Enemies worse than chance: a few minutes on ancient warfare (and how we think about it)
The Homeric poems first conceptualize ancient leadership -- a topic covered broadly in earlier modules. Agamemnon might perhaps have chosen better how to combat divine disease and inspire his men, and Odysseus' relationship with his returning companions surely leaves much to be desired. But neither of these accounts of leadership focus on military command in particular -- the acts of the leader against an intelligent enemy. (Indeed, Odysseus' only real military encounter in the Odyssey -- the battle against the Cicones -- begins with trivial victory and ends in disastrous defeat.)
Gods do oppose humans, of course, but with contemptuous frivolity rather than desperate malice, and never really try very hard, and (immortal as they are) never have everything at stake. But a hostile army has everything at stake; defeat means death, perhaps (for city defenders) destruction of all loved ones and an entire way of life. The mortal human wrestler is more desperate the immortal divine, and the violent conflict between human and human is accordingly a game with no holds barred.
This need not be so. Ancient armies, in Europe and elsewhere, in fact did not generally seek to slaughter all opponents. The exceptions (Assyrians, Macedonians, Timur's horses, Chaka's army) were terrors, often conceived as divinely sent or even as gods themselves. Total war is extremely rare in the ancient world, not least because key cultural ingredients of modern total wars -- in particular, nationalism and other totalizing ideologies -- were simply absent five thousand years ago. (Again there are exceptions: early Indo-European texts from northern India seem unusually interested in racial superiority, for example.) Moreover, Greeks and Romans saw their entire civilized world as a kind of neighborhood -- called in Greek oikumene, from oikos (household), a word cognate with 'economics' and 'vicinity' and various Slavic words for 'guest'. For the most part, all war among civilized peoples was a kind of internal conflict; the world was not yet big enough for 'othering' to spiral to 19th-century imperialist extremes.
Thus many ancient wars were felt as what we would now call 'civil', even when enemies (such as Athens and Sparta) hailed from politically distinct homes. But some were 'civil' in an even fuller sense -- that is, between rivals within a narrow political-cultural group. The most famous and perhaps most historically influential of these civil wars were fought in Italy: first between Rome and other Italians (of course the Romans won this so-called 'Social War'), then, for a hundred years, among the Romans themselves. The most destructive of these latter conflicts occurred over two generations: the first between Rome's savior against an invading barbarian population (Marius) and his brilliant military-tribune-cum-protege (Sulla), the second between the old savior's nephew (Caesar) and Rome's new savior against marauding barbarian pirates (the equally brilliant Pompey).
Caesar's military exploits are known in unusual detail because the detailed accounts he wrote for the Senate -- his Commentarii -- have been (mostly) preserved. He wrote two Commentarii: one about his conquest of the barbarians in Gaul (the so-called Bellum Gallicum) and another about his defeat of his friend-turned-enemy Pompey (the Bellum Civile). Of course we must take these accounts with a grain of salt: no single narrative tells the whole tale, and we might naturally (and without unreasonable cynicism) suppose that Caesar was specifically trying to paint a rather positive picture of himself in the eyes of his senatorial readers. In some places we can be fairly certain that Caesar's account is false (when, for example, he cites population numbers that far exceed what can be gleaned from available archaeological evidence); but in many cases, given the level of detail, Caesar's account has no counter-stories, and our judgment about what actually happened is due in disappointing measure to our postmodern predilection for suspicious reading, our present mores about killing in general and war in particular (which, for all moderns, cannot escape the influence of the two world wars' utterly unprecedented scale), our special horror of civil strife (which is, for Americans, conditioned by the bloodiest civil war in history, a war that perhaps marked the birth of modern mechanized total war), and no doubt Caesar's own colossal influence on later leaders of Europe (so great that his name came to mean simple 'supreme ruler' in even Germanic and Slavic states, let alone Romance).
Nevertheless, how Caesar presented himself in his own writings about war is both evidence of a common Roman picture of good leadership (assuming Caesar judged his audience well) and itself a primary text for countless later thoughts on generalship in particular and leadership in general.
In this module we consider Caesar the general as synecdochic of Caesar the leader, drawing especially on his own writings to understand his self-presentation as leader of men.