Herodotus and Xenophon would greatly aid the Greek military historian. Some type of systematic study of casualty rates and their effect on small Greek communities would ground in reality the frequent laments over losses voiced in Greek poetry and drama. No major work has yet appeared that would place the Greeks' abstract conception of war in the larger context of the Western philosophical tradition. Yet a comprehensive survey of the battle records and military service of the major Greek writers and thinkers-Aeschylus, Socrates, Thucydides, etc.-would do much to explain their pragmatic and realistic discussions of war itself. Literary critics are not sensitive enough to the degree that Attic tragedians, Plato's Socrates, and the lyric poets drew examples and inspirations from their own contemporary first-hand military experience and the general warmaking of the times.

Greek fortifications have been widely studied, but we have no comprehensive account-at least outside of Athens-of the relationship between walls and politics, a connection explicit in all the Greek philosophers. No study has examined the relationship in classical Greece between radical democracy and military prowess, though the forces of Athens, Sicily, and Argos were among the most accomplished of the fifth century B.C. Was that because of, or in spite of, their democratic constitutions? Such a book might dispel the somewhat romantic view that Athenian democracy was pacifistic; in fact, more Greeks died fighting alongside or against Athenian democrats than in all the other wars of the Greek city-states put together.

The main controversies over traditional problems-the hoplite reform, the battle of Marathon, the nature of pushing in the phalanx, the strategy of Pericles, etc.-have now been aired sufficiently for scholars to move on to more pressing issues. If we are to publish yet more reconstructions of Marathon, Thermopylae, Mantineia, Leuctra, and Chaeroneia, then we must at least adopt different approaches, whether it be the battle experience of the combatants or the effects of the fighting and dying on later generations of Greeks. While there are numerous accounts of booty, plundering, and raiding, we still desperately need a new study of the cost of fielding Greek armies, both Classical and Hellenistic, the methods of raising such revenue, and the larger effects on state budgets of keeping men in the field. Scholars argue that the expenditures of the Peloponnesian War stopped cold the classical Greek artistic and architectural renaissance, and yet also make the case that the great contributions of Hellenistic art and culture were dividends from the non-stop campaigning of warring kings and elites.

There is no general account of taxation in the Greek world-a study inseparable from a general military history. A few excellent specialized books on naval finance (e.g., V. Gabrielsen, Financing the Athenian Fleet: Public Taxation and Social Relations [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 19941; L. Kallet-Marx, Money, Expense, and Naval Power in Thucydides' History 1-5.24 [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993]) demonstrate the value of that fiscal approach. Pragmatic research into weapon weight, durability, cost, and performance, human endurance, and medical treatment exists in journal articles; these could now be summarized by a philologist aware of the ancient literary sources and the pertinent archaeological and epigraphical evidence, to provide a comprehensive study of what it was like to wear such equipment in the phalanx or legion.

In an era of scholarship in which the Greeks are now sometimes considered merely members of a larger Afro-Asiatic mosaic of the Eastern Mediterranean, a comprehensive cultural and philosophical crossstudy is needed of Greek military practice in comparison to other armies of the region. Far from being merely one of many cultures of the Eastern Mediterranean, some account-and it will ultimately include cultural, political, scientific, and economic questions-must explain why a small region in the Southern Balkans, without reserves of either manpower or natural resources, fielded forces that consistently destroyed much larger and better equipped adversaries. Greek armies, it seems to me, were anti-Mediterranean in spirit, organization, ideology, and practice.

The rise of frontier research in Roman military history-itself made possible by the enormous achievement in archaeological research over the last two decades-demonstrates how war studies can rise to the fore of basic historical questions of the field. Although Roman military history is far more diverse than Greek, there is as yet not a comparable second generation of generalists which has produced comprehensive introductory volumes incorporating recent research. It is a valid generalization that we still know very little about the combat behavior, morale, and psychology of the Roman soldier, despite a plethora of studies on technological, fiscal, and sociological aspects of the Roman legions.

There have been dozens of major books on Roman agricultural practice in recent years; thus, it is now possible to write a systematic account of the interplay between warfare and farming in the Roman worldeffect of agricultural devastation, loss of productivity due to recruitment, seasonal considerations in campaigning, impact of food reserves on the legions' mobility and persistence, and the connection between the agrarian profile and military elan.

A final note. Two decades after its appearance in general humanities departments, postmodernism has now permeated Classical Studies, primarily within literary criticism, historical theory, and archaeological methodology. With a few exceptions, such reliance on poststructuralist theory, I think, has had largely deleterious effects both on the standards of research (dismissal of primary sources, interest in peripheral topics, increasing politicization, and diminution of human agency) and on the presentation of scholarship (jargon-laden prose, absence of common sense, preference for the theoretical at the expense of the pragmatic)not to mention its ill-effects on the commitment to undergraduate teaching. Ancient military history, it is true, has largely been immune from these trends-again, partly because of the decidedly unprogressive image of war, partly because war is ultimately real killing and thus too obvious an act of aggression to dress up with the Foucauldian vocabulary of power and exploitation. Perhaps too, unlike, say, the study of Athenian tragedy or Augustan poetry, which are now reinterpreted according to each new theoretical fashion, ancient warfare has been so long neglected that there are hundreds of areas of research still untouchedwithout the need of the constant reworking of previously mined ore.

In any case, at a time when classical military history has at last emerged from the Germanic image of war study as the science of killing and the chivalry of battle, has resisted the entrance of war-gaming, and has become fully integrated within the central social, economic, and cultural controversies of the ancient world, it would be unfortunate to embrace postmodern theoretical fashions and thereby to abandon the grand tradition of accessible historical narrative, based on empirical research that is the product of classical scholarship. To do so will ultimately kill interest just as it has reawakened. Theory, at least as it is now championed, is not the cure for the evils of philological pedantry-clear prose, common sense, and an appreciation that war holds a terrible fascination for us all are.