Given the recent growth of classical reception, it is without surprise that war has been given its just due as a subject for consideration. With an eye towards the student and the general reader, B.'s slender volume seeks to establish lines of continuity from warfare's foundation (at least in the western tradition) in the Greco-Roman period to today. Interwoven within this narrative, we encounter B.'s own often trenchant personal experiences as a veteran of America's Vietnam war highlighting the commonality between ancient and modern soldiering in often surprising ways. B.'s book successfully identifies common leaden threads that run through the tapestry of human conflict, but the reviewer is left to wonder why and how do these various examples of the classical tradition transform and perpetuate in new and modern contexts.
B. begins rightly with the Iliad, the first work of war in western literature, which encapsulates all the emotional, psychological and moral dimensions of conflict within the backdrop of Greek Dark Age warfare. Here B. establishes Homer's epic as a reflective text of a soldier's experience and whose heroes’ martial qualities were often imitated and admired by later Greeks, Romans and modern generals. War's brutality, however, exhibited by a Greek taking a Trojan's head as a war trophy in Il. 14.493 and B.'s own recollection of a fellow soldier's decapitation of a dead enemy with his entrenching tool (p. 23), provides a chilling example of continuity. The next two chapters, in 50 pages no less, is a sweeping and dizzying historical account of warfare from its earliest records down to the twenty-first century. One detects the footprints of Alexander's campaigns and Xenophon's Anabasis upon Gustavus Adolphus’ tactical knowledge, while Vegetius found readers from Richard the Lionheart to Austrian field marshals in the eighteenth century. And not surprisingly, Caesar's Commentaries cast a giant shadow over Europe's military leaders from the Middle Ages to the Late Modern Period. The English poets of the Great War make their appearance in their single representative, Wilfred Owen, yet his classicism reflected in his famous line, Dulce et decorum est / Pro patria mori, is curiously left unattributed to any ancient author. Horace would be perplexed. In the end, however, B. correctly maintains that despite the changes in military technology, the Greeks and Romans wrestled with the same basic questions regarding warfare that modern societies continue to face and that the basic principles of war remain unchanged (p. 76).
Chapter 4 presents a more narrowly focused argument on the discussion of ethics in warfare, particularly the influence Cicero's De officiis and St Augustine's De civitate and its impact on intellectuals and philosophers from Machiavelli to Michael Walzer. The dialogue between political leaders and moral theorists on ius bello revolves around, as B. points out, ‘the latter seeking justification for acts already committed, the former, using Greek and Roman writers – in particular, Cicero – furnishing a moral structure for the circumstances of their own time’ (p. 99). This is a sobering thought considering if the justification that the Athenians used to invade Melos in Thuc. 2.64 actually guided modern foreign policy. Yet, B. argues that the debate on the ethics of warfare generated by the ancients should be studied not for any necessarily moral or philosophical purposes, but adhering to the advice gained from their arguments may prevent bad decision-making. This for B. is perhaps the true legacy of ancient warfare (p. 110).
In the fifth chapter, ‘Writing War’, B. provides a truncated survey of ancient military historiography and traces the legacy of ancient authors in the genres of post-classical military history, military memoirs and modern historical fiction. Save for Vegetius, other ancient military technical writers like Aeneas Tacticus, Frontinus and Polyaenus have seemingly fallen between the cracks. Yet, there is good grist for the mill here as B. observes that ancient warfare is alive and well in the form of historical novels in not only well-known classics such as Mary Renault's The Persian Boy and the reissue of L. Sprague de Camp's The Arrows of Hercules, but recent treatments by David Drake, Harry Turtledove, Steven Pressfield and Harry Sidebottom. More could be said about the ranking of ancient historical fiction in the sales lists of the various publishers and internet booksellers as they could reveal some hard evidence of interest in the ancient world provided by these ‘gateway texts’. Also, we would benefit from some analysis of the background of these writers and their relationship with the classical tradition. The facts tantalise. Renault was a self-taught classicist, while Turtledove and Sidebottom are trained academics. Both Pressfield and Drake are veterans and have written extensively on military fiction in the ancient world. B.'s brief final chapter reveals a bewildering array of treatments of classical warfare in art, film, television and video games. Here Michael Woods's documentary, In the Footsteps of Alexander, rubs shoulders with the reality show, Warrior Challenge Rome. Ridley Scott's Gladiator, Zach Synder's 300 and Oliver Stone's Alexander are all pertinent examples of large studio filmmaking featuring war. Edutainment networks like the History Channel provide a plethora of programming featuring ancient warfare. Video gamers can play Kratos, a Spartan hero in God of War, or command Roman legions and Macedonian phalanxes in Activision's Rome: Total War, to name only two. And though not technically ‘art’ but perhaps artistic, the chapter touches on groups who re-enact the battles and manoeuvres of Roman legionaries in Europe and the United States. Curiously, B. does not touch upon ancient warfare's treatment in modern music. Examples can be found in Iron Maiden's ‘Alexander the Great’, while references in rap music to the Macedonian conqueror and the Persian Wars are included in ‘I Can’ by NAS and Boogie Down Productions’ ‘You Must Learn’.
In broad strokes B. has aptly demonstrated the imprint of classical warfare in various aspects of military culture, the ethics of warfare, military historical writing and popular culture. Throughout the book the connection between ancient and modern is evident yet, as the editor of the Ancient and Moderns series to which this book belongs writes, the series is designed to challenge the assumption of a direct line of continuity between the ancient and the modern, and to provoke and challenge the standard narratives about the legacy of the Greek and Romans. Unfortunately, we do not encounter strong evidence of ancient warfare expressed through classical texts that challenges us to view them in a new way until the last few pages. In the conclusion, B. personally relates the way the Iliad provided solace when dealing with his PTSD caused by the anguish of battlefield trauma in Vietnam. His grief was in fact Achilles’. Furthermore, B. illustrates how recently classical texts like the Iliad and Sophocles’ Ajax and Philoctetes have been employed to help American veterans of the Iraq War discuss issues which remain universal to soldiers both modern and ancient. The use of Homer as therapy for personal trauma follows the recent treatment by Adam Nicholson's The Mighty Dead and traces its lineage down to the war poets of the First World War. The veteran of today might not have had the classical education of his brethren in the trenches, yet he can still relate to the texts of antiquity like Homer and Sophocles, whose universal themes remain relevant and timeless.
