Ancient World Books just posted a list of new books they have.
10. Sherman, Nancy STOIC WARRIORS The Ancient Philosophy Behind The Military Mind ]Ancient World Books new aquisitions
Ancient World Books new acquisitions
One of the books, "10. Sherman, Nancy
STOIC WARRIORS The Ancient Philosophy Behind The Military Mind", has this in its description:
Quote:During the My Lai massacre, helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson landed between American troops and Vietnamese civilians and ordered his crew, at gunpoint, to rescue women and children who were about to be slaughtered because it was the right thing to do, even though it meant bearing his men's extreme hatred.
I remember watching a very moving interview with him on the BBC's Hard Talk programme (Tim Sebastian had saved him for last before retiring from the programme), and I was wondering, except for the Theban Legion, if there are any known examples of Roman soldiers doing something similar or refusing orders based on moral or conscientious grounds?
There are some examples of Roman soldiers committing atrocities against the orders of their commanders (usually ignoring a command not to storm and sack a city), but the rules or conventions of war, such as they were, were very different, as were attitudes to the defeated. There's some stuff about this in the siege warfare chapter of my Roman Art of War book, but refusal to obey orders is part of the current research project, so if anyone does have any examples of what Tarbicus is looking for I'd appreciate the references too. I can't think of any off-hand.
kate
Quote:There are some examples of Roman soldiers committing atrocities against the orders of their commanders
Thanks Kate, and that makes a lot of sense in a strange kind of way :? I'll take a look at your book for examples of "immoral" acts.
One thing occured to me, and that is it's quite likely, should it have happened, that there would be very little to find on "conscientious" refusal, simply because it might set a bad example to the soldiers expected to follow sanctioned orders to commit atrocities without question, and was never entered into the record, perhaps? The Theban Legion is a different matter because of the scale of the dissent, and was based on religious beliefs and refusal to honour the Emperor.
In the early days, there was a story that a consul left his son to command his army while he went back to Rome to perform the auspices to double check if they were favorable. He specifically told him not to attack the enemy while he was gone, because there was some question on auspices previously taken. Well, the son saw an opportunity, attacked the enemy and was victorious. Nontheless, his father executed him on his return to the army for disobeying his orders. (can't remember the exact story, it was before the punic wars, in the first 5 books of Livy)
I think if you disobeyed an order in the Roman military, you pretty much had to desert to some barbarian land if you wanted to continue living. However, there are some examples of large numbers of soldiers putting their foot down, forcing their commaders to aquiesce. In every case I remember, it was for some selfish reason, like not being paid on time.
Quote:his father executed him on his return to the army for disobeying his orders.
A bit harsh. Couldn't he have grounded him or something?
At the battle of Vercelae, Cnaeus Petreius, the Primus Pilus, had had enough of the dithering of his tribune whether to attack the Germans or not and gutted him. He then led the men to victory, and as a result was commended for his actions and awarded military honours. I suppose technically the tribune was dead so couldn't order the men
not to attack :wink:
You have to remember that there was a different mindset and morales to those we have today.Things that today we would'nt condone nor commit were common place.Life was cheap.I would imagine that the discipline so famed of the roman Army was like a rod of Iron.,given the punishments meted out for minor infringements i should think that to even contemplate gainsaying an order would be totally alien to the average roman legionaire.Of course there are cases of so called "atrocities" but by whose yardstick are these being measured by?Ours or the Romans?
Just to keep the perspective,howabout an nice afternoon at the Colisseum,and watch a few people slaughter each other and animals for a bit of a giggle?Thats Entertianment to a Roman.
Quote:At the battle of Vercelae, Cnaeus Petreius, the Primus Pilus, had had enough of the dithering of his tribune whether to attack the Germans or not and gutted him. He then led the men to victory, and as a result was commended for his actions and awarded military honours.
Source?
Quote:Tarbicus:r5lwsce8 Wrote:At the battle of Vercelae, Cnaeus Petreius, the Primus Pilus, had had enough of the dithering of his tribune whether to attack the Germans or not and gutted him. He then led the men to victory, and as a result was commended for his actions and awarded military honours.
Source?
Ross Cowan - Military Illustrated - April 2005 - 'Roman Headhunters'.
I dare say it's taken from
gutenberg.org, but I'm not the one to ask about Petreius leading the legion to victory:
Theodor Mommsen - History of Rome - Ch. 'The Revolution', page 71.
addendum: And by "taken from gutenberg.org", I actually meant the book not the website
On the front of soldiers refusing orders, it might by worth asking the currently unanswerable question of where much of the information on particular campaigns and generals actually originated from.
Caesar's commentaries, for instance, give us a first hand account of the Gallic and Civil wars of the mid first century BC. However, comparison with information contained in letters sent by Cicero to various friends shows that Caesar failed to mention some things which it presumably did not suit him to mention and is quite liberal with his use of facts in places. If Caesar's commentaries are either his annual reports back to the senate or his campaign dairies (or both at once) then it is reasonable to assume that other generals and governors would have written similar accounts of their campaigns, and might have deleted or falsified embarrassing information to preserve or build up their reputations. It would not do a general's reputation much good to let it be known that his soldiers had come close to mutiny or had successfully refused his direct orders. If these campaign dairies, cover-ups and all, were used as source material by Rome's own historians, how many mutinies which might actually have happened slipped past the historians' gaze and never found their way into the history books?
The mutinies we know about and the orders known to have been refused may be simply the tip of a now invisible iceberg, thanks to general's censoring of sensitive information. It may be worth remembering that Caesar mentions a lot of centuriones (who would not be in a position to blacken his name much back in Rome) but as far as I remember does not mention any of his tribunes and only a few of the legati, such as Labienus and Marcus Cicero's brother Quintus, the latter probably because Cicero could have been a useful ally. How likely is it that Caesar (and therefore any other general) was able to exert a good deal of control over the outwards post of his officers, which might contradict things he was saying himself?
How likely is it therefore that we can ever build up a reliable picture of what really happened during many campaigns, particularly when they were often being written about when there was no longer any living memory of actual events, such as much of the material Livy cites, and long dead generals' own accounts may have been the best source material available?
Crispvs
Crispus is right that we're never going to create a totally reliable picture of what happened on campaign - but isn't that half the fun of Ancient History? Making up looney theories (based on critical appraisal of all the available evidence of course) is what it's all about! :lol:
The reference for Gnaeus Petreius, btw, is Pliny Natural History 22.6. He killed his tribune not because the guy was dithering about attacking the Germans, but in order to extricate the legion from an impossible position in which it was about to get cut off from retreat and probably wiped out. Petreius received the Grass Crown for saving an entire legion, the lowest ranking soldier to receive one up til the time of writing - mid 1st century AD.
What do we mean by "disobediance"?
As far as I know from the Bronze age armies there was punishment for disobedience depending on the criticality of the offence.
From the dawn of time a rufusal to your superior´s order gets you into trouble.
Kind regards
Stefanos
Well the thread started with Tarbicus looking for examples of Roman soldiers disobeying orders on moral / conscientious grounds. We've got Roman soldiers disobeying orders for all kinds of other reasons, but nothing else so far that directly answers Tarbicus' query.
Quote:What do we mean by "disobediance"?
Here's a variant on an example:
A particularly cruel tribune orders a legionary to cut the throats of a group of villagers in Germany for no reason. The legionary refuses because they have done nothing wrong and feels compelled to disobey
Or:
A particularly cruel tribune orders a legionary to cut the throats of a group of villagers in Germany for no reason. The legionary refuses because they have done nothing wrong AND the legate has ordered that there will be no uneccesary killings in order to keep the peace.
Or:
His comrades start to do it, but a legionary tries to intervene for the above reasons.
Feel free to swap the legionary for a centurion or optio.
I know attitudes were different in those days, but refer to Hugh Thompson's actions at the My Lai massacre I posted at the start of the thread. This is pure conjecture, and I was only really asking if anyone knows of any literary evidence for such a thing, which I highly doubt somehow.
One possible example is the soldiers who refused to execute Sejanus' daughter because she was a virgin, which was religiously taboo (and therefore can be classed as immoral at the time). However, they raped her first, and then killed her, which makes the whole thing very grey, although within the taboos of the society at the time that may have been acceptable?
That only applies if the soldiers refused, but doesn't if they were ordered by their officer or senate to rape her first in the fore-knowledge that they wouldn't be able to execute her whilst a virgin. Note - this is a state-sanctioned execution. Question is, did the soldiers refuse to kill the poor girl on moral grounds? The irony to the modern observer is that they obviously did not believe rape was an immoral act if that was the case.
It's a bit of a minefield because an act of morality to the Romans could well be an act of barbarism now, and probably needs to be taken into the context of cultural taboos at the time.
I know it's perhaps an obvious one, but wouldn't the objections of the legions at Brundisium in 40 BC come into this? They didn't want to fight, at least ostensibly, because they didn't believe that it was right to do so. That said, I'm not sure a direct order was disobeyed in the process - it was more that they indicated their reluctance to do so.
The problem, I suppose, is that there's not really a higher court to appeal to if you're a Roman soldier. A commander holds imperium and anything you do under his command can be judged by him. You couldn't appeal to a civil court against an unfair order, nor could you appeal, say, to an independent military tribunal. You're pretty much stuffed, aren't you? Unless you can plead overwhelming military reasons for not following an order, then you're in trouble.
You might, I suppose, disobey a military tribune on conscientious grounds and appeal to the commander, but I don't know any examples of this (the reluctance of the troops sent to execute the orator Antonius during the 80s BC perhaps [the military tribune commanding them had to go in and do it after Antonius beguiled the troops with his oratory], but this was only delay, and not, again, a refusal to act) - you'd be very brave to try!
If anyone can think of any examples, however tenuous (e.g. the above), I'd love to hear them.
blue skies
Tom