\'soft\' eastern soldiers

[Sean Manning]

It doesn't make much sense to say that the Macedonians were western in 300 BCE and eastern in 200 BCE...

I think it makes every bit of sense: the Iranians were just as eastern to the Greeks, as the Greeks were to the Romans. History was then made from the west, in two consecutive waves, with each conquest movement starting from the Western periphery of the civilized world, until the center of the ancient world had moved from the Euphrates and Nile over the Aegean to the Tiber, the Far West. It is perfectly legitimate to analyse this change of power balances in east-west terms (as Herodot himself already does in his introduction), because world power flowed along these geopolitical lines with Western powers being the main driving forces in this period.

Macedonia is certainly geographically east of Italy. But Sicily, Carthage, and Massilia were west, and the Italian Greeks were south. Somehow, being west of Italy didn't save them from Roman armies. And of course, the eastern Mediterranean became part of Roman power! After Augustus I think you would have a hard time showing in which regions of the Roman empire Roman power lay (do you mean cultural power? Scholarship? Capital? Technology? Population? War?) The eastern half of the empire was always richer and more learned than the western, it produced both of the religions which were central to the death of the ancient world and the birth of the medieval, and it lasted twice as long.

The other problem that I see is that who doesn't fit into either group is basically arbitrary. The Italian Celts, Gauls, Iberians, Numidians, and Carthaginians don't seem to fit in to your story. Are you saying that only literate societies with towns can be either eastern or western? But that leaves the problem of Carthage and the western Greeks.

Could you explain how anyone could have world power before the 16th or 17th centuries? Rome had no power east of Mesopotamia or south of the Sahara, and China and whichever Indian power was strongest in a given century had no power west of Bactria. A few merchants, muleteers, and sailors could reach from the edge of one empire to the edge of another but their only power was to trade (and occasionally raid or pirate).