Enemies worse than chance: a few minutes on ancient warfare (1:00)
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. (Not that murder of warriors and enslavement of women and children -- a common outcome for the defeated in ancient warfare -- was anything less than horrific.) 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, and some Greeks -- far from all -- argued that their birth made them superior to non-Greeks.) 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 (the most recent is called the 'Social War', because Romans called non-Roman Italian allies socii; the Romans won of course), then, for another fifty 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 war in Gaul, however, is not so 'civil' -- certainly not as Caesar narrates it. For Caesar, Gaul is a foreign place, viewed like a map from above, filled with populations Caesar is willing, and sometimes apparently proud, to slaughter. To cite an ancient source other than Caesar himself: the Roman historian Appian records that Caesar killed a million Gauls and enslaved another million -- altogether about half the entire population of what is now northern France.
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. (It would be not be inaccurate to consider both of Caesar's Commentarii a kind of 'propaganda', although more informative and subtle than some.) In some places we can be reasonably confident 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).
To illustrate in one brief example the difficulty of interpreting Caesar's account from our post-WWII perspective: Caesar seems unembarrassed to report that he ordered the elimination of an entire Gallic tribe: (Bellum Gallicum 6.34: "[Caesar sent a command that] the stock [of the Eburones] and the name of the city be eradicated (stirps ac nomen civitatis tollatur"). We might call this genocide, or something very near.
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.
We should always keep in mind that how we tell a story depends greatly on whether we know where it will end up, and that how even a single battle -- let alone a multi-year, multi-theater war -- turns out is hardly ever known before the dust settles.
Recall how incalculable (παράλογον) war is before you decide to start it (τοῦ δὲ πολέμου τὸν παράλογον, ὅσος ἐστί, πρὶν ἐν αὐτῷ γενέσθαι προδιάγνωτε).
- Athenian envoys to Sparta, as reported by Thucydides (1.78.1)
