Historical Notes

[cherryfunk]

This thread will serve as an archive to store passages that I've copied from the various books I'm reading. I'll post some of these in other threads if they fit, so don't feel that you have to read through these, it's just for me to store interesting passages. Feel free to comment or ask questions if you'd like though.

[cherryfunk]

========= THE SELEUCID EMPIRE =========

The Seleucid armies were the veterans and descendants of Alexander’s forces that had remained, after 323BC, under his general Seleucus Nicator in Asia. In the first generation and again under Antoichus the Third, they had garrisoned the world from Antioch to Bactria, and made the traditions of their Macedonian home magnificent while keeping them basically unaltered. Their officers dyed the original shallow broad-brimmed hat crimson, and embroidered their cloaks and buskins with crimson and gold. The shields were bronze or silver, or decorated with bronze or silver crescents. Writers of that era confirm over and over again this military glow of the Macedonians, gleaming in the pride of life with gilt armor and scarlet coats; ‘glittering in the sun as they marched down in their order, the elephants with their castles, and the men in their purple….’

On the wings of these armies were the cavalry, the mountaineers ‘girt for running’, Cretans, Carians, Cilicians; the archers, the javelin men from Thrace with black tunics; slingers, naked Gauls from Galatia with wild hair and huge shields – and behind them a camp with four times their number of non-combatants inside it, for the ancient armies travelled with most of their possessions about them.

The elephants stood like towers near the front or between the sections of phlanx; Indian for the Seleucids, African (and inferior) for the Ptolemies, their mahmouts dressed them with red housings for battle, and behind their frontlets and crests they carried four men in a turret on their backs.

Arabs, too, were there on camels, with long swords. [Rome on the Euphrates]

Antiochus’ preoccupations lay along the axis of his two capitals – Antioch in the west, where stood Seleucus’ palance and bridge which he completed, and the port of Seleucia; and the other Seleuceia in the east across the Tigris, in a land so wealthy that in the days of Herodotus, ‘for four months of theyear Babylon supports the king’. Here ran the visible stream of the trade of Asia, the heritage which Antiochus had restored through thirty brave and persevering years. [Rome on the Euphrates]

The Hellenistic armies loved and conferred military decorations upon their elephants; when the bad days came and a Roman commissioner was sent to hamstring these great beasts in their stables, the Syrians of Latakia rose up and lynched him out of hand.

Elephants would open battles, ‘putting forth their strength and meeting forhead to forehead’ interlocking their trunks while the pikemen struck from their towers, till one best or the other turned his flank and was gored by his enemy’s tusks. [Rome on the Euphrates]

The heart of the Seleucid warfare was the phalanx at the center, like a hedgehog, or sectioned like a series of hedgehogs, sixteen or sometimes thirty-two deep, Greek or Macedonian in origin, immensely trained, immensely brave, immensely proud of its tradition, and doomed.

….It was the impetus of these eleven ranks pressing towards the front, which was also stiffened by the horizontal spears, that made it impossible for the phlanx to turn once it had started. Polybius makes the point that the phalanx, invincible in a charge upon even ground, was not good for anything else, while the Roman was an all-purpose infantryman, adaptable in small groups or greater divisions. [Rome on the Euphrates]

BATTLE OF MAGNESIA
Sixteen thousand Macedonians, thirty-two deep, divided into ten sections with their elephants between them, were now unsupported by cavalry. They preserved the appearance of being about to charge, yet they did not advance, because they were foot soldiers and heavily armed, and saw that the enemy were mounted. Most of all they feared to relax their close formation, which they had not time to change. The Romans did not come to close quarters, they feared the discipline, the solidity, and the desperation of this veteran corps; but circled around them and assailed them with javelins and arrows, none of which missed their mark in the dense mass. After suffering severely in this way they yielded to necessity and fell back step by step, in perfect order and still formidable to the Romans, who even then did not venture to close with them, but continued to circle round and round them, until the elephants…became excited and unmanageable, and the phalanx broke into disorderly flight. [Rome on the Euphrates]

[cherryfunk]

========= THE PARTHIANS =========

Their army was chiefly ‘an array of horsemen’ – heavy armed cavalry using the horse-shoe that at that time had been invented, or light bowmen recruited from the lesser nobility of small landowners – ‘private armies of the satraps and of the vassal kings,’ and king’s guards largely foreign; sometimes foot soldiers, such as the army of twenty thousand concentrated at Ctesiphon against the Alani in AD134. They were never good at sieges, since they were uniterested in conquest and content to retire into their wildernesses when attacked; yet engines of war were introduced by Roman deserters or captives, and the Macedonian colonists, who had inhereited a good training in the arts of war, garrisoned their own cities. [Rome on the Euphrates]

[cherryfunk]

========= ROME =========

In the second century, through the heyday of the Antonines, the varied army that held the eastern frontier was still disciplined and splendid. Behind a double line of scouts, the mounted Nabataean archers, the wing (ala) of the Isaurians (from Anatolia), the Rhaetian cavalry, the Ituraeans (southwest of Damascus), the mounted archers from Cyrene, the Celtic cavalry in double file, are described by Arrian for his province of Cappadocia. Infantry four deep follow with flags displayed – Italians and Cyrenians, mounted Bosporans and Numidians, and all there is of archers and horsemen before them and on either flank. The cavalry of the legions at the center escorted catapults, legates, prefects, tribunes and centurions with their eagles; the javelin throwers and the marching infantry and allies from Lesser Armenia, the heavy infantry from Trebizond, the spearmen of Colchis, the baggage and a guard of Getae from the steppes of Asia, brought up the rear. [Rome on the Euphrates]

[cherryfunk]

========= RHODES =========

The island of Rhodes, paramount in the Aegean, whose trade in grain came largely from the Black Sea ports. [Rome on the Euphrates]

[2nd cent. BC:]Rhodes at her sea crossing remained the queen of the Aegean, the commercial clearing house, especially for grain, the chief center of banking in the Hellenistic world, the only navy strong enough to face the pirates, and a city which the travelers of that day held to be more beautiful than any other. Her aim was the unity of the Greek world, at least in its economic aspect, and her seacode was tacitly accepted as international maritime law and went on into the ages of Rome. [Rome on the Euphrates]

[cherryfunk]

========= PERGAMUM=========

The kings of Pergamon, though they were half Paphlagonian, had become more Hellenic than the Hellenes, and their presence is still felt in the capital they beautified; the first great city of the Greeks to be built on the slope of a hill. Left as the chief state in Asia Minor, sincerely Greek in feeling and scattering fine gifts, Pergamon seems to have tried to preserve a sort of economic unity in the Hellenistic world. She guided the oriental trade into Greek harbors and spread across the Seleucid dominions a currency that was later continued by Rome.[Rome on the Euphrates]

[cherryfunk]

========= THE BOSPORAN KINGDOM =========

Strabo describes the Greeks of the Crimea rich again at the turn of the Christian era, with a thirty-fold yield of grain round their city of Panticapaeum. It was strategically placed at the entrance to the sea of Azof, and in the course of time was to give birth and baptism to the Russian Vladimir and to the idea of Holy Russia. But meanwhile, pressed by the Sarmatians descending, with harbors and docks for about thirty ships, and villages around it, the harassed city sat under its Cimmerian acropolis, exporting native manufactures and furnishing wine and precarious Greek luxuries to the local kings.

Pressed and tormented throughout the second century, inhabited less and less by Greeks and more and more by Iranians, Scythians and Sarmatians, Panticapaeum and its neighboring cities of the Bosporan Kingdom applied at least for help to Mithradates on the southern coast. [Rome on the Euphrates]

The south Russian steppes had long been producers of corn for the ancient world, and as the Roman armies began to move towards the Black Sea shores, the corn of the Bosporan kingdom became ever more necessary to feed them.

The landowners there with their families and their armed retinues would leave the cities in the springtime in heavy four-wheeled carts or on horseback, and settle in tents on their fields to supervise and tend their flocks and their harvests. In the autumn they returned to their houses in the city; the corn was shipped, and the Bosporan king received an annual subsidy from the governor on the opposite coast of Bithynia. The great Bosporan merchants supplied the ships.

Ovid, too old at the age of fifty to adapt himself to his exile, describes this northern world and its Grecian cities [Tomi], where ‘the guard on the wall and a closed gate kept back the hostile Getae.’

‘Across the new bridge [of ice], above the gliding current, the carts of the barbarians are drawn by Sarmatian oxen. Greater hordes of Sarmate and Getae go and come upon their horses along the roads. Among them thre is not one who does not bear quiver and bow and darts yellow with viper’s gall. Harsh voices, grim countenances, veritable pictures of Mars, neither hair nor beard trimmed by any hand, the knife which every barbarian wears fastened to his side. Without, nothing is secure: the hill itself is defended by meager walls and by its skillful site. When least expected, like birds, the foe swarms upon us and when scarce well seen is already driving off the booty. Often within the walls when the gates are closed, we gather daily missiles in the midst of the streets. Rare then is he who ventures to till the fields, for the wretch must plough with one hand and hold arms in the other. Scarce with the fortress’s aid are we defended, and even within it the barbarous mob mingled with the Greeks inspires fear. For with us dwell without distinction the barbarians, occupying more than half the buildings.’ [Rome on the Euphrates]

[cherryfunk]

========= EGYPT =========

…the treasure of Egypt paid for everything and continued to pay while that rich country was administered like a farm; sums are recorded that ‘add up to over a thousand million sesterces, much of which seems to have come from Egypt.’ They made the Principate possible, for they enriched Augustus sufficiently to let him undertake what the senate could no longer afford. [Rome on the Euphrates]