Our Ancient Wars: Re-thinking War through the Classics ed. by Victor Caston and Silke-Maria Weineck, and: Women and War in Antiquity ed. by Jacqueline Fabre-Serris and Alison Keith

Abstract

Reviewed by: Our Ancient Wars: Re-thinking War through the Classics ed. by Victor Caston and Silke-Maria Weineck, and: Women and War in Antiquity ed. by Jacqueline Fabre-Serris and Alison Keith Michael J. Taylor Victor Caston and Silke-Maria Weineck, eds. Our Ancient Wars: Re-thinking War through the Classics. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2016. 296pp. Cloth, $90.00. Jacqueline Fabre-Serris and Alison Keith, eds. Women and War in Antiquity. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015. ix + 341 pp. 13black-and-white figs. Cloth, $55.00. Approaching modern warfare from the perspective of ancient conflict has a very old pedigree: Alexander the Great on campaign slept with a copy of the Iliad—his ancient war—under his pillow (Plut. Alex. 8.2). But ancient wars do not always prove as relevant as might be hoped. Young George Washington read Julius Caesar and Quintus Curtius, which did little to prepare him for the grim reality of backwoods combat in the French and Indian War. One finds essays written by classicists during the early years of World War II comparing elephants to tanks, Alexander the Great’s conquest of Persia to Hitler’s blitzkrieg, or US Army bayonet training to Roman fencing, but all in retrospect seem silly and inaccurate once the realities of industrial, mechanized, and ultimately atomic warfare became manifest. The pompous irrelevance of the Classics is nicely captured in cinema by the incompetent battalion commander in Terrence Malick’s World War II film The Thin Red Line (1998), who brags to a subordinate officer that he has read the Iliad at West Point in the original Greek—ēōs rhododactylos!—before ordering a suicidal assault on a fortified position at Guadalcanal. The volume Our Ancient Wars tries to link ancient and modern wars in a more profound way, although not necessarily with more success. Produced out of a 2010 conference of the same name, it brings together ancient historians, literary experts, and philosophers to discuss ancient wars in light of the modern, and to analyze modern conflict from ancient perspectives. The contemporary wars of the conference were the US adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan. Since then the civil war in Syria has spawned the rise of the Islamic State, which smashes ancient artefacts in spasms of medieval iconoclasm, yet also funds itself through the sale of smuggled antiquities. In the recent battle in the ancient oasis city of Palmyra, ISIS did terrible damage before the site was retaken by the Syrian Army, although perhaps no worse than the emperor Aurelian, who sacked the city in 273 c.e. Still, even for “our ancient wars” circa 2010, the obvious parallels to wars ancient and contemporary are oddly ignored. An interesting essay could be written on Xenophon’s Anabasis, with the critical Battle of Cunaxa fought not far from modern Baghdad and the Greek mercenaries along the course of the Tigris River in perhaps the most perilous redeployment out of Iraq in history. Alexander the Great fought the decisive battle of Gaugamela in Northern Iraq, and subsequently engaged in protracted asymmetric warfare in Sogdiana, now modern day Afghanistan. And for a historical parallel with the 2003–2010 Iraq War, one thinks immediately of Trajan’s invasion of Mesopotamia from 113–117 c.e.: a poorly conceived plan that was initially a smashing success, only to spiral into an uncontained insurgency, prompting a contentious withdrawal under his more cautious successor. [End Page 378] The 20th century saw great overlap between classicists and the cataclysmic wars of the era. Scholars served on the front lines, intrigued as secret agents (supposedly Syme), sheltered from air raids, and endured prison camps. Some did not survive, to the impoverishment of the field, from the young French archaeologist Adolphe Reinach, who published the cavalry frieze on the Pydna monument in 1910 only to die four years later in the opening days of World War I, to Friedrich Münzer, the dean of Republican prosopography, who perished in a Nazi concentration camp in 1942. Fewer classicists today have practical experience in conflict zones. As far as I can tell, Paul Woodruff is the...