#231： How the Ghosts of Tradition Inspired Ancient Military Might
Episode Stats
Summary
The armies of ancient Greece and Rome have gained legendary status. Both militaries successfully conquered much of the known world in their respective eras, but what made them so formidable? Was it technological innovation, novel strategies, or just plain old grit? Well, my guest today on the show argues that it was the ancient Greek reverence for their mythic past that made them great. His name is Dr. J. Linden, and he is the author of the book Soldiers and Ghosts: A History of Battle in Classical Antiquity.
Transcript
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brett mckay here and welcome to another edition of the art of manliness podcast so the armies of
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ancient greece and rome have gained legendary status both militaries successfully conquered
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much of the known world in their respective eras but what made them so formidable was it
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technological innovation novel strategies or just plain old grit well my guest today on the show
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argues that it was the greek and roman armies reverence for their mythic past that made them
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great his name is j linden he goes by ted he's a classical scholar and the author of the book
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soldiers and ghosts a history of battle in classical antiquity today on the show ted and i discuss how
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the ghost of the iliad and the odyssey haunted greek soldiers the ways in which both the greeks and the
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romans ritualized warfare and why the ancient greeks made a competition out of pretty much
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everything in life we also discussed the competing virtues of courage and discipline within the roman
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army this is a riveting conversation with some fascinating insights into ancient notions of
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masculinity after the show check out the show notes at aom.is slash linden that's l-e-n-d-o-n
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or you can get links to resources or you can delve deeper into this topic
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okay professor linden welcome to the show uh mr mckay thank you very much for having me
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uh so your book is called soldiers and ghosts and it's about battle and classic antiquity
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it's talking ancient greeks ancient romes um and i love this book because i'm a classics guy
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and uh but i thought it was interesting you begin your book about uh ancient greeks and ancient romans
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talking about how american soldiers won't leave a fallen comrade behind even if they're dead
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and then you say that this puts them in the company of these great warrior civilizations like
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ancient greece and rome how so well i would i would limit that to a certain degree to to greece
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because the romans seem a much have to have been much less fastidious about picking up their dead
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um but um the greeks were um very very finicky about this what would happen would be that um
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they'd have a battle uh and then one side would turn to flight and um the side that was victorious
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would basically move forward and stand on all the bodies um not physically stand on them but stand over
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them and then the losing side would have to send a herald who's protected by the gods to ask the
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winning side for the bodies back um that is to say the bodies of their dead and when that happened
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that was an admission of defeat so they had this very formal way of indicating victory and defeat
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and then the then the winning side says yes um and uh then people from the losing side come and
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and pick up the bodies of their people which must have been if you just think about it kind of weird
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i mean you've just been fighting and now you're sort of all um all sort of dragging bodies around
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together um very odd but in any event uh they they will then carry them home uh the bodies uh to be
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buried um and uh the winning side uh will uh build a trophy uh at the point where uh the decisive um
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uh effort in the battle happened but the turning point which is what trophy means in greek the
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turning the turning and then um and that's the end of things but as you can see it's all very
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it's all reformalized um the greeks believe that that if you didn't bury someone um or cremate them
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correctly um there would be uh they would never be able to get properly into hades and would wander
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around as ghosts um and that was of course a very bad thing to have ghosts wandering around the place
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so i mean everybody knows the greek custom of putting a coin under the tongue of of a person
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uh who's being buried so that they can pay the ferryman to take them over into hades well
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you know burying them properly in every other respect is uh is also very important and that the
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greeks are terrified and horrified by the prospect of bodies lost at sea uh because they can never be
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um properly recovered and and uh and sent down to hades um i mean every class of this knows what
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what i just told you what interested me was to discover that um oh that a parallel process has
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evolved in the american armed forces uh and uh that um the american armed forces will happily fight
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and endanger living soldiers to recover the bodies of dead soldiers um and what's interesting to me
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about this uh is that and of course you know you couldn't we can see the ritualized quality of it
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with the uh the ceremony um at the airplane when the body is taken back to the state the ceremony
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at the airplane when the body arrives in the states the the military funeral all that type of thing
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um it's not identical but obviously parallel to what the greeks are up to what really interested me
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about it is we can see it happen that is to say unlike the greek custom which doesn't seem to exist
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uh in the iliad but exists in historical time but we don't see it evolve uh we can really see it
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evolve in the american case uh if you look if you read books about the sacral war and i'm thinking
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here particularly of eugene sledges with the old breed it's a great book yeah great book uh about
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particularly about the battle of okinawa um they're very he and his comrades are very indifferent
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to the presence of american dead bodies um they do not feel any particular need to evacuate those
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bodies and in fact there are unpleasant scenes in which they use those bodies they pile them up to
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be fortifications um and um uh so they in that generation generation in the 40s they really don't
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seem to have had this this this code um and um but it's very clearly very much there particularly in
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the marine corps but also in the other services by the vietnam war and my suspicion is um that it
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derives from the battle of chosen reservoir uh or the retreat from chosen reservoir in the korean war
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um where the marines left a large number of comrades bodies behind and i think they sort of made a
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corporate decision then that they were never going to do that again and um that and and acting on that
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then um elaborated itself through the rest of the american services so that this has become a
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an important part of the american way of war as i say i'm interested in it because we can sort of see
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it evolve yeah that's really fascinating so like what we're seeing then is is a ritualization
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of warfare absolutely right and so let's go back to the ancient greeks so they had this very elaborate
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ritual for what to do with uh the dead bodies after a battle were the greeks we'll talk about some of the
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other ways that the greeks were they ritualized warfare but were the greeks always this ritual when
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it came to battle and if not when did this ritualization begin well um it uh to a certain
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degree i mean it uh it appears in a kind of uh in a place we don't know much about that is
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we have the iliad um and the iliad doesn't seem to involve this anywhere near this degree of
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ritualization um of course it's fictional it's an epic poem uh it's based on material from 1200 to
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700 bc all all muddled together so it doesn't necessarily really describe a real world um but
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any event it um it is useful in the sense that we can say at least that at some point uh it doesn't
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look like the greeks did this uh but when the greeks do pop into um uh in into our vision uh around
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500 ad 500 bc i'm sorry um they do um have it seems this whole system of dealing with the dead
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uh already well developed uh and we can't really um we can't really speculate about um exactly when it
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comes about i personally can speculate about why it comes about uh because i think it has to do with
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um the evolution of greek warfare to create uh to make it into a more perfect composite competition
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uh and one of the things that this system does is it very clearly indicates winners and losers of
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battles which of course no other um no other society has been quite as efficient as coming up with a way
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in which right after the battle the loser admits that they lose so that there's no question about
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who won uh i mean it's really an astonishing uh it's in many ways an astonishing human achievement
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if it's very important for you to have a clear uh indication of who won and lost and it is important
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to the greeks because not only do they compete individually between each other as as as people
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but their city states are fully anthropomorphized and compete as um and compete with each other as
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if they were people and when two greek armies fight it's two city states fighting and you want
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and just as you want to know very clearly who is the most brave soldier so clearly you want to know
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very clearly which is the most brave city state uh and therefore you evolve methods of making
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creating a clear victor and a clear defeated so you yeah this isn't right so you talked throughout
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the book about this competitive drive the greeks had they wanted to be the best and like what
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erite right excellence i mean where did this drive come from and did did other ancient cultures have
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the same desire for competition the ancient greeks had um we cannot tell exactly where it comes from
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it seems to exist very clearly in um in the homeric poems which is the earliest greek evidence we have
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uh and also more or less and more or less contemporaneously uh he said points out the
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problems with it um uh because it creates strife and civil war and various other things so
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uh the greeks already knew that it wasn't great um what i would say to that is that what sets the
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greeks aside is their eagerness to compete in every possible realm um the people i know about
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most of course are the other people i know about most of the romans and they compete in war uh and
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in being heroic in war and in politics uh and in certain other limited realms which we'll be talking
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about um but it would never strike the romans to consider for example bird interpretation as a
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competitive enterprise or um or the or abusing people as a competitive enterprise as it appears
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in the iliad or steering a ship as a competitive enterprise uh the thing about the greeks is that
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they they elaborate this so that there's nothing nothing is left cooperative everything is made
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competitive um and if you wish to get uh five ancient greeks to cooperate with each other
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the best way to do so is simply to announce the fact that you're going to have a competition
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in being cooperative um otherwise uh it really it really won't work uh they um they do not develop
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uh some people think they develop later i don't frankly um but they but they really do not develop
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um cooperative virtues and um they organize a society which is carefully based
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based on uh exploiting competitive virtues uh so that for just for example in classical athens
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uh they don't have taxes um what they do is they ask the richest people in the in the society to
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cook to contribute to the great expenses of the society um to keep to creating warships and and
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organizing um plays and things like that but it's intensely competitive uh the best warship of the
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year gets a prize the best play of the year gets a prize we know that about all the tragedies right
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that some of them win and some of them don't um but that's how they um that's how they fund their
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entire state uh essentially by creating a series of competitions among the richest people uh and
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letting the poor people um who are perceived to be perhaps either less competitive or less useful
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in this sort of respect mostly um have a free ride it's interesting so let's go back to the title
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of your book it's soldiers and ghosts and you argue uh throughout the book that both the greeks and the
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romans particularly the greeks they were haunted by the ghost of their past and that the way the
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innovations they made uh in warfare were was directed by this tradition and for the greeks it came from
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the ilia the homeric epics um so let's talk about some of this this the rules that the greeks got
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from the homeric epics on what made a good battle a good battle right so like for example they were
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the greeks were particularly concerned about glory and honor in battle and you see this in in the
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homeric epics so you talk about some of the the weird customs or rules about you know the governance of
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you know who got glory and honor and who didn't and how this was inspired by the iliad
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yes um i the uh the greeks do look back continuously uh and um one of the things that i particularly got
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interested in uh is um the way in which although in around 500 um among the persian wars in the in the
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in the uh in 480 479 um there seemed to be quite a lot of archers in greece uh that is to say archers
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a normal part of greek armies or at least the athenian army um that by the fourth century bc
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archers seem to have disappeared and um that's very odd you'd think because this is a effective
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technology um there's nothing wrong with the bows that they use there's no technical technological
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reason for this um and what's even more surprising is that they tend to be replaced uh by a type of
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light infantry who throw javelins and when they run out of javelins throw rocks and you think wow you
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know that's that's peculiar now greek has greece has a lot of rocks but there aren't a lot of other um
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there aren't a lot of other armies of which i know which have institutionalized the throwing of rocks
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as it were or have preferred systematically have made the choice to prefer javelins which of course
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have a very short range uh to arrows which have a much longer range and um so this seems to be a case
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of actually technological devolution and my thinking on it is that um javelins or the throwing of spears
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specifically is unquestionably heroic in the uh in the iliad there's no question that every hero
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that's one of the ways you fight you stab with your spear but you also throw your spear uh and there's
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never any criticism of that that's regarded as as as firmly heroic on the same is true of throwing rocks
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but archery is regarded in the poem as dubiously heroic there were at least two different ways of
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looking at it the actual archers uh people like pandarus for example think what they do is heroic
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but the a lot of other people basically say no archery is not heroic if you want to be a true hero
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you must stand face to face to the enemy with the enemy and fight him close in and that is probably
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the probably more people say that than uh in the iliad than praise archery it's interesting so there's
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this idea like the archery was kind of wussy was yeah archery was kind of wussy and my and my argument
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my my way of thinking is that it is this influence um that spear throwing is clearly heroic while archery
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is dubiously heroic which operating on time over time in the minds of the greeks finally drives archery
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out of their way of fighting and replaces it with with spear throwing and so the other aspect that
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the greeks look to um to the to the iliad the homeric epics was this idea of one-on-one battle
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single combat right you see in the iliad instances where there's sort of like this battle going on but
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then homer calls out two fighters hector and achilles and they fight one-on-one um what did the greeks do
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to i don't know some in a way replicate or give homage to that idea of you know single combat while still
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fighting as a unit well for a very long time they simply still do single combat i mean we have long
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lists of people this is mostly before 500 uh we have long lists of of single combat victors uh that
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they still had the custom of actual challenge before battle and some guy would come out and say you know
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i am such and such i challenge you uh i challenge anyone from your army to come out and fight you and
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indeed there's an athenian we know by the name of sophonies who were told uh defeated numerous
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opponents in this way and he's still alive at the battle of plataea so this is a this is a um this is
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something they're still doing just before the lights come up uh on on greek history but my my view is
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that uh the problem with single combat in reality is that it produces very confused battlefields
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uh and if you have groups at the one hand fighting and single people fighting uh it's very difficult
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to tell it's very difficult to tell who has been heroic and who has not and so um in my view what
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the greeks did um was remove in order to keep the heroic quality of combat in order to keep it uh
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competitive uh they they removed they removed themselves withdrew from from the mixed combat
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of uh of of the iliad and instead said okay we're going to compete in one thing uh and we're going
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to compete in one thing that is very easily judged and that one thing is standing your ground
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uh because if you're sort of placed in a matrix it's fairly clear to everyone around you whether
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you stand your ground or don't uh and that is what i think the phalanx is ultimately uh the the mass
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formation of the classical greeks um in which but the heavy-armed hoplite fights it's a way of testing
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uh individual soldiers to see who is the bravest by who can stand his ground the longest but since the
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phalanx also represents the city it's a way of testing the city state uh to see which city state
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has the same sort of courage um one of one of the things that makes it so useful to the greeks is that
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is that it's not it is the perfect analogy in that you test the same thing at both levels uh and that's
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what they want to do they want to test they want the bravest man to whom they can give an award which
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they do do after the battle sometimes second and third place too um but they also want to know which
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city is bravest so they come up with this somewhat unhomeric or at least only or at least debated in
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homer a form of heroism which is standing your ground they make that the primary form um and um
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they organize a system of fighting around it um so that they can tell uh who is going who in the
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real world who is the bravest whilst if you actually try to do if you try to replicate homeric
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fighting in the real world it's incredibly confusing and chaotic and you're not going to be able to tell
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who the bravest is right so this is interesting so and i thought was interesting too as you argue that
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you know the phalanx it's not i mean it's not a really effective way of warfare i mean a more
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effective way would be sort of guerrilla tactics right but as you said this allows the city states and
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individual greeks to know who's the best so it's off i mean it really is phalanx battle is like a
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football game in a lot of ways yeah i mean it's it's it's highly rules bound in ways i mean not
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only in in respect we've already talked about what happens after battle but before battle um there's a
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there's also a series of things that sort of has to happen um everybody lines up uh you don't actually
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agree on a time to fight but in practice you tend to wait for the other guys to to to be lined up
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um you advance um you sing a hymn to the god apollo called the peon um there you there are sacrifices
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to make sure that the gods are on your side um you uh you sing um there's a special magic shout to
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aries the ene alios shout uh and so forth and this is all again very um of course it's religious
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and therefore has a certain degree and independence um uh from from pure military considerations but
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the fact that everyone employs exactly the same religious ritual or very similar religious ritual
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before a battle and up to the point of contact uh suggests again a very high degree of ritualization
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and and precisely as you say that we're talking here about something which they conceive to be very
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much to they conceive to be what we would call a sport they of course have sports too
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um but the greeks have a particular genius for um for generating rules uh from generating
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competitive rules uh which is why of course they have the olympics and um they have organized
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athletics in a world uh where that is not particularly common um or at least much less prominent
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uh to the greeks organized athletics are one of the major things uh that interests them and this
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what this tells us is that they have this genius for coming up with rules uh to make things fair so
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that you can tell who is the best so going back to this idea of standing your ground this is
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interesting because this was um a way the greeks were inspired by the homeric epics of displaying
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courage but because they couldn't uh do it in single combat they they evolved it they changed it a bit
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where they changed courage to mean stand your ground um i mean are there particular battles or instances
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where this idea of courage meaning stand your ground um really comes into play um well yes absolutely
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let me begin simply by saying that that standing your ground is kind of like archery it is an
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equivocal virtue in um in the iliad you've got some people saying we're big heroes we have to stand
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our ground and you've got other people saying we don't actually have to do this if it's going to
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get us killed and then you've got other people who clearly simply don't stand their ground whatever
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they think about it uh so homeric warfare is is much more fluid with people going back and forth
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and famously you know people notice the way in which you're allowed to leave the battlefield if you
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want a drink or a meal uh you can hang around in the tents for as long as you want um have long
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discussions um which are reproduced by homer with your friends uh and then go back to the battle so
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it's it's it's all very relaxed compared to um uh to later greek warfare um but um the uh when you
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get into the later period they have made a clear decision that the homeric poems did not that standing
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your ground is heroic and specifically that it is the most heroic thing um that you can do that they're
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going to define heroism quite narrowly um in in terms of standing your ground uh and then if you
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want to uh get a sense of its importance uh you'll remember the stand of the 300 spartans at thermopylai
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uh when the persians attack this is in 480 bc uh and they basically fight and they fight and they fight
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um uh until um they are all killed uh standing that heroically standing their ground and the poet
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simonides uh writes this the famous epitaph which uh which we all know a stranger go tell the spartans
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uh that we lie here according to their laws um and the law is the law to stand your ground
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um and so um since that since that is the spartan law um they all die there and of course the
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strangers needed to go tell the spartans because they're all dead and they can none of them can do
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it themselves so let's shift gears here we were talking about the ancient greeks um let's talk about
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the ancient romans so the greeks had the iliad to guide them in their approach to war that's the
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tradition they look to what guided the romans in their development of their war-like ethos
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that's an interesting question because of course the romans start only start writing at least as far
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as we know the things that survived to us around 200 bc and their city is founded um you know according
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to legend uh in 753 bc and so they've had a very they have a very very long period which is essentially
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unhistorical to us um but they clearly have legends uh and much of the early material we have
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is about their legends and um it's always been said or but not always been said but it's always been
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said that history even their mythical history uh their own mythical history is the iliad and the
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odyssey to the romans and so they basically um uh they basically preserve a series of stories about
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um their early leaders and about how things were in the old days and that they model themselves
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uh on on those on those particular individual people but without it being shall we say canonized
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in epic poetry these are stories that are handed down in families and told a mother to child and
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things and things like that an oral tradition which of course is like um exactly like the iliad and the
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odyssey which are oral poems for a very long time but they're the property of professional
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bards who memorize them and recite them and that that doesn't seem to be the case of the old roman
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legends about about their doings in early time so let's talk about how the romans fought um so the
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greeks had the phalanx and the romans eventually adopted the phalanx but how did the romans fight in
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the early days of of rome or the republic well i mean before the romans adopt the phalanx we really
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don't know um because uh we don't have any useful records uh or useful archaeological information
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we have a few hints uh there's a very early temple to castor and pollux um which who are um
00:28:08.820
who are of course borrowed from greeks got the two greek uh the two greek brother gods um but they
00:28:15.940
are closely associated both in the greek and latin tradition with cavalry um so there might have been
00:28:21.680
some fighting on horseback uh but the truth is we really cannot we simply cannot in honesty tell
00:28:28.120
uh how they fought before they adopted the greek phalanx um but what we can tell is that the greek
00:28:36.820
phalanx did not agree with them uh because by the time we see them clearly they've abandoned the greek
00:28:42.180
phalanx and or not exactly abandoned it but collapsed it in such a fashion that individual roman soldiers
00:28:50.100
can fight as as heroic here as as heroic individuals much like people fight in the
00:28:56.960
iliad so that rather than like the greeks deciding we're not the iliad method of single combat doesn't
00:29:03.800
really work so we're going to do the phalanx the romans take the phalanx and they adapt it
00:29:08.620
to allow for uh individual uh individual fighting particularly before battle uh in which the young
00:29:17.940
men uh in the first rank in the velites are competing with one another um to um uh to challenge the
00:29:26.400
enemy uh this is also true of the cavalry which is made up of the um the most noble of the young men
00:29:31.980
the richest um they're they're challenging each other to into single combats uh and the whole system
00:29:39.420
rather than being a block uh is is uh much more messy uh because it's intended to allow for the for
00:29:49.520
single combats to develop uh and that is to my mind how you get from the phalanx which we know they
00:29:57.240
used uh to the classical republican form of uh of of roman fighting which is in the so-called manipular
00:30:04.700
legion in which the very in which the in which the army is divided up uh into small clumps of men
00:30:11.140
uh rather than simply in an enormous block like the phalanx of old and were the romans like the greeks
00:30:19.640
leery of technological advances because it would somehow rob them of honor and glory in battle
00:30:26.000
yeah i mean you don't um you will notice that um the romans much like the greeks never make archery
00:30:37.300
a significant part of their um their military thing uh and this is true even under the roman empire
00:30:45.540
um they uh they disliked both the romans and the greeks disliked the random factor and i think they
00:30:55.320
particularly associated archery and the fact that you know you've got a bunch of people you know
00:31:00.460
in a swarm who shoot off a bunch of arrows and they um you cannot tell whose arrow has hit anybody
00:31:09.220
so you cannot tell who the heroic person was who shot the arrow and the arrows strike randomly
00:31:15.140
uh and uh and they will strike equally brave and and cowardly uh and that's that won't do i mean
00:31:23.280
the point is that however you organize the fighting it has to distinguish between the brave and the
00:31:27.420
cowardly so that the brave will prevail or at least die heroically not being shot by an arrow
00:31:33.360
uh and so that the um so that the cowards will be shown to be cowards and archery just doesn't do that
00:31:40.740
very well okay so uh also within the romans you talk about these two competing ethoses these ideas of
00:31:48.960
weertus and disciplina ah you could you could tell you've had a classical education because you
00:31:54.680
pronounce you pronounce it weertus which is how a uh a classicist would pronounce it of course it
00:31:59.680
begins with a v and a boring old historian like me tends to pronounce it virtus all it means of course
00:32:05.800
is manliness um and uh it becomes the the word for um uh it becomes the word for courage or starts
00:32:14.400
with the word for courage i should point out that this is true both in greek and latin
00:32:17.760
that they don't make a linguistic distinction between manliness and courage so in latin you have
00:32:23.520
virtus manliness in greek you have andrea which also means manliness and courage at the same time
00:32:30.080
uh they don't seem they don't they don't need or feel they need a linguistic distinction between the
00:32:37.380
two qualities um something which uh your something which your magazine should contemplate and be
00:32:44.520
delighted by um but um uh yeah i mean what what to my mind happens is that you have um a very old
00:32:57.500
you have a very old culture of single combat at rome um that certainly is what if if the records mean
00:33:05.000
anything that's that is suggested um but that makes it it makes fighting information of any sort very
00:33:13.880
difficult and um so my argument is that the romans also developed this countervailing ethos disciplina
00:33:23.040
um which of course translates into discipline in english but also means things like you know hard work
00:33:30.480
so if you're asked to dig a ditch that's a question of disciplina um uh and um that whilst the individual
00:33:38.980
soldiers compete in the one in in in virtus the um uh the officers the leaders compete in disciplina
00:33:47.960
to try to keep order among all these young men who wish to fight um in uh who wish to fight in
00:33:55.460
individual combat and uh the result of this conflict is ultimately um the manipular legion but it's a
00:34:04.160
it's a happy conflict in that it it manages to uh keep the romans sufficiently organized so that they
00:34:10.880
can win battles on the big scale that's what that's disciplina uh but also allow them uh to uh fight
00:34:18.600
individually in a heroic fashion on the small scale uh that's virtus um which makes them incredibly
00:34:24.880
ferocious individually uh yeah i mean you talk about how far the romans took this disciplina how
00:34:31.620
serious they took i think you mentioned uh instance where a general killed his own son executed his own
00:34:37.380
son for cowardice because he didn't show disciplina well it's not for cowardice he's he's too brave um
00:34:43.440
this is this is a it's it's a war in which this is this is manlius torquatus um and uh who himself
00:34:51.340
early early in life manlius torquatus uh is challenged uh to a single combat uh by an enormous
00:34:59.160
gaul and uh is gets permission and goes out and fights it kills the gaul and takes his necklace his
00:35:05.380
torque which is why he is thereafter called manlius torquatus manlius the torque good guy right
00:35:11.960
so he gets older and um there is another war but this is a war not against gauls but but against
00:35:19.320
latins that is to say people who are linguistically and culturally the same as the romans and that
00:35:24.540
produces the possibility of severe confusion uh if there is single combat so the general manlius
00:35:31.380
torquatus on this one occasion forbids single combat uh but his son um who wishes to be proven as
00:35:38.940
brave as his father goes out and and ignores the rule and participates in single combat uh and then
00:35:45.880
brings the spoils the armor back and lays them before his father and says look father i'm just as
00:35:51.400
glorious as you were and then his father has him uh has him executed uh for the violation of disciplina
00:35:59.940
uh and um so yes you've got you've got that's a that's the that's sort of test case uh for the
00:36:07.360
two things in conflict uh it is of interest that this becomes a a sort of gross tradition uh in the
00:36:14.960
house of the manlii torquati and this is not the only one of their own sons that they execute uh they
00:36:21.780
develop a custom of doing this uh and uh either uh execute a number of their sons in in in subsequent
00:36:29.300
years or those sons knowing that they are going to be executed uh commit honorable suicide
00:36:34.560
wow yeah so they take it really serious um and how did the the these two conflicting ethoses
00:36:43.260
develop or evolve as rome changed transition from a republic to an empire was there a degradation of
00:36:51.080
the two or did one take precedent over the over the other well i mean the uh the romans clearly think
00:36:58.900
that both have to be kept going really very strongly and um that is what they want to do
00:37:07.000
uh and um the the the peril is that when you have a professional army uh they're going to become
00:37:14.180
better at disciplina because of course under the empire the romans do have a sort of the world's first
00:37:20.420
uh long service professional army with soldiers serving for 25 years and things like that
00:37:25.900
uh paid salaries um there's always a peril uh that they that things are going to flop over to the
00:37:32.700
disciplina side uh and that although they will be you know that they will be well trained and well
00:37:38.640
disciplined they will not be as brave and so the romans actually work very hard uh at keeping the the
00:37:46.880
the virtuos side going uh partially it's their system of uh of military decorations uh they have the
00:37:54.760
first we uh system of which we know of a military decoration the greek give the greeks give prizes
00:38:00.200
for being the best um but the romans just give prizes for doing various heroic things like um
00:38:06.620
uh say the life of another soldier and things like that much more like our system uh but their particular
00:38:13.320
technique is simply because the romans ultimately the greeks think the greeks think you can teach
00:38:20.160
courage um and uh this is of course debated in plato at considerable length but that basically seems
00:38:27.440
to be their view uh the romans don't really think you can teach courage and if they see if they think
00:38:34.540
that they're getting people without the right courage uh to be soldiers they will simply search
00:38:40.100
until they find people who have who are brought up right or who have the right courage in their blood
00:38:45.460
and so what you tend to get is the fact that they start recruiting um people from wilder and wilder
00:38:52.540
areas of the empire as the empire becomes more civilized the italians cease to want to fight
00:38:58.580
but then you've got all these gauls who maintain a military tradition and who have lots of virtues
00:39:03.760
you can give them disciplina you cannot give them virtues so the recruiters first go out into the
00:39:10.500
gaulic provinces and then in later years into spain um and then after that particularly uh onto the
00:39:19.080
german frontier uh and uh onto the balkan frontier and although they would not probably publicly say
00:39:26.420
it a lot of these people who are actually joining the roman army are probably really barbarians from
00:39:31.580
over the border uh who are taken in because they are really really brave uh and the romans know that
00:39:37.840
they can discipline them but they cannot generate bravery um over time it seems to me you can argue
00:39:45.640
uh that a practical distinction develops between uh the the roman soldier troops um rather the roman
00:39:53.460
citizen troops the legions uh who seem to um uh be be prized uh particularly for things like
00:40:01.620
engineering uh and the non-roman citizen troops who are who tend to be um uh from wilder areas uh these
00:40:09.880
are the so-called auxiliaries uh and uh they seem to be prized more for actual fighting uh because they
00:40:17.140
have more virtues than the legions and we can see this reflected in tacitus but we can also see it
00:40:24.060
particularly in trajan's column uh where if you count up the fights all the way up the column you
00:40:29.760
realize that most of the fighting is being done by the auxiliaries and surprisingly little of the
00:40:35.900
fighting is being done by the roman citizen legionaries who are instead depicted building
00:40:41.720
um cutting making roads cutting down forests uh and i mean they they appear a lot but they appear
00:40:48.460
mostly in uh engineering or parading capacities very interesting so ted you argue in the book that the
00:40:57.900
greeks um like like the greeks the romans reverenced the past uh but you argue that while the greek
00:41:04.180
reverence for their past made greek armies better rome's reverence for their military past made their
00:41:10.180
armies worse how so well my argument is vast um the greek greek military history is a series of
00:41:21.260
experiments to try to recreate the homeric ethics um the phalanx which we've always talked we already
00:41:27.040
talked about is one of those things but actually things get they get better at this as things go on
00:41:33.060
and philip the second um the king of macedonia the father of alexander uh produces another set of
00:41:40.500
experiments uh based at least we're told on various passages in the iliad uh which which make a far more
00:41:48.580
effective army uh than the greeks had previously he then of course defeats the greeks and goes at his
00:41:56.140
side and he is murdered uh and then his son um briefly defeats the greeks again but then goes off
00:42:03.440
and creates this incredible world empire uh so alexander is is phenomenally successful and he is
00:42:10.720
successful with an army that his father created uh on the basis of um of looking back uh at at the
00:42:18.320
iliad and also because his own soldiers coming from macedonia um have not been civilianized in the way
00:42:25.160
that the that a lot of the rest of the greek um greeks have been at are in fact in fact sort of
00:42:31.800
much more homeric in their outlook so if they're homeric in their outlook and they're fighting in a
00:42:37.220
homeric way or think they are um this makes for a very effective thing very interesting um my argument
00:42:44.280
about the romans is that um they lose confidence in that because particularly in um the late second
00:42:54.520
and third century they start having military setbacks and the third century is of course terrible not only
00:43:01.440
with multiple invasions by barbarians but also by a lot of civil war and economic collapse and general
00:43:07.940
misery um that they lose confidence in their own military tradition uh and in in the ways they
00:43:16.500
have been fighting over a very very long time uh because it doesn't seem to be effective anymore
00:43:21.340
and uh but they are of course because they're an ancient people they're still very past-minded
00:43:26.980
and um so what they do uh is is decide okay well our own traditions aren't helping us here uh let's
00:43:36.480
use the greek traditions uh and so what you see in the fourth century a.d is the revival of what is
00:43:44.840
essentially a phalanx army uh that is to say that the romans go back to um an army which would have
00:43:53.400
been which is recognized particularly among the infantry recognizably the same in equipment uh and
00:44:00.600
in tactics uh as the um as the greeks in the fifth century would have been that's to say even before
00:44:07.320
philip the second now there's a certain weird logic to this because um as as one author says well
00:44:14.900
um the only the only folk among us of the westerners who have ever defeated the persians
00:44:21.440
were the greeks so if we're gonna and if we're now losing to the persians we should naturally fight
00:44:27.820
like the greeks did and you know we think well that's very odd logic but if you revere the past
00:44:32.580
as much as the as the romans and the greeks did that makes sense uh so what you end up with is a
00:44:39.340
a roman army which is a throwback not to roman military tradition but to greek military tradition
00:44:45.660
uh and um which is as a result somewhat inflexible uh and brittle uh in the way that the roman army
00:44:54.960
had not been before uh that is to say in the in the earlier centuries in the republican in the earlier
00:45:01.040
empire uh and it seems to me that you can make a case that this is in fact um although it is a
00:45:08.500
historical recreation it's not a good historical recreation unlike philip the seconds who made a
00:45:15.700
better army with a historical recreation um the romans make a worse army um because the phalanx is
00:45:22.580
simply um just not as effective as the way the romans themselves used to fight uh something had the
00:45:29.020
romans thought about it they should have been able to tell because of course they had defeated
00:45:32.560
themselves the people with their own methods of warfare um that fought in these ways but they
00:45:39.260
were in a desperate situation they they knew they needed to make some change they had no confidence in
00:45:45.200
their own tradition uh and so they adopt this greek this this ancient greek way of fighting which proves
00:45:51.180
to be less effective very interesting well ted this has been a great conversation where can people
00:45:56.460
learn more about your work and your book uh soldiers and ghosts well um the easiest way is
00:46:02.520
to go to the library and um uh and and read it uh in fact that's uh in practice uh the best way to
00:46:10.080
proceed um uh the um uh there are there are of course various various book reviews and things like
00:46:18.720
that but the book is now quite old um and so uh it's it's still universally available um but um putting
00:46:27.680
your hands on an old review would be uh would be quite tricky um again i just say ultimately people
00:46:33.840
should probably um read the thing uh it's read it's what's written for people who are not academics
00:46:40.380
that is to say uh it is read it is written to be interesting um to people other than college
00:46:46.000
professors try to i try to write in a lively style uh and um so you will not be a reader will not be
00:46:53.360
overwhelmed with boredom and horror uh as a normal reader is when faced with an academic book
00:46:59.280
well i can concur i can i can vouch that this is true it's it's a highly engaging very readable book
00:47:04.720
well ted thank you so much for your time it's been a pleasure well thank you brett for uh having me on
00:47:10.340
the show i'm extremely grateful my guest today was ted linden or j.e linden he's the author of the
00:47:15.060
book soldiers and ghosts available on amazon.com and bookstores everywhere you can also check out the
00:47:19.560
show notes for more information about what we talked about today at aom.is slash linden
00:47:24.300
well that wraps up another edition of the art of manliness podcast for more manly tips and advice
00:47:39.240
make sure to check out the art of manliness website at artofmanliness.com and if you enjoy
00:47:42.960
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00:47:46.140
or stitcher helps us out a lot as always thank you for your continued support and until next time