Download PDF | (The Cambridge History Of Greek And Roman Warfare - Volume II) Philip Sabin, Hans van Wees, Michael Whitby - Rome from the late Republic to the late Empire-Cambridge University Press (2008).
567 Pages
THE CAMBRIDGE HISTORY OF GREEK AND ROMAN WARFARE
Warfare was the single biggest preoccupation of historians in antiquity. In recent decades fresh textual interpretations, numerous new archaeological discoveries and a much broader analytical focus emphasizing social, economic, political and cultural approaches have transformed our understanding of ancient warfare.
Volume ii of this two-volume History reflects these developments and provides a systematic account, written by a distinguished cast of contributors, of the various themes underlying the warfare of the Roman world from the late Republic to the sixthcentury Empire of Justinian and his successors. For each broad period developments in troop types, equipment, strategy and tactics are discussed. These are placed in the broader context of developments in international relations and the relationship of warfare to both the state and wider society. Numerous illustrations, a glossary and chronology, and information about the ancient authors mentioned supplement the text.
This will become the primary reference work for specialists and non-specialists alike.
philip sabin is Professor of Strategic Studies in the Department of War Studies at King’s College London. His main academic interest concerns the analytical modelling of conflict, and he is the author of Lost Battles: Reconstructing the Great Clashes of the Ancient World (2007) and co-editor (with Tim Cornell and Boris Rankov) of The Second Punic War: A Reappraisal (1996). He teaches and writes about the strategy and tactics of warfare from ancient times to the twenty-first century. hans van wees is Professor of Ancient History at University College London. He is the author of Status Warriors: War, Violence and Society in Homer and History (1992) and Greek Warfare: Myths and Realities (2004) and editor of War and Violence in Ancient Greece (2000).
He has co-edited (with Nick Fisher) Archaic Greece: New Approaches and New Evidence (1998), (with Egbert Bakker and Irene de Jong) Brill’s Companion to Herodotus (2002) and (with Kurt Raaflaub) A Companion to Archaic Greece (forthcoming). michael whitby is Professor of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Warwick. He is the co-editor of volume xiv of The Cambridge Ancient History (2001) and author of Rome at War, ad 293–696 (2002) as well as several articles on late Roman warfare, and has made several television appearances talking about ancient warfare from the Graeco-Persian Wars to the collapse of the Roman Empire.
EDITORS’ PREFACE
Warfare was the single biggest preoccupation of historians in antiquity, but modern academic interest in the subject has revived only in the last few decades The narrowly focused studies of war written before the First World War by Delbruck, Kromayer, Veith and others have now been super- ¨ seded by a much wider spectrum of work, ranging from the individual soldier’s experience of battle to the place of ancient warfare within wider social, economic, political and cultural structures. Partly as a result of this broader focus, and partly through richer textual analysis and a flood of new archaeological discoveries, our understanding of ancient warfare has been transformed. With the exception of popular survey works, however, there is no comprehensive overview of this burgeoning field of study.
The Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Warfare aims to fill this gap: its two volumes survey the advances made since the 1970s in all aspects of research on ancient warfare, and provide an opportunity for a distinguished group of experts in the field to take the subject further still by presenting an array of new ideas and suggesting many new directions. Our aim in this work is not to provide a narrative account of the countless wars which took place across a period spanning fifteen centuries – such accounts are readily available from any number of other sources, not least the Cambridge Ancient History – but to offer a thematic analysis of the main aspects of warfare in the ancient world.
Three important introductory chapters set the scene: the first puts the present volumes in their historiographical context and explains further the rationale for their publication; the other two address the nature of evidence and the problems of its interpretation, two issues which are fundamental to a new and better understanding of ancient warfare. The bulk of the volumes is divided into four chronologically ordered parts, each covering a span of three or four centuries. These chronological divisions serve to draw attention to the broad changes which occurred in warfare and the societies in which this warfare was practised and pursued. Detailed chronological tables at the end of each volume also help readers to place the discussion in its proper historical frame.
The first part of volume i covers the earliest centuries of Greek society, which generated our most famous accounts of ancient warfare, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, as well as ‘proper’ historical accounts of conflicts, with Thucydides’ record of the Peloponnesian War often regarded as the acme of ancient historiography. In the second part, early Rome and the Hellenistic world are dealt with in parallel, a rather unusual combination designed to stimulate a fresh analytical perspective and to overcome the common tendency to keep the Greek and Roman worlds in entirely separate compartments. The first part of the second volume bridges one of the great political transitions of the ancient world, that from the Roman Republic to the Principate of Augustus and his successors, with the intention of highlighting continuing issues and recurrent themes.
The final part deals with the later Empire, a period long seen through the prism of ‘decline and fall’ but one in which most scholars now identify a robust and protracted defence of imperial interests in a world which was experiencing profound changes, internally through the adoption of Christianity and externally through the arrival of the Huns. Within each chronological part, the subdivisions are thematic and reflect the key aspects of ancient warfare identified in modern historiography: (1) the role of war and peace in international relations; (2) the nature, composition and status of different kinds of armed forces; (3) the practicalities and ethics of the conduct of wars and campaigns; (4) the nature and experience of combat in pitched battles and sieges; (5) the political and economic dimensions of war; and (6) the social and cultural dimensions of war.
The same sub-divisions are applied in each of the four parts, so as to enable readers to make comparisons and to pursue particular themes throughout antiquity. ‘War is terrible’, said Polybius, ‘but not so terrible that we should put up with anything to avoid it’ (4.31.3). These volumes examine both the forms taken by the terror of war in the ancient world and the forces which all too often made it seem necessary to resort to violence at the cost of giving up ‘the thing which we all pray that the gods may give us . . . the only incontestable blessing among the so-called good things in life – I mean peace’ (4.74.3). Philip Sabin Hans van Wees Michael Whitby 2007.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The inspiration for these volumes came from Pauline Hire, former classics editor at Cambridge University Press, and we are very grateful for her help and advice in the early stages of this work. Thanks are also due to Ashley Clements for his careful subeditorial work and to Hilary Scannell, Alison Powell, Michael Sharp and Sinead Moloney for their many and varied contributions in bringing this project to completion. We also wish to thank Barbara Hird for her work in producing the indexes.
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