The titular topic of Courage and Cowardice in Ancient Warfare is vast and variegated. Such concepts might be highly contested and nuanced even within a single moment in history. What was the dividing line between prudence and cowardice? Between a tactical withdrawal (Retreat, hell! We’re just attacking in a different direction!)Footnote ¹ and a shameful flight? To what extent was courage a strictly martial value, or could it be displayed in non-martial contexts? Given how gendered both notions often were, to what extent could women display courage at all? Finn assembles a wide-ranging team of contributors to engage with the problem across 25 well-researched and deeply considered contributions.

Particularly commendable is the broad view of the ancient world, which is not limited simply to Classical Greece and Rome but stretches back into the Bronze Age Near East and pharaonic Egypt. Finn quite remarkably holds separate PhDs in both Greek and Roman History and Near Eastern Studies, and her capacious interests are reflected in the volume’s range. Some ancient peoples are inevitably left out, in particular Carthage, the Sassanians, the La Tène Celts and, aside from a few mentions here and there, the early Germans. Still, it would be risible to accuse this expansive volume of being anything but thorough. Finn organises the chapters into sections determined by theme, with the chapters arranged chronologically within each section. For clarity, I will proceed chronologically by region.

For the Near East, S.C. Melville explores the shifting vocabulary of courage in Mesopotamian royal inscriptions, at a time when scribes were learning how to deploy the technology of writing to describe warfare. In the third millennium bce kings took total credit for victories and only described their own prowess; it was not until the second millennium bce that the courage of common soldiers was seen as a phenomenon good kings should elicit. Defeated enemies were seldom accused of cowardice; their flight was simply recognition of how overmatched they were by the victorious king and his gods. G. Konstantopoulos surveys notions of courage and fear in Sumerian literature, where gods and kings model courage and prowess. While gods only rarely display fear and despair (usually within the city lament genre), human heroes often show fear and hesitation. Even the mighty Gilgamesh is briefly frozen by fear when he encounters Huwawa, his fear a symptom of his mortality. C. Trimm examines New Kingdom campaign narratives, noting that these generally present enemy kings as courageous and worthy opponents before the campaign, but they are handily overawed once they witness the might of the pharaoh. In contrast, Assyrian narratives portray the enemy as deceitful ad bellum and cowardly in bello. A.J. Spalinger also explores Egyptian royal narratives, providing a close reading of the Kadesh Materials, where Ramses II notably accuses much of his own army of cowardice and claims the victory based on his courage alone. P. Clancier surveys first-millennium bce Assyrian and Babylonian narratives of heroic kings and cowardly enemies but contrasts these with preserved dispatches that acknowledge cowardice and failures among soldiers and subordinates. J.O. Hyland examines Achaemenid Persian conceptions, juxtaposing emic texts predictably celebrating royal fearlessness alongside the cowardice and perfidy of opponents with etic Greek descriptions. The Greeks were in fact capable of acknowledging Persian bravery, including Herodotus’ positive description of Artabazus, who extricated the survivors of Plataea (Hdt. 9.89). Persian notions of courage were likewise profoundly gendered, with ‘woman’ being used as a derogatory term for coward. Darius’ flights from Issus and Gaugamela, while leveraged by the Macedonians as proof of his unworthiness, would have been highly problematic to his own subjects, leading to his deposition and death.

Moving to Archaic Greece, E. Schlatter examines martial excellence on the Homeric battlefield, suggesting that courage and cowardice are viewed as momentary states rather than permanent aspects of character, so that a brave man one day can be cowardly the next. K. Lu Hsu examines the extent to which kleos in Archaic literature and myth was available to those who were not elite and male. Female deities, particularly Athena, are assigned martial prowess in the Iliad. Amazons in Greek myth, including Penthesilea at Troy, fight vigorously, but are invariably killed off to restore the gendered order their combat heroics have unsettled. Even mythical stories recapitulated in democratic Athens spotlighted the courage of elite ‘superhero’ characters over common hoplites. C. Kucewicz parses the concept of rhipsaspia, the throwing away of one’s shield to flee more efficiently. Its absence from Homer is notable, although it was nonchalantly self-reported by aristocratic poets such as Archilochus and Alcaeus; the phenomenon received escalating moral censure and legal sanction with the rise of polis militias in the sixth century bce.

For Classical Greece, there is a new burst of literary sources. E. Foster discusses Thucydides’ views of courage, which manifests primarily as a motivation for action. In Thucydides’ pragmatic (or cynical) moral vision, good courage does not always lead to good results, and good courage itself is rooted in an array of factors, ranging from technically competent leadership to sheer luck. M. Christ examines Xenophon, whom he sees as heavily influenced by democratic ideals of collective action, mediated by leaders’ persuasion and example, although he also detects a more elitist strand where bravery is generated through the sort of socialisation and education only available to aristocrats. P. de Souza surveys courage in naval warfare across both Greece and Rome. While set-piece clashes often evoked rhetoric about courage and cowardice similar to that of land battles, naval raids, while quite effective, were criticised as cowardly both because of the low status of common sailors and the ease of exfiltration by ship.

The Hellenistic world gets somewhat short shrift, with no chapters on the Successors or the Hellenistic kingdoms. S. Müller explores the courage of Alexander the Great, who mobilised traditional expectations for heroic leadership by Macedonian kings and inflated them into a self-image of an unstoppable warrior king. N.L. Overtoom assesses the Parthians, whose military activity is largely known from Greek and Roman sources. He argues these accounts misunderstood the logic of Parthian tactics and strategy, which favoured hit-and-run raids and the maintenance of an army-in-being over holding terrain and prioritising pitched battles.

Several contributions bridge both Greece and Rome. L. van Gils and L. Huitink examine discussions about battlefield courage across Greek and Latin historiography, where notions of courage are nuanced and situationally dependent, a point already raised by Socrates in his Platonic dialogue with the Athenian general Laches. A. Hobbs elaborates how philosophers expounded this situational dependency, starting with Socrates, himself a war-hero. In the influential Socratic tradition, it was not enough to act boldly and without fear, but true courage had to be aligned with a cogent and worthy objective.

Moving to Rome, K.H. Milne explores courage among soldiers during the Middle Republic, where Roman infantry tactics required a combination of aggression and stalwartness, encouraged through rewards for killing and wounding enemies, and mutual oaths that stressed holding one’s place. L.L. Brice examines the social dynamics of courage and how soldiers’ fear might be managed through training, discipline, leadership, cohesion and habituation. R. Ash surveys depictions of courage in Roman historiography, focusing mostly on Caesar. D. Potter considers imperial-era notions of courage, which in official ideology flowed directly from the emperor himself. In practice, Potter argues that harsh training and disciplinary regimes produced the primary group cohesion that made Roman soldiers effective in battle, even if they were often at odds with their careerist centurions and a rotating carousel of tribunes and legates. J. Secord surveys imperial conceptions of courage in military manuals, when civilian intellectuals framed courage as an imperial virtue they could still hope to emulate, often deprecating the front-line courage of common soldiers. S.E. Phang considers Tacitus’ descriptions of the Year of the Four Emperors, when virtus is almost impossible to display amid paranoid emperors, reckless soldiers and callow elites just trying to pick the winning side. P. Rance explores heroism in Procopius’ histories and the extent to which Homeric tropes informed the narrative. The answer is mostly negative, as duelling scenes may derive from the native martial traditions of Rome’s Germanic soldiers, while descriptions of wounds seem to draw on medical observation rather than emulation of Homeric gore. By way of summary, A.G. Zavaliy notes that courage and cowardice were highly variable and context dependent notions, rooted in the particularities of the military situation, leadership structure, social class and gender hierarchies.

Overall, Finn has put together a companion that stands head and shoulders above the median edited volume. The nuance of the individual chapters is impossible to replicate in a brief review, but is one of the volume’s strengths. Several strands emerge. Social hierarchy mattered a great deal, with social status often used to police who was capable of bravery in the first place, so that in many monarchic societies courage was often attributed to the king, emperor or pharaoh alone, in contrast to the more democratised vision of the city-state. Army typology also mattered: professional forces like the imperial legions produced courageous soldiers through training, discipline and standing unit cohesion; citizen militias instead relied on social expectations, persuasion and consensus. Rewards and penalties served as additional motivating factors, whether Roman decorations like the civic crown or punishments like barley rations given to defeated units (decimation loomed as a threat but was rarely carried out).

Military tactics played a key role in determining when retrograde movement might be acceptable or even necessary (e.g. Parthian horse archers) and when unit cohesion and steadfastness constituted a mandatum (particularly in the massed heavy infantry tactics of the phalanx or legion). One potential blind spot is neglect of the material culture of courage (the rhipsaspia discussion being an exception). Lightly armoured troops like archers or skirmishers could not be expected to stand their ground, while heavy infantry with large, thick shields like the aspis or scutum, and further protected by body armour, had the capacity to hold positions against shock attacks without instantly being cut to ribbons; physical protection often separated courage from suicide.

The second volume under review on women, gender and warfare in many ways complements Finn’s themes, given how notions of courage themselves were highly gendered, rooted in ‘manliness’ (virtus/andreia). The ten papers in War and Masculinity in Roman and Medieval Culture were the result of a conference held at Tampere University, Finland, in 2022. The volume embraces a wide chronological scope, ranging from early Rome to the High Middle Ages, and this inevitably provides a broader geographic scope as well, integrating Byzantium and medieval northern Europe.

Pyy starts with a study of wounds in Roman epic, taking as a starting point Aeneas’ indignus dolor ‘shameful pain’ in Virgil (Aen. 12.411). In Roman epic, pain, rather than being automatically honourable, pierced the aura of invulnerability so central to elite male identity, although base physical suffering, particularly in Lucan and Silius, might be laundered through Stoic endurance in service of a higher goal. Pyy notes that these epics were produced by writers increasingly unfamiliar with war for similarly uninitiated audiences, and their scenes of ultraviolence often verged on camp.

Rantala considers sexual violence in Livy, focusing on the mythical rape of the Sabine women. There is some risk in focusing on the hyper-literary tropes of the first pentad. Later sexually charged anecdotes from more historical periods, particularly Scipio’s ostentatious continence at New Carthage (Livy 26.50) and the rape and revenge narrative of the Galatian princess Chiomara against a dastardly centurion (Livy 38.24) – both episodes based on Polybius – are oddly ignored. K. Mustakallio’s discussion of female agency in Roman historiography also largely limits itself to Livy’s first pentad and the mythical heroics assigned to women such as Veturia and Volumnia (Coriolanus’ mother and wife) and the plucky hostage Cloelia. R. Berg notes the relative absence of battle scenes in Pompeian houses, with most combat scenes being either mythological or gladiatorial, rather than depicting contemporary military events. Berg concludes, based on domestic scenes of Mars relaxing at home with Venus, that the Romans preferred to see the home as a demilitarised space, although it should be noted that most of the surviving Pompeian wall paintings were produced during the Principate, after military participation rates in Italy had collapsed. Peltonen teams up with Rantala to discuss the emasculation of defeated barbarians, ranging from the implied homosexual rape on the Ludovisi Battle Sarcophagus to the Gemma Augustea where an allegorical female warrior with attributes of Diana pulls a male captive by his hair, to the enigmatic but quite explicit scene of bound male prisoners being tortured by women on Trajan’s Column. Peltonen returns to examine notions of gender in Ammianus Marcellinus, who appears as a relatively gruff conservative influenced by earlier exempla and appreciative of Julian’s performance of an austere and militant masculinity.

Moving into the Late Roman Empire, M.E. Stewart considers gender in Agathias’ Histories. Agathias continued to hope for a blunt imperial gender paradigm of masculine Romans, emasculated northern barbarians and subservient, feminised Persians. The eunuch re-emerges as a persistent pressure point for gender norms, represented by both the effective general Narses in Agathias and the eunuch commanders Niketas and Peter profiled by the ninth-century historian Leo the Deacon, whose writings are the subject of S. Tougher’s subsequent chapter. This ‘third gender’ could still be very effective at war.

Pivoting to Medieval Europe, P. Line assembles a medley of issues related to gender in the Early Middle Ages, ranging from berserkers and Valkyries to the burial of women with weapons. J. Hanska discusses eleventh-century sermons, which sought to modulate out-of-control knightly violence. St George here is presented as the paradigm for a pious and socially responsible knight. One interesting feature is the rise of Christianity and the provision of alternative pathways for male accomplishment through asceticism. Results here are mixed: Leo the Deacon was a churchman but a deep admirer of secular military courage, while the authors of the Saints’ Day sermons were highly critical of the reckless violence characteristic of knights and urged them to modulate their behaviour towards a universalist vision of manhood driven by Christian piety. At this point, the discussion has moved from a narrow virtus rooted in physical combat and available only to the warrior to a more multifaceted virtue that can be performed by all members of society.

The book overall is a solid conference proceedings: the coverage is inevitably patchy and at times capricious, but one senses the insights and cross-fertilisations emerging from commingling scholars from several different subfields. Altogether, both volumes affirm Carl von Clausewitz’s adage that war is a chameleon, variable and deeply rooted in its immediate social and cultural context, so that across premodernity military violence provided many ways to ‘act like a man’.