A ‘revised and updated’ edition marks the 40th anniversary of L.’s classic investigation of Roman strategic statecraft (reviewed in CR 29 [1979] by A. Birley). This unexpected foray into Roman territory by a Washington-based defence analyst immediately provoked a disproportionate response. Most Roman specialists, even those inclined to leniency, criticised L.’s anachronism, schematised synthetic modelling and factual and/or interpretative errors. Some, nonetheless, found insight in his deduction and evaluation of three successive Roman imperial security strategies using an analytical framework and vocabulary drawn from modern Defence Studies. L. posed novel questions about how the Roman Empire defined priorities, allocated resources and formulated policy. Even if historians and archaeologists thought L.’s antiquity too closely resembled mid-Cold War modernity, this methodological exercise stimulated and partly framed subsequent discussion. L. has since analysed The Grand Strategy of the Byzantine Empire (2009), with less success or furore.
In a new, more polemical preface, L.’s selective survey of critical responses to his book belies its marginal significance in recent, especially anglophone scholarship, which overwhelmingly repudiates ‘Luttwakian’ rationalist assumptions about Roman defensive goals, planning and capabilities and his inference of logical empire-wide strategy(ies) of territorial defence. If cited at all, L. has become the strawman of anachronistic misconception. Justification for a new edition rests on the extent and validity of revisions in light of four decades of research. The depth of L.’s engagement is soon in doubt: an acknowledgement thanks an undergraduate student who ‘undertook the task of reviewing the original text to identify passages that needed revision’. Modifications are minimal, sporadic and/or insufficiently integrated. Former misprints are corrected, but poorly-produced maps retain inaccuracies. The bibliography has been haphazardly updated: 90 percent of works listed predate 1979, important studies are omitted, and redundant items persist. L. intermittently bats away criticism – chiefly from B. Isaac, C.R. Whittaker and S. Mattern – regarding the nature of borders and functions of frontier installations, but these sideswipes, even where valid, rarely further his case or advance debate. A main target is Isaac's The Limits of Empire (1990), which L. faults for primitivism and philological-conceptual reductionism, without acknowledging that discussion long ago shifted to a more nuanced middle ground, where academic consensus allows the Romans ‘realist’ concerns about power and security, but generally denies long-term and systematic inter-continental strategic decision-making. Moreover, qualified Classicists have already assimilated and elaborated the more applicable aspects of L.’s analysis; notably E.L. Wheeler, JMH 57 (1993), 7–41, 215–40, rebuts Isaac's arch-primitivist view while simultaneously exposing the limits of L.’s paradigm. The third, late Roman chapter was the most problematic 40 years ago, but proliferation of ‘late-antique’ scholarship has since transformed interpretations of the late Roman army. Here especially, L.’s occasional counterblasts at his critics reveal unfamiliarity with the field and only more radical intervention could have rescued this section from obsolescence. In the original foreword, J.F. Gilliam opined, ‘[L.] has done for Roman historians what they have not done for themselves’. If true then, this could hardly be said now. On the contrary, L.’s unrevised reaffirmation of his arch-modernist case can only drag debate back to former extreme positions. For Roman historians, this book retains historiographical interest. The main readership should be students or practitioners of strategy, ‘grand’ or otherwise.
