Ancient Warfare III.2, April/May 2009

Theme: Alexander's funeral games - the wars of the Successors

The Source: Konstantin Nossov, 'Philon of Byzantium'
According to the latest notions, Philon of Byzantium was a military engineer in the army of Ptolemy III Euergetes, who in the campaigns of 246–241 BC (the Third Syrian war) conquered Phoenicia and a great part of Syria from the Seleucids and succeeded in seizing Babylon. In the same decade, Philon wrote his work Poliorketika.

Theme: Duncan B.Campbell, 'Outrageous fortune'.

Alone amongst all of Alexander's Successors, Demetrius, the son of Antigonus, lived to see a stellar career plumb the depths of misfortune. Plutarch astutely observed that, "in none of the kings did tyche (fortune) take such sudden twists and turns, and never in the deeds of others did she so appear to wane and wax, shrink and shine, weaken and become all powerful."

Theme: Joseph Pietrykowski, 'In the school of Alexander'. Illustrated by Igor Dzis
Armed with the lessons they learned as officers in the conqueror's army, Alexander's Successors turned the deadly Macedonian phalanx against each other in a grim civil war that plunged into chaos the whole of the eastern Mediterranean and beyond. Although the Successors deployed similar forces and employed much the same tactics, they did so under markedly different circumstances...

Theme: Michael Park, 'The fight for Asia'. Illustrated by Johnny Shumate.
The dead lay everywhere; the ground onto which they had been driven was a charnel house littered with their corpses. Shattered sarissae, viscera and body parts shared the killing ground with the whole weapons and armour that had been abandoned in the final rout. The military prospects were not propitious: the phalanx infantry and, more importantly, its Macedonians were shattered. Any resumption of hostilities on the morrow would prove difficult, if not impossible.

Theme: Christian Koepfer, 'The Sarissa'. Illustrated by Andrew Brozyna
South east of the northern Greek village Vergina, which is identified as ancient Aigiai, the royal capital of the Macedonian Kingdom, a large tumulus with a diameter of about 110 m and standing about 12 m height, was excavated between 1976 and 1980. The most spectacular find in this tumulus was a large tomb of a high status couple. Besides all kinds of goods, such as furniture and large numbers of silver and bronze vessels, it also contained a number of weapons.

Features

Special: Svenja Grosser, 'For training and entertainment'.
"A bored soldier is a dangerous soldier", the Romans were already aware of the truth behind this age-old phrase, so commanders made sure that their soldiers were always occupied even in peaceful times. Apart from their immediate military tasks, soldiers were kept busy with the construction and maintenance of roads and public buildings. They were also provided with entertainment of a kind with which soldiers from the Romanized areas of the empire would be very familiar.

The Warrior: Raffaele D'Amato, 'From Herculaneum's ashes'. Illustrated by Graham Sumner.
In 1982, the body of a miles classiarius, i.e. a mariner of the Imperial Fleet, was found intact on the beach of Herculaneum, a victim of the Vesuvius eruption. For the first time, the final results of this extraordinary find are presented.

Be a general: Murray Dahm, 'Vegetius' teachings'. Illustrated by Andrew Brozyna.
In the last 'Be a General' we took an extended look at the context, history, reception and possible sources of Vegetius' Epitoma Rei Militaris, the only Latin 'Art of War' to survive from antiquity. In this instalment we'll take a close look at the contentsof Vegetius' treatise and see what we can make of it.