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for the ones who get it done. who get it done. Hi

1:06

everyone and welcome to another Ancient Warfare Answers with

1:08

me Murray. Your 10

1:10

minute escape from daily life to

1:12

think about ancient warfare. And

1:15

I answer questions sent in by

1:17

viewers and listeners in

1:19

various forms. Emails and

1:22

postcards. You can comment on a video.

1:25

You can of course back us on Patreon.

1:28

Lots of our questions come in from patrons. You

1:30

just need to go to Patreon/ancient warfare

1:32

podcast and you can back us there

1:34

at one of three levels. There's Legionary,

1:37

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1:39

dollar five dollars ten dollars. For five dollars you

1:41

get the digital copy of the magazine and for

1:44

ten dollars you get a print

1:46

copy of the magazine. Each well

1:49

every two months by bi-monthly. Not

1:52

meaning twice a month but meaning every

1:54

two months. Anyway, now this question has

1:57

been sent in by Aaron Friedman and

1:59

it's called... a comment about one of

2:01

the earlier podcasts I made. On

2:03

your comment about written battle

2:05

accounts, were Empire error writings

2:10

less common, lost to time, or

2:13

were the generals less educated than

2:15

Republican error generals? Oh

2:17

interesting, this was in the

2:20

context of talking about the

2:22

Battle of Mons Grauthiers I think in

2:25

an earlier podcast where we've only got

2:27

Tacitus' account and very few others. And

2:29

it's true that for the Roman Empire

2:31

you know we have Tacitus for events

2:34

of the first century, not as many

2:36

as we'd like. He's fragmentary in both

2:38

his histories and the Annales.

2:41

We also have the histories

2:44

of Josephus who's very

2:46

good and then Diocassius

2:49

again survives large

2:51

passages fragmentarily

2:54

and then later in the Roman Empire

2:57

we do have Amiens, Marcellinus and Procopius.

3:00

But that of course is 700 years

3:02

of history and we know

3:04

of lots of other sources that have

3:06

been lost and so the first answer

3:09

to your question Aaron is indeed lots

3:12

have been lost to time. We

3:15

know of accounts written

3:17

by Marcus Aurelius, accounts written by

3:19

Trajan and other generals, Demetius

3:22

Corbulo and others about their campaigns

3:24

that just did not survive unless

3:26

they survive in the fragmentary

3:30

accounts of the other historians. But often

3:32

those historians don't include a lot of

3:34

detail on the military campaigns of those

3:37

generals and so maybe

3:40

they didn't use them and that's problematic.

3:43

Now we also of course have Arian

3:46

who's most famous as a historian of Alexander the

3:48

Great but who was a general

3:50

and a commander himself and we do

3:52

have his Tactica and his

3:54

Ecotaxis which is his array

3:57

against the Allens as it's translated. So

3:59

in about one 136,

4:01

137 AD. He leads an army against a marauding

4:04

band of Alans and draws

4:07

up his army and tells us what he does, which

4:09

is interesting. Now, we've got to piece all

4:11

of that together though. The problem is of course, you've

4:14

got Josephus, you've got Arian and you've got these

4:16

sort of other battle accounts, which is all we've

4:19

got to go on to tell

4:21

us about what the

4:23

Roman Imperial Army did in the field, which

4:25

is not a lot. Of course, you've got

4:28

visual mediums as well. You've got the Trajan's

4:31

column famously and Mark's realtors column

4:34

slightly less famously, the Adam

4:37

Clissy monuments as well under Trajan, and

4:40

several other architectural and archaeological

4:42

finds which tell us stuff. And

4:44

of course, so much armor and

4:46

weapons and helmets to tell us

4:48

the story or confuse

4:50

the story as the case may be. Now,

4:52

in addition to the lost

4:55

to time, frustrating as

4:57

that is, we've also got

4:59

the idea of under

5:01

the Roman Empire, of course, the

5:04

commander in chief of all the Roman armies is

5:06

the Emperor himself and therefore

5:08

the generals who are writing

5:10

about their own campaigns face

5:13

the problem of highlighting

5:15

their own achievements and therefore

5:17

being sidelined,

5:20

asked to fall on their sword, put to death, blacklisted

5:24

by the Emperor. And

5:27

of course in the historians, especially in

5:29

Tacitus and Cassius Dio, you've got

5:31

the idea of good emperors and bad emperors and

5:34

bad emperors, of course, are jealous and petty

5:38

and will stop the careers

5:40

of good generals like Agricola, according to

5:42

Tacitus and you know,

5:44

Demetrius Corbulo falls on the

5:46

sword like a good general when Nero demands it.

5:49

The interesting thing there, of course, is

5:51

those accounts don't survive except

5:54

in little tiny fragments and there

5:57

are other ideas that

6:00

There are careers, and I've spoken about front times many

6:02

times, his career doesn't suffer.

6:04

And there are other generals whose careers don't

6:06

suffer under bad emperors. We

6:08

don't have any battle accounts by

6:10

them either, unfortunately. But

6:13

it's the idea that, you know, these

6:15

bad emperors block what the

6:18

generals did, or, you know, take credit

6:20

for them. That is,

6:23

I think, problematic. We've got

6:25

a couple of fragments of Lucius Verus' commentary

6:27

when he goes on the Parthian

6:30

War in the 160s, but

6:32

it's not particularly useful for

6:36

what the battles were looking like, unfortunately.

6:38

And so I think

6:40

the interesting thing there is they

6:42

probably were less common. So

6:45

even with these generals' accounts, you've

6:48

actually probably got people don't want to read about

6:51

battle in the detail that Julius Caesar

6:53

gave us, for instance. It's

6:56

not the done thing, because

6:58

of course the commander in chief is the emperor.

7:01

And so the credit

7:03

isn't being taken by these generals. And

7:06

so when we look at Arian, very

7:09

much the exception, and Josephus, who's not Roman,

7:12

again, the exception, and those battle accounts

7:14

and Tacitus which do survive, that's

7:17

not the emphasis. We

7:19

do rely on Vegetaus writing

7:21

in the late 4th or

7:23

early 5th century AD to tell

7:25

us about how Roman armies deployed.

7:28

It's Josephus and Vegetaus. And

7:30

another problem, so many problems, is

7:33

that we use them to extrapolate what

7:35

happens in 400 years of imperial Roman

7:37

history, which is problematic in itself.

7:40

So what have we got? Lost to

7:42

time, less common, I think, yes, both

7:45

of those things. Were the generals less educated than

7:47

Roman republican generals? No, I don't think so. I

7:49

think that there is a long

7:52

tradition of generalship in the Roman

7:54

army, and there are some phenomenal

7:57

generals in the

7:59

imperial period. Most interestingly, of

8:01

course, many of them

8:03

are fighting for their

8:05

Emperor. Now again, and I think I've spoken

8:07

about it before, always, broken

8:09

record me, the idea of course is

8:11

that the good generals are

8:14

there in person and they are active,

8:17

and their subordinate commanders are,

8:19

you know, deferring to them.

8:22

Bad generals, bad emperors, sorry,

8:24

are there. They might have

8:27

bad generals because they're sycophants, not good generals,

8:31

which I think is not true. I think that's the case in both

8:33

good and bad emperors have good and bad generals. But

8:35

of course when you have a bad emperor like Domitian

8:37

for instance, we don't believe he was there in person

8:40

in the front, even though the

8:42

Praetorian Guards, and we're told he's there, we

8:45

poo-poo that. Then we're told,

8:47

oh, he took credit for it but it

8:49

wasn't his to take. But when it's a good general, they take

8:51

credit for it, and it was theirs

8:54

to take. And it's like, well, hang on, exactly

8:56

the same scenario. A good general, sorry, a good

8:58

emperor taking credit for what their subordinates do, is

9:00

no different from a bad emperor taking credit for

9:02

what their generals do. But our

9:05

idea is, well, he's a good emperor, he's a bad

9:07

emperor. I think it's actually, no, no,

9:10

emperors are present, they either are responsible

9:12

or they're not. It doesn't change whether you're a good

9:14

or a bad emperor. You're there

9:16

and probably you're not

9:18

responsible. Trajan was not

9:20

responsible. Marcus Aurelius was not responsible. It

9:22

was Domitian, but they were there in

9:24

person. And their subordinate generals,

9:28

they commanded. Again,

9:30

coming back to their first issue, they're

9:32

fighting under the Roman Empire. They

9:35

give credit to their emperor,

9:37

not themselves, because they don't want to

9:39

be sidelined. That's true

9:41

under good and bad emperors. And we

9:43

weirdly give credit to good emperors that

9:46

they were responsible. And

9:48

we don't give it to bad emperors. And I

9:50

think it's like, no, no, they don't get any

9:52

credit. Whether they be a good emperor in our

9:54

estimation or a bad emperor, their subordinates did all

9:57

the commanding. And so there are very good generals

9:59

in the Roman Empire. We

10:01

hear less about them because they're not

10:03

as publicised for those reasons above. So

10:06

thank you for joining me. I hope that answered your

10:08

question, Aaron. I hope I raised more questions than I've

10:10

answered. Join me again for another

10:12

Ancient Warfare Answers and I will attempt to answer your

10:14

questions. Thanks. Bye. Some

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