The Old Ways Are Best

Consider the cavalry charge.

Before the railroad, horseback was the fastest a human could travel. At full gallop, while carrying an armored rider, horses could reach 20 miles per hour. In a charge, hundreds of mounted riders, carrying thrusting spears or heavy lances, would run directly at a stationary infantry formation.

The moment of contact is carnage. Soldiers are gored at spearpoint or trampled underfoot. All is confusion.

Yet this isn’t as one-sided as you’d expect. Charges need to start at a distance so the horses have time to accelerate before entering projectile range, giving infantry several minutes to brace themselves. In the pre-gunpowder era, infantry had javelins and arrows to attrit the approaching charge. At contact, coordinated infantry can stab horses with swords or spears, or unhorse riders by slashing at them or pulling them down. And once horses start falling, the cohesion of the entire charge could break.

Resisting a cavalry charge was a coordination problem. If formation was maintained, then the approaching horses often instinctively swerved or braked out of self-preservation before contact is made. The riders that did make contact could be quickly dispatched. But if soldiers started edging backwards, or if, when contact was made, the front line broke into flight, then gaps would open in the formation. Riders could then charge through the gaps and trigger a rout.

Cavalry charges, then, were weapons of psychological terror. Infantry needed to suppress base self-preservation and trust in their formation. When galloping horses bore down on them, they needed to raise their shields and hold their ground. When a rider leapt overhead and crushed their neighbor, they needed to summon aggression, not fear, and slash outwards. Terror needed to be transmuted into courage.

This is a reaction that defies nature. A successful defense required soldiers to welcome death, and in doing so, avoid it. It’s certainly not one I could summon. Yet in successful armies throughout history, soldiers ignored their mortality and did exactly what was needed: brace their spears and drive their blades into the horses as they slowed.

What’s different between us and them?

Here at the Tanzimat Diaries, I write about history, state capacity, and the making and unmaking of civilizations. Subscribing is the best way to support my work!

Culture, according to J.E Lendon in his book Soldiers and Ghosts, which chronicles the motivations and psychology of soldiers in ancient Greece and Rome. This begins, most crudely, with societal incentives. Where our (modern, Western) societies offer only token rewards to soldiers and almost none to achievements in combat, the ancients were obsessed with military glory. War, for their hoplites or legionaries, was a conduit for moral expression. Bravery in war enshrined a man and his descendants with honor, while cowardice brought shame that could not be escaped. You fought to prove yourself equal to the ancestral legacy you inherited; you held your ground because of the eternal dishonor of self-preservation.

This martial culture did not separate the motivations for fighting from its actual shape and form. In the modern world, the ways of war are derived from some definition of effectiveness: how successful they are at achieving strategic objectives relative to how many resources and lives they expend. This was not how the Romans saw war. For them, the core purpose of ancient warfare was to allow each soldier to achieve glory through aggressive bravery.

All tactical reasoning sat downstream of this valorization of military glory. This didn’t require any doublethink. The Romans believed a glorious army was a victorious army. Victory was a product of the character and boldness of their men, while defeat was the inevitable consequence of individual lassitude. The optimal form of tactical organization in this system was the one that encouraged bravery and audacity in each soldier.

Wars, after all, weren’t some Clausewitzian “policy by other means” calculation, like ours today, declared exclusively to achieve some political objective. War was the ancestral impulse of martial peoples fighting for their own aggrandizement. When those peoples poised themselves against each other, they designed their methods of fighting to offer chances for glory and honor to their soldiers.

This glory was inevitably rooted in the past. Soldiers reached backwards to their historical and mythological forebears to understand their place in the present. They viewed their own actions through a frame of legendary and historical exemplars. This was the underlying bedrock that created the enduring desire for confrontation and boldness characteristic of Roman military culture. All soldiers fought to prove their worthiness of their history.

Virtus and Disciplina

In the modern world, the ways of war are in constant flux. Military strategy and tactics sit downstream of technological change, and technology is always progressing.

But to understand Greco-Roman warfare, we must abandon this perspective. Ancient military culture was born from a world of utter technological stagnation. For all the vaunted engineering accomplishments of the Romans, their underlying military technology was borrowed from the Greeks and changed very little for their entire existence. A soldier from the Battle of Marathon (490 BC), fighting with hoplite shield and doru spear, could fight at Adrianople (378 AD), some 868 years later, with the same equipment, and experience little disadvantage.

In this reality, military success was a matter of soldiering and individual bravery. A war was the amalgamation of millions of instances of face-to-face combat, where one man slashed and stabbed another to death at short range. Success required each soldier to yearn for those moments; to conjure new strength and belief when they arrive; to even launch himself uncaring of life into the enemy and drag them down through sheer elan.

The Romans called this virtus. The word literally means “manliness” and encompasses all forms of martial courage. Virtus was the self-organized groups of soldiers sneaking into a town at personal peril and opening the gates from within, or legionaries throwing themselves at the ladders during a siege to be the first over the wall, or even the entire army banging its shields and demanding battle, refusing a commander’s order to break camp for the night. It was bottom-up, ungoverned, and often at odds with generalship. But generals themselves can also show virtus. Alexander the Great’s near-suicidal personal leadership of cavalry charges at the Granicus and Gaugamela became examples for every Roman leader. Future Emperor Titus, for example, led numerous reckless charges forward when he led the armies besieging Jerusalem. Julian did the same in his invasion of Persia.

Importantly, virtus was zero-sum: only one soldier can be first atop a wall, only one man can drive their pilum into the enemy’s general. Soldiers fought amongst themselves for virtus, and while unsuccessful attempts at virtus were not shamed, glory was reserved for victory. This created natural competition between soldiers, who jostled within the boundaries of ordered formation to achieve battlefield glory.

Yet an army of virtus alone was a Germanic warband: brave and aggressive, yes, but also uncontrolled and erratic. Virtus had to be restrained by its counterpart: disciplina. This is radical obedience to military protocol, both inculcated by training but also imposed by commanders from above. Disciplina marshaled the virtus of soldiers into broader tactical success. It was also competitive. Soldiers fought to display their excellence through their restraint. They showed valor in standing before a charging enemy and holding ground, or completing a harried retreat without being baited into aggression, or building earthworks while staving off enemy projectiles.

Disciplina was enforced with brutal efficiency. The Roman exemplum, or representative parable, for disciplina was the semi-mythical story of Titus Manlius Torquatus. During a long war against the cities of Latium, Torquatus forbade any soldier from challenging the enemy to single combat. Torquatus’s son ignored him and challenged and defeated an enemy commander. When his son returned claiming triumph, Torquatus didn’t flinch: he sentenced him to death, then beheaded the boy himself. Disciplina, the story showed, was impartial and uncompromising. Success did not excuse it. Disobedient legionaries were often punished more severely than deserters, and when an entire unit disobeyed orders—especially when they routed in battle—they could be decimated: one-tenth of their number were beaten to death by the remainder.

Notably, each of these punishments was enacted by the army against themselves. Roman legionaries were willing to subject themselves to brutal self-enforced penalties to achieve societal honor.

A Warrior Culture

Altogether, virtus was the fundamental substance of all ancient military success, while disciplina was the differentiator for the Roman army in particular. Aggressive bravery was, while not common, well-known. The transmutation of that competitive instinct to achieve collective ends was unique, and that is what gave the Roman army its enduring success.

Roman culture was designed to, above all, nurture and inculcate these values within its citizens. This was a warrior culture, that, through centuries surviving in Darwinian geopolitics, optimized itself to extract the maximum military usefulness from their men. How did they do this? By emphasizing a deep reverence for ancestral and legendary glory that culturally rewarded both reckless bravery and measured restraint.

Every facet of Roman society reinforced these themes. The corona muralis, awarded to the first soldier that scaled a battlement, offered a huge financial bounty and massive public fame. And, in a society like Rome, where people believed greatness flowed through generations, where young aristocrats grew up worshipping the death masks of their ancestors, having even a great-great-grandfather who won a military corona granted social status. Julius Caesar considered winning the corona civica the greatest accomplishment of his career. There were hundreds of different awards offered across all military ranks, and soldiers would wear them in battle as evidence of their past deeds. At aristocratic funerals, military achievements were announced first—even for accomplished statesmen. Centurions were promoted from publicly attested acts of bravery, and led their soldiers from the front. Veterans would often bare their wounds in court to gain sympathy; Cicero once used this strategy to gain one official an acquittal from corruption.

Rome mined its past for exemplars which provided paragons of moral, virtuous behavior, and instilled them in its legionaries and their commanders. Central to this was the spolia opima, an award granted to a Roman commander who defeated the opposing leader in single-combat. This was the highest honor the army could offer. It was based on a story of Romulus, who killed an enemy king a year after Rome’s founding, and bolstered by a legend of the semi-mythical hero Aulus Cossus. Generations of commanders thereafter sought individual battle with an enemy, from other legends like Valerius Corvus, to the very real victories of Torquatus (the same who executed his son) against a supposedly massive Gaul, Marcus Claudius Marcellus, who killed Viridomarus, king of the invading Celts, and Marcus Licinius Crassus (grandson of Julius Caesar’s backer), who killed the King of the Bastarnae, a Germanic tribe (and had his claim formally denied by a jealous Augustus).

Yet, virtus encompassed not just martial skill but a disdain for mortality. In this sense, the mythical stories of the Decii are its apotheosis. In three different wars, across fifty years, a grandfather, father, and grandson, all named Publius Decius Mus, each sacrificed himself in the same ritual on the battlefield to secure victory. Each sacrifice was recklessly courageous, deliberately suicidal, and (as the story goes) ensured the army’s victory. One imagines that each son saw in his death a new glory to match his father. We can see the same in the story of Mucius Scaevola, a child who, when confronted by an enemy leader after a failed assassination attempt, places his hand in a burning fire to show, in microcosm, the disdain all Roman men had for pain, life, and consequence.

But the Romans’ cultural conception of war is captured most fully in the legend of the Horatii. In a war with neighboring Alba Longa, single-combat was agreed to prevent full-scale battle. The Romans nominated a set of triplets, the Horatii, to fight against their Alban counterparts, the Curiatii. The Curiatii quickly killed two of the Horatii, but were each wounded in the process. The last, Publius, realizing he couldn’t face them alone, started running across the battlefield. Each Curiatii chased him, tasting blood, but because of their wounds, they tired quickly. Publius then turned back, and as his opponents slowed and stumbled, he slew each one.

Single combat was the exemplification of virtus, and so it was here. But the final Horatii actually achieved his victory through cunning, not martial skill. Instead of facing his opponents directly and dying a noble death, he noticed their weakness and applied strategy. In the Roman conception, this was not cowardice but useful restraint. Publius restrained his virtus to achieve a greater victory, forming the model of what Roman culture expected of its soldiers. It also emphasizes that virtus is predicated on success, and success retroactively justifies most means.

This contradictory ethos allowed the Romans to justify both aggression and restraint. When Hannibal invaded Italy, the Romans began with their traditional approach: aggressive confrontation. But when Hannibal defeated three massive armies thrown against him (including Cannae, the largest Roman military defeat ever), the Romans adopted the Fabian strategy (named after Fabius Maximus): avoiding direct confrontation and attacking wherever Hannibal wasn’t. And despite the reflexive screams of cowardice, virtus was largely restrained for two decades, until a young Scipio Africanus led a reciprocal invasion of Carthage.

If you’re enjoying this essay on the Roman ways of war, please consider subscribing and supporting my work.

Shapes and Forms

It’s natural then, that the actual shape of Roman combat followed from these two contradictory impulses. Combat had to accommodate each soldier’s impulse to emulate their forebears and exhibit their virtus, while also retaining structure and order to ensure success on the battlefield.

If you were to design a mode of fighting that offered the most opportunities for glory, you’d arrive at something like Homeric battle. Homer’s heroes fought almost exclusively in single-combat. Some of these were staged duels, like Hector and Achilles, but most arose naturally from battle. These duels were where many characters were introduced, largely through their own boasts, before the fighting began. Every fight had an audience of watching soldiers, and each martial deed was recorded. Each victor was adorned with their triumph for all time, becoming known as the “slayer” of their opponent..

This was the romantic ideal of virtus: singular bravery and immortal memory. It carried into reckless charges of Alexander and Titus and the long-lived tradition of the spolia opima, which was the Roman interpretation of Homeric combat retained for a different age. It even survived Christianity. As late as the seventh century AD, George of Pisidia wrote a Homeric epic to narrate the campaigns of Heraclius.

But the chaos of a real battle, where all soldiers fight the entire other side at once, would lead to the dreadful ignominy where, as Achilles himself said, “all are held in the same honor, the brave man and the coward.” And without distinction, virtus cannot be achieved. Instead, the competitive impulse for individual glory through single combat was transmuted into competition amongst soldiers fighting in a collaborative formation.

From this came the phalanx. Hoplites fighting together in the phalanx exemplified a new form of glory: the glory of holding ones ground. Bravery could be seen in the army’s united stand against the enemy. Virtus became a property of the polity, which inherited the military characteristics of its men, while those men jostled against each other to show excellence in their adherence to form and stricture. This culminated in the Spartan ethos: each citizen was a born soldier, but the army itself fought in a rigid phalanx that eliminated the distinctiveness of any individual soldier. The competitiveness of single-combat became the competition to hold ground, while the glory of singular victory now flowed upwards to the state.

Where the Greeks used their inherent fractiousness to motivate their phalanx, the Romans’ cultural impetus allowed glorious individual combat to coexist with ordered discipline. This birthed the manipular legion, whose four separate divisions each engaged in a distinct form of fighting. The velites, skirmishers who fought in loose formation ahead of the army, emulated the Homeric ideal of free-form single-combat. The hastati fought in tighter formation behind them, representing another stage of the competition. And the principes and the triarii, the two rear phalanx layers, represented the disciplina that bound virtus. The triarii were the veterans of the army who were held in reserve unless the battle went starkly wrong. Each soldier within an echelon competed to exhibit a different form of virtus, drawing from a different exempla. Where the velites aped the blind courage of the Decii Mus or Mucius Scaevola, the triarii drew on Torquatus and his radical obedience to hold themselves back from the early strokes of battle.

As Rome’s competitive oligarchy gave way to the autocracy, virtus started to flow upwards from soldiers to commanders. In the late Republic, during the days of Julius Caesar, the maniple became the interchangeable cohort, enabling strategy, and under the Empire, these cohort commanders adopted Alexandrian boldness to embody that same ideal of warrior kingship.

Yet across these transitions, Roman culture never surrendered its original conception of battle. Their battlefield wasn’t a lawless anarchy: it was a place governed by ancestral rules of honor. Soldiers fought to accumulate glory and wars were fought as contests of civilizational virtus. The methods and tactics of fighting were secondary to the bravery of each soldier because victory was the inevitable consequence of an army that exemplified virtus.

And defeat was a mark of cowardice and weakness. A fearful and effeminate army lost a battle; a decadent, morally compromised state lost a war. For the Romans, all civilizational outcomes followed from the character of individuals. Edward Gibbon, when he argued that the Roman Empire collapsed from moral decline, made the same argument the Romans did about themselves.

Consequently, for their entire history, the Romans sought to prosecute their wars through rapid and decisive confrontation. Their generals induced these against every opponent they faced, even knowing the long record of disasters this caused. The Romans lost 130,000 men in first two years of the Second Punic War, yet they still bristled against the Fabian strategy—even after it delivered them notable gains. Roman generals charged their troops into three consecutive ambushes in the Cimbrian War, leading to the first invasion of Italy in a century. In the late empire, Valens threw his army at the Goths at Adrianople, despite the noted successes from the Fabian tactics employed by his general, Sebastianus, the year before. The resulting catastrophe hobbled Thrace for a decade.

Victory achieved through defeat, as they saw it, was worse than defeat. And so the Roman way of war continued, lashed on by history, generation after generation, even as the world it was born from came apart.

Unless you’re an Aztec wearing leather armor.

And perhaps that tells us something of our own derivation: virtue.

Alexander The Great’s speech to his mutinying soldiers hits a similar theme.

This isn’t Greek-specific. The Mahabharata and Ramayana have their own, similar traditions.

They were pretty epic. I recommend this History of Byzantium podcast episode on them.

This is perhaps why the Romans attributed all manner of sexual and physical perversities to their political enemies.