Innholdsfortegnelse for AW XVI.2 i Ancient Warfare Magazine

EDITORIAL – AW never tires When I started Ancient Warfare, people sometimes asked me whether I worried about ever running out of topics to discuss. Their reasoning, apparently, goes along the lines of “Marathon, Alexander the Great, Cannae, Teutoburger Forest, a Roman civil war or two, and you've ticked all the boxes”. In fact, people occasionally still ask me that. The answer is always very succinct: nope. One reason lies in the setup of the magazine. The themes were conceived to ensure a near-endless variety of topics and a lens to focus the contributions of authors in new ways, even if the theme is similar. So far, that seems to work very well, if I say so myself. The other reason lies in the advance of academic debate, something that…

The later Roman Empire saw many challengers to central Roman authority come and go. One, the self-styled ‘Roman emperor’ Sponsianus, is known only from a small assemblage of coins allegedly found in Romania, and first recorded in 1713. Only four coins now survive. Many have doubted their authenticity, but a new study supports the case for them being genuine. The gold coins are very unlike regular Roman coins in both style and manufacture. They display various enigmatic features, including bungled legends and historically mixed motifs. For these reasons they have long been dismissed as poorly made forgeries. Researchers from University College London and the University of Glasgow set out resolve a long-standing ‘unsolved mystery’. Their findings are published in “Authenticating coins of the ‘Roman emperor’ Sponsian” in PLOS One 17(11).…

CONSTANTIUS II – USURPERS, EUNUCHS, AND THE ANTICHRIST Crawford explores the reign of this most neglected but important Roman emperor who reigned 337-361. Nestled between Constantine I, the Great, his father, and Julian the Apostate, the last pagan emperor, his nephew, Constantius has been relegated to the ‘guy’ between those two giants of history. His reign is poorly served in the sources, yet it saw constant warfare, the borders all across the empire threatened. There were civil wars, usurpers and troubles aplenty – all of which he survived. His reign also saw a whole raft of military reforms (many of which he has received no credit for despite clearly being their author). Among these were the widespread introduction of heavy cavalry units, clibanarii, the introduction of the separate comitatenses field…

SPECIAL Using the example of Roman armies in the camps built in relation to numerous campaigns of the second century BC against, the Celtiberian City of Numantia, which culminated in the infamous siege, some eye-watering sewage statistics emerge for when an army encamped, and the impact on the local area is astonishing. The conclusions can be applied in a suitably scaled manner to other ancient armies – sewage was as much a part of all their everyday lives as eating, drinking, and sleeping. Sewage Britain is particularly good for indicating how common latrines must also have been in military installations, as 40 per cent (137 examples) have yielded evidence of latrines. The best-known is the rather sophisticated stone-built communal latrine with flushing water system at Housesteads, Hadrian's Wall. Such latrines…

THEME: The coming of the hoplite The popular image of the Greek hoplite, the one most commonly seen in both tabletop and computer wargames, Hollywood movies, and in endless images of internet art, is so relentless that I can close my eyes and picture it effortlessly – a muscular man in a shining bronze Corinthian-pattern helmet with a horsehair crest. He wears a muscled bronze cuirass (always of the later, more realistic fifth century BC style, cut high to allow movement at the hips), or a linothorax or spolas ‘tube and yoke’ cuirass, and a pair of bronze greaves, also of the later fifth century BC ‘clipon’ variety, realistically muscled and extending from the ankle to the top of the knee, cut away at the back to allow for flexion…

SPECIAL In 575 BC, prior to battle with the army of the great southern state of Chu, Duke Li of Jin consulted his milfoil stalks. The result suggested that a southern state would shrink, and that the king of that state would be shot in the eye. Meanwhile, the Jin general Lu Qi dreamt that he had shot at, and hit, the moon, but then became mired in mud. The Jin diviners concluded that it would be Lu Qi who would shoot King Gong of Chu, but he would become mired and die himself when withdrawing from battle. The episode is recorded in the Zuozhuan, a key source covering the Spring and Autumn period in what is now China. Two hundred years later, at the other end of Eurasia in…

REVIEWS By Peter Stothard ISBN: 978-0300256604 Yale Books (2022) – $26.00 www.yalebooks.yale.edu M. Licinius Crassus (ca.115–53 BC) was the richest man to live during the last years of the Roman Republic. How he established his wealth and reputation, then spectacularly squandered them, is told in this new biography. Crassus was an opportunist in turbulent times. When his father and brother stood against C. Marius and were executed, Crassus fled to Spain and lived in a cave. He returned to Italy with an army to support Sulla. He was tasked with winning over the Marsi; in this he was successful, adding their fighters to his legion. He put it to good use outside the walls of Rome. As “the hero of the Battle of Colline Gate” in 82 BC (p. 57),…

By Raffaele D'Amato & Andrea Salimbeti, illustrated by Andrei Negin ISBN: 978-1472850980 Osprey (2023) – £14.99 www.ospreypublishing.com The latest release in Osprey's Elite series covers the ‘dark’ period of postRoman Britain and Gaul following the collapse of Roman control in those provinces. There was a great deal of continuity between late-Roman Gaul and Britain and the post-Roman period; new cultures did not immediately assert themselves, nor did old cultures reassert themselves, and equipment remained largely the same. Tactics and even organization may have done so too, in addition to the continuing Roman influence in religion, language, law, and other areas; Latin was still the lingua franca. In Gaul, we find a similar situation where the ruling elite were patricii and command remained in the hands of a magister militum –…

THE GREEK HOPLITE PHALANX: THE ICONIC HEAVY INFANTRY OF CLASSICAL GREECE By R. Taylor Pen & Sword, 2021 ISBN: 978-1526788566 Taylor provides an overview of the ‘current state of play’ of scholarship on the hoplite and the formation of the phalanx, and on the hoplite debate in all its aspects. He also argues that the insistence on the unique nature of the Greek hoplite phalanx, has obscured the similarities with other equivalent contemporary formations. GREEK WARFARE: MYTHS AND REALITIES By H. van Wees Duckworth, 2004 ISBN: 978-0715629673 Van Wees here looks at the ‘big picture’ of Greek warfare. Although his conclusions are controversial and still debated, he makes his arguments based on interpretations of the evidence, contending that the Greek sources present a highly selective and idealised picture, too easily…

The controversy of when and how the hoplite developed remains a debated topic in ancient Greek warfare. Certain items of equipment appear relatively early – aspis shields, bronze cuirasses, Corinthian and other helmets types, the sword, and spear. We also have evidence for tube and yoke or linothorax armour. The sources often just state helmet (kranos) or armour (thorax). And just because a warrior looks like a hoplite, however, that does not mean he fights like a hoplite, in coordinated ranks, several files deep, with overlapping shields, and with the tactic of othismos (although as we have seen, that and the exact nature of hoplite combat is a debate in itself!). Here we see an early hoplite, at least in terms of appearance – he wears hoplite panoply, the hoplon.…

Hordes of horse-riding Huns led by Attila crossing into eastern and central Europe in the fourth and fifth centuries AD have long been considered one of the deciding factors in the collapse of the Western Roman Empire. Yet, both the origins of the Huns and their impact on the Roman provinces have remained poorly understood. A new, combined assessment of the archaeological, historical, and environmental evidence provides possible answers. The Hunni were a nomadic tribe with roots in Central Asia. The Romans became aware of them when, in AD 376, their invasion of the Pontic steppes caused the Goths to migrate to the Lower Danube and to seek refuge within the borders of the Empire. Ammianus Marcellinus gives an extended description of the Huns’ wild appearance and war tactics in…

When, exactly, the hoplite panoply became little more than chiton, aspis shield and helmet is difficult to pin down. We have seen that greaves seem to have fallen out of use before the Peloponnesian War, but the cloak remained (see AW XIII.1 and XIII.4). By the end of the Peloponnesian War, hoplites certainly wore little armour, as is visible on tombstones (although we still find a Corinthian helmet and a muscled cuirass occasionally – are these artistic conventions perhaps, or a reflection of reality?). In the centrefold, you will note ‘fully’ armoured hoplites from Thebes and Athens clashing at Delium in 424 BC – these are the front ranks, the protostates, who would (presumably) be better armoured than their companions behind them. We can ask, however, if the process of…

Alexander the Great set the model that generals (and those who followed his example) should command the cavalry contingent of their armies. Alexander's bold command of his Companion cavalry, leading them from the front, was not a style which suited all subsequent commanders, however. In the Roman era it became more normal for commanders to command from the rear of the legions and usually on foot.…

THEME: The coming of the hoplite Xenophon, a veteran and witness to countless battles, described victorious hoplites as “courageous, because they were in eager rivalry with one another and because their bodies were in thorough training” (Cyropaedia 3.3.57). But who did these ‘rivals’ represent to these men? And what made them ‘rivals’? Above all other factors critical to one's will to combat is what modern military anthropologists have termed the ‘primary group’. In short, a primary group can be equated to something akin to a modern military squad, a Roman legion's contubernium, or a classical phalanx's stichos (“file”). Regardless of name, it generally refers to the smallest, and most intimate, social (and often tactical) organization of any army, the social connections within which motivate soldiers to fight. Given the nature…