Displaying 1-10 of 10
Displaying 1-10 of 10
Liability for military service, and ephebic service, seems to have been practically universal. Lysias informs us (On the Refusal of a Pension 24.13) that in Athens an invalid was entitled to draw a pension of one obol a day.
I am one of those people who has always been fascinated by Hannibal. Back in the day, when I was very young, the shopping center across from our home in Hamburg, Germany had an old game in one of the retail stores. It wasn’t so much a game in the traditional sense but more a of question and answer one, a test your knowledge kind of a thing. The question that has remained with me to this day was: How many elephants did Hannibal have when he crossed the Alps?
The Second Battle of Thermopylae, fought in 480 BC between the Achaemenid Persian army of Xerxes and the Greek coalition led by the Spartan king Leonidas, is legendary. Much less well known, however, are the 26 other combat actions fought in and around the pass, which date from before 480 BC all the way up to World War II.
One of the most remarkable scenes on Marcus Aurelius’ Column depicts a god of rain slaking the thirst of the Romans and granting them victory. Elsewhere on the column, we have scenes of enemies struck by lightning. In the very sparse surviving literary records of Marcus’ wars, however, the rain and lightning are combined into one moment.
Our best (and sometimes only) source for Belisarius’ campaigns is the historian Procopius of Caesarea in his magisterial work The History of the Wars (the Vandal Wars are in books 3 and 4).
Of the many changes in Roman military organisation between the fourth and sixth centuries AD, one of the most impactful for the wars of Belisarius was increased use of the bucellarii (or boukellarioi in Greek) – privately raised forces (usually cavalry) who operated as bodyguards for commanders.
Nic Field shows us how the story of Alexander the Great has been portrayed across different sources and cultures.
Fantastic artwork or not, we still had to justify every battle’s inclusion in the “100 greatest” list. This meant the battle had to tick the right boxes
I’ve been asked why I wrote The Bronze Lie: Shattering the Myth of Spartan Warrior Supremacy. Why did I think it was so important to target the myth that the Spartans were history’s greatest warriors?
The complexity of the shaping involved in producing a muscled cuirass meant it was extremely labour intensive.
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