Lendon, \'Soldiers and Ghosts\'

[Virgil]

well, I got so tired of the "all Greeks fought because Homer wrote epics" theme, that i had to take a break at the end of the Greek/Macedonian section. (yawn!) ...

I tend to share your frustration, it didn't get any better in the Roman section. Victor Hanson does the culture of war thing well, Lendon doesn't. He has no intuitive sense of how soldiers operate from a psychological stand point or how leadership is exercised.

Human nature and male psychology hasn't changed over the centuries and the Romans harnessed psychological incentives it better than anyone from an organizational standpoint. Peer pressure, not to be looked upon as a coward and the drive to be noticed for bravery and toughness by both them and your leaders are a powerful incentives still used today.

As an example of many there is Lendon’s commentary on Trajan’s column. His notion, dependent on some contemporary scholar's writings, is that the column’s several instances of auxiliaries in combat versus those of legionary soldiers foraging and building shows the role of the legion as engineers rather than soldiers. To someone without a military background maybe this thesis is understandable, to a soldier it isn’t. The column was overseen if not designed, one can guess fairly confidently, by Romans and probably Romans with a military background. Soldiers will tell you a majority of their time, even in a war zone, is spent not fighting but doing a variety of mundane tasks like unloading, construction, maintenance and dozens of other things. This aspect of military life hasn’t changed much in two thousand years. It's natural to assume that designing a column from one's own perspective would reflect that.

My copy is scribbled with dozens of note, but I'll leave it here as it--my take on it for what it's worth.