Innholdsfortegnelse for AW XVII.4 i Ancient Warfare Magazine

EDITORIAL - Finishing the job If you consider it, and as will become very obvious from this issue, it’s not strange that we tend to think the Greco-Persian Wars end after Plataea. The Persians retreat from Greece, after all. Most narratives will give a nod to Mycale, and we’re off to the races with the Delian League and the Pentecontaetia, the fifty-year era between the purported end of the Persian Wars and the start of the Peloponnesian War. 'Pentecontaetia' was coined centuries later, based on the end date of Herodotus' history and the start given by Thucydides for the later war. The detailed contemporary narratives are missing, but that doesn’t mean the war was over. Mardonius was dead, and few Persians remained west of the Bosporus, but the fighting didn’t…

SPECIAL At its head, in a chariot of gilded wood, stood a young king of Egypt. His name was Ramesses and he was on his way east across the Sinai Peninsula and up the Levantine coast towards the province of Amurru in modern-day Syria. Ramesses II had only been king of Egypt for four years, and his youth and perceived inexperience had prompted one of his vassals, Prince Benteshina of Amurru, to defect to Ramesses’ enemies: the Hittites, living in modern-day Turkey. Ramesses was now marching towards the citadel of Kadesh in Amurru to repay Benteshina’s treachery. With him, the Egyptian king brought 20,000 men – infantry, archers, and chariotry. Behind the army, the mudbrick walls of the great Egyptian border fortress of Tjaru sank into the distance. Ahead, the…

THEME: The Persian Wars, part II His chief commander and close relative, Mardonius, who had played a major role in persuading Xerxes to invade Greece, had died on the field at Plataea along with countless other soldiers. The royal fleet had been severely damaged, and what had been saved from Salamis was destroyed by a lightning-fast attack launched by the Greeks against the harbour of Mycale, where the Persian fleet had found shelter just a few days after the battle at Plataea. These losses, however, meant relatively little to the Great King (or so the Greeks believed). In economic terms, the damage was limited: his virtually infinite resources meant that Xerxes could quickly reconstruct a fleet as large as the one he had just lost. New armies could be mustered…

THEME: The Persian Wars, part II While the battle of Eurymedon was an important moment in Greek history, details about this event are poorly preserved: it is impossible to establish with certainty its date, forces, and course. One element clearly emerges, however: the engagement at the Eurymedon consisted of a naval battle followed by a land battle on the same day. Scholars have painstakingly analyzed surviving evidence – which, unfortunately, is exclusively Greek – in order to attempt to understand the details. And, in fact, by comparing and combining details from various sources, we can presume with reasonable safety that the battle was fought in the Spring or Summer of 465 BC. The following is a plausible reconstruction based on what available ancient sources record (or fail to). The vast…

Anecdotes in Aelian’s Varia Historia and Athenaeus’ Deipnosophistae, both probably excerpted from Phylarchus’ Histories, provide some clues about the colours of Persian uniforms: purple and yellow for the Apple Bearers, flame-coloured, dark blue and scarlet for the archers, and purple for the Susians. Xenophon (Cyropaedia 8.3.3) also mentions purple, sable, red, and dark walnut-red. The silver or golden pomegranate or apple decoration on the spear perhaps differentiated the Immortals and not any other item of uniform or equipment from regular Persian troops. The purple of the Susians also implies that other contingents in Persian armies had specific colours associated with them or a colour to signify their origins. Unfortunately, we are not given details of some of the other colours so we do not know where the flame-, blueor scarlet-clothed…

SPECIAL Three years earlier, after a revolt against him had broken out, Ptolemy XII had fled to Rome. He decided to remain there until he was able to gain enough influence and wealth to hire an army to help him regain his throne. The senator Aulus Gabinius was closely affiliated with Pompey and responsible for the creation of the lex Gabinia in 67 BC that gave Pompey wide-ranging powers to deal with pirates throughout the Mediterranean. In 57 BC, Gabinius was appointed proconsul of the Roman province of Syria, and, as he made his way there, he met the young and ambitious Mark Antony, and appointed him to be the commander of his cavalry (Plutarch Antony 3.1). Once Gabinius arrived in the province, he campaigned in Judea for the next…

The poet Juvenal advised the would-be centurion to “ensure that Laelius notices your tousled head and hairy nostrils and admires your broad shoulders” (Satires 14.194–195). Laelius was evidently a provincial governor with the authority to commission centurions, and in Juvenal’s view, he would be seeking no-nonsense men who took no interest in their personal appearance and relied on brute strength to project their authority. The poet Persius’ reference to “the smelly race of centurions” (Satires 3.77) shows that he would have agreed with Juvenal’s judgement. It is easy to see how such men would become, in Tacitus’ view, objects of the soldiers’ resentment. Of course, this was a literary conceit. It is unthinkable that every legionary centurion was a bully, or that any might have presented a slovenly or uncouth…

In 1960, in the village of Dendra, in southern Greece, the so-called Dendra Panoply – one of the oldest complete suits of Bronze Age armour – was discovered. Dated to the fifteenth century BC, it is unknown whether this armour was intended for extended use in battle or was purely ceremonial. A team of researchers set out to determine how practical the armour was. For the study, the research team from the University of Thessaly used a replica of the Dendra armour made using gilding metal (95 per cent copper, 5 per cent zinc), which was the closest alloy to the original bronze available. Each of the plates of the armour replicated the exact dimensions, curvature, and perforations of the original and were edged with leather strips and joined with…

Leading the Roman Army: Soldiers and Emperors 31 BC - AD 235 Based on his PhD thesis, Eaton explores the means and strategies by which Roman emperors controlled their soldiers and sustained their allegiance from the battle of Actium in 31 BC, to the demise of the Severan dynasty in AD 235. The Roman imperial army represented one of the main factors in the exercise of political control of the empire by the emperors and, therefore, the effective political management of the army was essential for maintaining the safety and well-being of the empire as a whole. Not to mention the safety of the emperor himself in many cases. A failure of this management can be seen as one of the causes of almost every military crisis during the empire.…

Egyptian troops had been augmented by mercenaries for centuries. Weni, a court official of the 6th Dynasty (ca. 2345-2180 BC), is the first recorded Egyptian commander to make use of Nubian mercenaries. By the reign of Akhenaten, Nubian mercenaries were a common feature of the Egyptian military system. Several Amarna Letters record requests for Nubian archers to be sent as garrison troops to Levantine cities. Nubians were not the only mercenaries employed by Egypt, however. A mock letter found in Papyrus Anastasi I, dated to the Ramesside period (ca. 1189–1077 BC), enumerates the division of ethnicities within an Egyptian army, claiming that for every 5000 soldiers, 1900 were Egyptian, 520 were Sherden mercenaries (possibly from Sardinia or the Aegean), 1600 were men of the Kehek, probably from the Aegean, 100…

THEME: The Persian Wars, part II Mycale (or Mykale, modern Dilek Daği, Turkey) was a mountainous promontory which faced the island of Samos along the northern edge of the bay at the mouth of the Meander River (the modern Büyük Menderes, or Great Meander, southwestern Turkey). The site has changed immensely since antiquity due to the silting up of the river mouth. What was originally a bay between Miletus and Priene is now an alluvial plain. This important river was the border between Caria to the south and Lydia to the north. The site of the battle is usually associated with the modern town of Atburgazi, on the coast some 6 km west of Priene. The forces gather The defeat of the Persian navy at the battle of Salamis the…

Another common differentiator on depictions of Persian troops are the types of helmets shown. In several reliefs we find distinctively different headgear, from the tiara to other kinds of headdress and helmet. There are at least six distinctly different headdresses depicted in the reliefs at Susa and Persepolis and it is possible that Bactrian, Median, Lydian, Susian, and other units were immediately recognizable by their distinctive headdress. While most Persian troops seem to be armed relatively similarly, with spears, swords, often akinakes, and bows, sometimes with shields, there is differentiation in headgear and hairstyle and this too may have aided in their identification – perhaps not on the battlefield but certainly on reliefs, and it would have been possible to know up close where a unit or a man was…

SPECIAL Odoacer had paid a visit to Theoderic who was answering petitions. Two would-be petitioners suddenly grabbed Odoacer’s hands, after which Theoderic himself cut Odoacer down. The assassination was followed by a massacre of Odoacer’s family and supporters. That Theoderic had to do the bloody handiwork himself speaks volumes about the fragility of his authority. No wonder, given the war had dragged on for four years, the longest conflict Roman Italy had endured since the days of the Second Triumvirate (ca. 44–30 BC). How had it come to this? 476 and all that Odoacer is mainly remembered as the man who had put the Western Roman Empire to rest in 476. That is not how contemporaries saw it, however. He had led an uprising of what was left of Italy’s…

One of the most persistent stories about Cleopatra VII’s first meeting with Julius Caesar is that she was hidden in a carpet from which she was unrolled to emerge in Caesar’s presence; it was with this audacious entrance that the twenty-one year-old queen first entranced the fifty-two year old Caesar. However, according to Plutarch – the source of the story (Caesar 49.1-3) – this was not (quite) how things went. Plutarch states that Cleopatra was brought by her trusted companion Apollodorus the Sicilian in a small skiff to the palace at dusk, “and as it was impossible to escape notice otherwise, she stretched herself at full length inside a stromatodesmon, while Apollodorus tied it up with a cord and carried it indoors to Caesar.” The Greek – stromatodesmon (lit. "matress-bundle")…

REVIEWS By Touraj Daryaee ISBN: 978-0755618415 Bloomsbury (2023) - $39.99 www.bloomsbury.com The first edition of renowned Sasanian scholar Daryaee’s study came out in 2013. It was acclaimed and welcomed and, in the years since there has been a flurry of works covering Sasanian history (even an issue of Ancient Warfare!). The author addresses this in his new Prolegomena (pp. xvi– xxii), stating much has changed in the study of Sasanian history since 2013. Daryaee, however, believes his work is still a good introduction, especially as it is brought up to date with new material and bibliography. In its almost 200 pages of text (the remainder consists of a comprehensive bibliography and index), Daryaee introduces Sasanian history. The four-hundred-year reign of the Sasanian dynasty needs more than this for a comprehensive…

ARMED FORCE IN THE TEISPID-ACHAEMENID EMPIRE: PAST APPROACHES, FUTURE PROSPECTS By Sean Manning Franz Steiner Verlag, 2021 ISBN: 978-3515127752 Manning proposes a new understanding of the Persian army based on a wide variety of evidence from the ancient Near East. Akkadian tablets, Aramaic documents, royal inscriptions, and artifacts are treated as sources in their own right, not compliments to Herodotus. Manning also examines the last century and a half of research in its historical and ideological context. THE GREEK WARS: THE FAILURE OF PERSIA By George Cawkwell Oxford University Press, 2005 ISBN: 978-0199299836 Cawkwell treats the whole course of Persian relations with the Greeks from the coming of Cyrus in the 540s down to Alexander the Great's defeat of Darius III in 331 BC. This overarching view is relevant and…

GRAVE MATTERS Many of the images on Roman military tombstones referenced key parts of a soldier’s life, such as full-length portraits of the deceased in armour or holding elements of their insignia and rank. These provided a rapid communication of the main aspects of the deceased’s life and personality, and could be understood even by those unable to read the Latin epitaph. But this type of image was not the only way to emphasize a military identity on a tombstone, as one example from Pannonia demonstrates. From Antioch to Carnuntum The tombstone of Quintus Septimius Niger was found in Petronell-Carnuntum in 1932, a short distance outside the legionary fortress which used to occupy the site, the home for a major part of the garrison of Pannonia. It is made of…

THEME: The Persian Wars, part II The Aegean world was connected by sea long before the Greco-Persian Wars. Trade, piracy, and raiding went hand in hand, and any ship might switch roles depending on the situation. The rocky, islet-strewn Aegean provided many spots where ships might wait unseen to ambush another unwary ship. They would not ram such a ship. Instead, armed crew or perhaps a few warriors would fight their counterparts with ranged weapons and in close combat, as shown on the famous Etruscan krater of Aristonothos. Naval innovation was, for a time, limited to the type of warriors embarked on the ships. A notorious example of the Archaic era was Polycrates, the tyrant of Samos. He put a corps of archers aboard his ships, whose ranged weapons could…

THEME: The Persian Wars, part II After all, if an army massing three, ten, or even 100 times more men was defeated by the Greeks, did it matter how they were commanded and what decisions were made? The result would always be the same: their destruction by the more tactically effective Hellenes. In fact, however, Mardonius showed himself a superior commander to Pausanias at Plataea, who forced the Greek army to retreat and split into three separate bodies. Yet, in the end, he was defeated and killed. How was this possible? What really happened here and in other battles between Greeks and Persians? In contrast to the Greeks, the Persians had no poet to sing of them, or at least, no cohesive narrative survives. The Persians were a group of…

THEME: The Persian Wars, part II According to Diodorus, at the conclusion of the battle, where the Athenians won against several Persian satraps, Artaxerxes “took counsel on the war with his friends and decided that it was to his advantage to conclude a peace with the Greeks” (12.4.4). He ordered his satraps, Artabazus and Megabyzus, to negotiate a settlement with the Greeks. The Greeks were amenable. Chief Athenian ambassador was Callias the son of Hipponicus. Diodorus (12.4.5) gives us a summary of the terms: » All the Greek cities of Asia shall live under laws of their own making » The Persians shall not come closer than three days’ journey to the sea » No Persian ship shall sail beyond Phaselis (in Pamphylia) or the Cyanean Rocks (the entrance to…

Both Odoacer and various barbarian units had originated as warbands, who were once part of Attila’s Hunnic realm in central Europe. When Attila died in 453, and his sons failed to keep that realm together, many went their own way. By the end of the 450s, various warbands had ended up on the Imperial West’s payroll, as part of the emperor Majorian’s recruiting drive for a campaign against Vandal Africa. The Imperial West from 455 to 476 was characterized by provincial civil wars and quasi-annual Vandal raids, one of which resulted in the sack of Rome in 455. After the murder of Valentinian III in March 455, the Theodosian dynasty had come to an end. Nine emperors came and went. Some were content with being mere figureheads for the army’s…

ROMAN ARMY IN DETAIL There is a well-known story in Tacitus’ Annals concerning a centurion in one of the Pannonian legions during the reign of Augustus. His name was Lucilius, but “as a soldiers’ witticism, they had given him the nickname ‘fetch another one!’ because”, Tacitus explained, “whenever he broke a vine-stick over a soldier’s back, he shouted for another and then another” (Annals 1.23.4). When mutiny broke out in AD 14, the disgruntled soldiers murdered him. Another centurion, Sirpicus by name, was only saved from a similar fate when soldiers from another legion protected him. At the very same time, on the Rhine frontier, the mutinous legionaries decided that “the time had come … when all should demand an end to their misery and take revenge for the cruelty…

By Mir Bahmanyar ISBN: 978-1472859754 Osprey Campaign 400 (2024) - £16.99 www.ospreypublishing.com Marking the 400th Campaign Series title, it is good to see a book examining an ancient topic – of late there has been a real drop-off in the number of ancient Campaign titles. Mir Bahmanyar has previously written for Osprey on Zama (2016), a variety of subjects from WWII to modern warfare and, drawing on his own combat experiences, on the US Army Rangers (2003), Afghanistan cave complexes 1979–2004 (2004; 2011; 2018), and the US Navy SEALs (2005; 2011). Thus, the author brings his own combat experience to bear on ancient warfare – always a welcome perspective. Here, he explores some relatively neglected battles fought in Spain during the Second Punic War with colour plates by Marco Capparoni.…

The success of the Greek naval alliance at the battle of Salamis in 480 BC did not mean that the Persian threat was defeated. Athens still burned and the Persians occupied Greece as far as Attica and threatened the remainder of Greece in the Isthmus of Corinth and the Peloponnese. Xerxes’ decision to return to Persia still left a huge Persian army under the experienced commander Mardonius. What is more, the Greek alliance was still precarious (as the bickering before the battle of Plataea in 479 amply shows). Nonetheless, the Greeks did unite to defeat the Persian army there – and on the other side of the Aegean (on the same day) at Mycale. Despite these successes, the Persians were still the dominant force in the Aegean, the Black Sea,…