P. Sabin – The Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Warfare (2 Volumes)

Автор: P. Sabin
Название книги: The Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Warfare (2 Volumes)
Формат: PDF
Жанр: Военная история
Страницы: 631+567
Качество: Изначально компьютерное, E-book

Warfare was the single biggest preoccupation of historians in antiquity. In recent
decades fresh textual interpretations, numerous new archaeological discoveries and
a much broader analytical focus emphasizing social, economic, political and cultural
approaches have transformed our understanding of ancient warfare. Volume
i of this two-volume History reflects these developments and provides a systematic
account, written by a distinguished cast of contributors, of the various themes
underlying the warfare of the Greek world from the archaic to the Hellenistic
period and of early and middle Republican Rome. For each broad period developments
in troop-types, equipment, strategy and tactics are discussed. These are
placed in the broader context of developments in international relations and the
relationship of warfare to both the state and wider society. Numerous illustrations,
a glossary and chronology, and information about the ancient authors mentioned
supplement the text. This will become the primary reference work for specialists
and non-specialists alike.
philip sabin is Professor of Strategic Studies in the Department ofWar Studies
at King’s College London. His main academic interest concerns the analytical
modelling of conflict, and he is the author of Lost Battles: Reconstructing the Great
Clashes of the Ancient World (2007) and coeditor (with Tim Cornell and Boris
Rankov) of The Second Punic War: A Reappraisal (1996). He teaches and writes
about the strategy and tactics of warfare from ancient times to the twenty-first
century.
hans van wees is Professor of Ancient History at University College London.
He is the author of StatusWarriors:War, Violence and Society in Homer and History
(1992) andGreekWarfare:Myths and Realities (2004) and editor ofWar and Violence
in Ancient Greece (2000). He has coedited (with Nick Fisher) Archaic Greece: New
Approaches and New Evidence (1998), (with Egbert Bakker and Irene de Jong) Brill’s
Companion to Herodotus (2002) and (with Kurt Raaflaub) A Companion to Archaic
Greece (forthcoming).
michael whitby is Professor of Classics and Ancient History at the University
of Warwick. He is the coeditor of Volume XIV of The Cambridge Ancient History
(2001) and author of Rome at War, ad 293–696 (2002) as well as several articles
on late Roman warfare, and has made several television appearances talking about
ancient warfare fromtheGraeco-PersianWars to the collapse of theRoman Empire

Warfare was the single biggest preoccupation of historians in antiquity,
but modern academic interest in the subject has revived only in the last
few decades. The narrowly focused studies of war written before the First
WorldWar byDelbr¨uck, Kromayer, Veith and others have now been superseded
by a much wider spectrum of work, ranging from the individual
soldier’s experience of battle to the place of ancient warfare within wider
social, economic, political and cultural structures. Partly as a result of this
broader focus, and partly through richer textual analysis and a flood of new
archaeological discoveries, our understanding of ancient warfare has been
transformed.
With the exception of popular survey works, however, there is no comprehensive
overview of this burgeoning field of study. The Cambridge History
of Greek and Roman Warfare aims to fill this gap: its two volumes survey
the advances made since the 1970s in all aspects of research on ancient
warfare, and provide an opportunity for a distinguished group of experts
in the field to take the subject further still by presenting an array of new
ideas and suggesting many new directions. Our aim in this work is not to
provide a narrative account of the countless wars which took place across a
period spanning fifteen centuries – such accounts are readily available from
any number of other sources, not least the Cambridge Ancient History – but
to offer a thematic analysis of the main aspects of warfare in the ancient
world.
Three important introductory chapters set the scene: the first puts the
present volumes in their historiographical context and explains further the
rationale for their publication; the other two address the nature of evidence
and the problems of its interpretation, two issues which are fundamental
to a new and better understanding of ancient warfare. The bulk of the
volumes is divided into four chronologically ordered parts, each covering a
span of three or four centuries. These chronological divisions serve to draw
attention to the broad changes which occurred in warfare and the societies
in which this warfare was practised and pursued. Detailed chronological
tables at the end of each volume also help readers to place the discussion
in its proper historical frame. The first part of volume i covers the earliest
centuries of Greek society, which generated our most famous accounts of
ancient warfare, Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey, as well as the first ‘proper’
historical accounts of conflicts, with Thucydides’ record of the Peloponnesian
War often regarded as the acme of ancient historiography. In the
second part, early Rome and theHellenistic world are dealt with in parallel,
a rather unusual combination designed to stimulate a fresh analytical
perspective and to overcome the common tendency to keep the Greek
and Roman worlds in entirely separate compartments. The first part of
volume ii bridges one of the great political transitions of the ancient world,
that from the Roman Republic to the Principate of Augustus and his successors,
with the intention of highlighting continuing issues and recurrent
themes. The final part deals with the later Empire, a period long seen
through the prism of ‘Decline and Fall’ but one in which most scholars
now identify a robust and protracted defence of imperial interests in a
world which was experiencing profound changes, internally through the
adoption of Christianity and externally through the arrival of the Huns.
Within each chronological part, the sub-divisions are thematic and reflect
the key aspects of ancient warfare identified in modern historiography:
(1) the role of war and peace in international relations; (2) the nature, composition
and status of different kinds of armed forces; (3) the practicalities
and ethics of the conduct of wars and campaigns; (4) the nature and experience
of combat in pitched battles and sieges; (5) the political and economic
dimensions of war; and (6) the social and cultural dimensions of war. The
same sub-divisions are applied in each of the four parts, so as to enable
readers to make comparisons and to pursue particular themes throughout
antiquity. (All dates in volume i are bc unless indicated.)
‘War is terrible’, said Polybius, ‘but not so terrible that we should put up
with anything to avoid it’ (4.31.3). These volumes examine both the forms
taken by the terror of war in the ancient world and the forces which all
too often made it seem necessary to resort to violence at the cost of giving
up ‘the thing which we all pray that the gods may give us . . . the only
incontestable blessing among the so-called good things in life – I mean
peace’ (4.74.3).
Phil Sabin