The Tactics of Aelian Read online

  First published in Great Britain in 2012 by

  PEN & SWORD MILITARY

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  Copyright © Christopher Matthew 2012

  ISBN 978 1 84884 900 6

  eISBN 978 1 78337 861 6

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  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  List of Plates

  Foreword

  Acknowledgments

  Abbreviations

  Preface

  The Tactics of Aelian

  Notes

  Glossary of Key Terms

  Bibliography

  Plates

  List of Illustrations

  1. Examples of Chapter 6 from various editions of Aelian’s Tactics

  2. The position of the phalangarchs across the front of a phalanx

  3. The position of the merarchs across the front of a phalanx

  4. The position of the lochargoi across the front of a tetrarchia

  5. The ‘fronts and flanks’ when the army is facing towards an enemy

  6. The ‘fronts and flanks’ when a formation has turned to the left or right

  7. The ‘fronts and flanks’ when the army is facing away from an enemy

  List of Plates

  1. The various forms of the file.

  2. Eight joined files.

  3. One syntagma (256 men in sixteen files with five supernumeraries).

  4. The different orders of the phalanx.

  5. One syntagma deployed for battle showing the projection of the pikes ahead of the formation.

  6. One pentacontarchia of slingers (sixty-four men in eight files).

  7. Cavalry arranged in a rhombus by ranks and files.

  8. A wedge of cavalry.

  9. Variations of the cavalry square.

  10. Cavalry arranged in a rhombus with files but no ranks.

  11. Changing the soldier’s facing.

  12. The Macedonian countermarch.

  13. The Lacedaemonian countermarch.

  14. The Choral/Cretan/Persian countermarch.

  15. Doubling the number of files.

  16. Entaxis.

  17. Hypotaxis.

  18. Wheeling to the left.

  19. The koelembolus formation.

  20. One syntagma ‘deducted’ to the right.

  21. One syntagma arranged as an antistomos formation.

  22. One syntagma arranged as an amphistomos formation.

  23. The antistomos diphalangarchia formation.

  24. Two syntagmae arranged in a peristomos diphalangarchia formation.

  25. Two tetrarchia marching in a homoiostomos formation.

  26. Two syntagmae marching in a heterostomos formation.

  27. The cavalry rhombus and the half-moon infantry formation.

  28. The cavalry rhombus and the epicampios emprosthia infantry formation.

  29. The kyrtē infantry formation.

  30. The square cavalry formation and the infantry wedge.

  31. The plaision infantry formation.

  32. The peplegmenē or ‘saw tooth’ infantry formation.

  Foreword

  It is a great pleasure to write the foreword to this new translation of Aelian’s treatise, On the Military Arrangements of the Greeks, with commentary by Christopher Matthew. In a world where success in warfare was crucial to the long-term prosperity of any ancient city or people, it is not surprising that specialist military manuals were written on a wide range of topics. Only a fraction of this literature has survived, in the arbitrary way that is common to most ancient writings. For instance, we know that the famous Roman senator Frontinus, who wrote on the water supply of Rome during the Flavian period, also composed two military works: a book on tactics, and a collection of ruses and military anecdotes like the strategemata of Polyaenus. The former has not survived, yet the latter has. What sources we have – from writers like Xenophon (4th century BC), Aeneas Tacticus (4th century BC), Athenaeus Mechanicus (1st century BC), Frontinus and Polyaenus (2nd century AD) – offer a wealth of information on diverse topics, from naval engagements and training warhorses to fooling an enemy, surviving siege warfare, and constructing siege engines. Some of this information is plain wacky, but a lot of it is plausible and intriguing, providing valuable insights into the practical logistics of warfare, as well as human ingenuity – and cruelty.

  In addition to the authors listed above, there are three other esoteric military texts that have a close affinity to each other: Asclepiodotus’ Techne Tactica (1st century BC), Arrian’s work of the same name (ca. AD 136), and Aelian’s text (Aelianus Tacticus, to distinguish him from the Claudius Aelianus of the late 2nd-early 3rd century AD). Aelian’s work on the arrangements for military deployment made by Alexander the Great and the Diadochoi is the longest and perhaps the most important. (On the dates and form of these manuals, see A.M. Devine, ‘Arrian’s “Tactica”’, ANRW II 34.1 (1993), 312–337, at 315–6, with n. 13.) However, of the three, only Arrian appears to have any personal and professional military experience. Asclepiodotus and Aelian were military theorists rather than generals. In fact, in his Proemium, Aelian openly admits that he has no experience of warfare himself, but instead writes as an academic or a philosopher. As Matthew notes in his Preface, Aelian may have used Asclepiodotus’ work, but all three treatises are derivative, probably depending directly, or via an intermediary, on a Hellenistic writer called Poseidonius of Rhodes, whose work is also lost (cf. Aelian 1.2; Arrian, Tact. 1.1; see also Devine, op. cit., 333, with nn. 30, 31).

  Aelian’s work is dense, technical and esoteric. Even though he claims he is writing a stylish and polished essay (Praef. 6), it is clear that his text is aimed at the military specialist. At the same time, despite his claims about the exhaustive research he has undertaken, the spirit of the work – given its theoretical genre – is both artificial and idealized, rather than necessarily a reflection of the campaigns that Alexander and his marshals actually fought. It might appear, then, that the value of such a treatise is limited, but that would be a mistake. Apart from the treatise’s intrinsic appeal to the modern student of military history and to the wargamer, Aelian’s Tactics will be of interest to those engaged in the growing field of experimental archaeology, in which the editor himself has considerable expertise.

  This book is an important contribution to the cultural heritage of the Hellenistic period. It r
edeems the work of an ancient author (Aelian), which was practically unknown. Matthew operates with meticulous efficiency, providing the Greek text alongside the English translation, with an exhaustive commentary and illuminating images and diagrams. In particular, the book explains the operation of the Macedonian phalanx under Philip and Alexander, a force that conquered much of the known world.

  Brian Bosworth, Macquarie University

  Elizabeth Baynham, University of Newcastle, Australia

  Acknowledgments

  This work would not have been possible without the contributions of a number of individuals. Firstly, I would like to thank my wife, Kate, for the assistance she gave me in reading over some of the drafts as this work was being put together and for the inexhaustable amount of patience that she demonstrated while this project was being undertaken. Secondly, I would like to express my gratitude to the officers of the National Library of Australia in Canberra for their assistance with, and granting of access to, their copy of Robertello’s 1552 edition of Aelian’s Tactics from their rare book collection – without which this new edition of the work would not have been able to have been put together. I would also like to thank Dr. Ian Plant, Dr. Greg Fox and Professor Alanna Nobbs of Macquarie University for the help that they have given me with some of the more obscure passages that are found in some of the earlier editions of Aelian’s work. Additionally I would like to thank Dr. Elizabeth Baynham (University of Newcastle), Professor Brian Bosworth (Macquarie University), Professor Richard Gabriel (Royal Military College of Canada), and Dr. Michael Schmitz (University of New England) for reviewing drafts of the work and for their honest and constructive feedback. Finally I would like to thank all of the other friends, family and colleagues who have shown their own levels of support and/or interest in this project and who helped bring this work to life.

  CM

  2011

  Abbreviations

  Arc 1613: Aelian, Tactica, translation by S. Arcerius (Leyden: Lewis Elzevir, 1613)

  K&R 1855: Aelian, Tactics, edition by H. Köchly and W. Rüstow (Leipzig: Engelmann, 1855)

  Rob 1552: Aelian, Περί Στρατηγικών Τάξεων Ελληνικών, edition by F. Robertello (Venice: Andream and Iacobum Spinellos, 1552)

  Preface

  There are two ancient authors by the name of Aelian whose works have survived to the present day. One by the name of Claudius Aelianus, living in the second and third centuries AD (c. AD 175–235), was the author of a treatise on animals (the De Natura animalium or Περὶ Ζῴων Ἰδιότητος as it was originally called) and a miscellany of anecdotes, maxims, biographical comments and other assorted points of interest (the Varia Historia or Ποικίλη Ἱστορία). The other writer, living about a century earlier, was the author of this treatise on tactics (On the Military arrangements of the Greeks or Περί Στρατηγικών Τάξεων Ελληνικών). For centuries, the two authors have often been confused with each other and their works were regularly combined into single editions.1 The tactical writer has subsequently been dubbed Aelianus Tacticus to distinguish him from the later author.

  Of Aelianus Tacticus, very little is known other than what he tells us within the pages of his own work. The work is dedicated to the Roman emperor Hadrian (AD 117–138), although Aelian confesses in his introduction that he had originally begun composing the work for the previous emperor Trajan (AD 98–117). Despite another confession that he was somewhat ignorant of Roman military matters, Aelian spent time in Formiae undertaking some task for Trajan. It was here that he met Sextus Julius Frontinus, a distinguished Roman aristocrat and author of both a treatise on tactics (unfortunately no longer extant) and a volume of military anecdotes called the Strategemata. This contact with Frontinus aroused an interest in military matters in Aelian.

  Aelian then seems to have immersed himself in the study of tactical manuals and other military writings. In the first chapter of his treatise, he details an exhaustive list of the texts that he has perused in the course of researching his own work (many of which have sadly failed to survive the passing of the centuries). The final result of Aelian’s research was a fifty-three-book analysis of the tactical systems used by Alexander the Great and the Successors half a millennium earlier, with the various military aspects arranged into a well thought out and structured order. Aelian may have drawn heavily upon an earlier work on the same theme written by Asclepiodotus (which still survives), as Asclepiodotus’ name is conspicuously absent from the list of sources that Aelian provides, and the two works share many similarities (chapters in this edition of Aelian’s Tactics are cross-referenced to the corresponding sections of Asclepiodotus’s Tactica). It is also possible that Asclepiodotus had simply released a work on tactics written by Poseidonius, of whom he was a pupil and whom Aelian lists as a source. The question of the true authorship of Asclepiodotus work, and therefore Aelian’s potential use of it as a source, will probably never be satisfactorily addressed.

  Despite the distance from his own time to his subject matter, Aelian asserts that ‘the reader shall find more advantages in this little book than in all their writings [i.e. the military texts that had come before] due to the order and method I have followed’, and he claims to have compiled a work far superior to that of any produced by the other learned scholars that had preceded him. Additionally, Aelian illustrated his work with diagrams and images to visually convey some of the more complex terms that he discussed (a technique also employed by Asclepiodotus), which merely adds to the suspicion that Aelian had borrowed heavily from this earlier work). Thus, in terms of the detail provided by Aelian on the tactical manoeuvres and arrangements of Hellenistic armies, his claim that he produced a superior work to any that had come before it appears to be no idle boast; and this is the great value of his work.

  We have no real indication of how well Aelian’s work was received when it was first released. However, the fact that it survived to be drawn upon by later writers suggests that is was held in a reasonably high level of regard. Not long after its release, Flavius Arrianus (Arrian) drew in part on Aelian’s work for the first thirty-three books of his own examination of tactics – the Τέχνη Τακτική or Tactical Handbook (the chapters in this volume are also cross-referenced with the corresponding chapters from Arrian). It has even been theorized that Aelian was actually the author of the Τέχνη Τακτική, a revised version of his own work, and that Arrian later released it himself, although this hypothesis is somewhat contentious.2

  Regardless of the subsequent release of Arrian’s Handbook, the Byzantine emperor Leo IV, otherwise known as ‘the Wise’ (AD 866–912), incorporated much of Aelian’s text, rather than Arrian’s, into his own version of the Τέχνη Τακτική in the late ninth century. The oldest surviving manuscript of Aelian’s Tactics is part of a collection of Classical, Hellenistic and Byzantine military treatises known as the codex Laurentianus graecus 55.4, now housed in the Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana in Florence. This collection of 405 folios dates to the reign of the Byzantine emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus, who reigned immediately after Leo IV (AD 912–959). Three eleventh century manuscripts (the codex Parisinus graecus 2442, now in the Bibliothèque Nationale in Paris, the Codex Vaticanus graecus 1164, now in the Vatican, and the Codex Neapolitanus III-C-26 (284)) all contain the Tactica, either wholly or partially, within a collection of other military texts, and seem to derive from a now lost version of the text known as the Mazoneus.

  Around 1330, Andreas Telountas copied a number of military texts into the collection now called Codex Venetus Marcianus graecus 516 for Cardinal Bessarion, later the Latin patriarch of Constantinople (1395–1472). The text of Aelian’s work in this manuscript derives from another lost version, designated the Bourguetianus. Both the Bourguetianus and the earlier Mazoneus manuscripts represent a departure from the Codex Laurentianus graecus 55.4 and contain various interpolations and differences between them. An Arabic version of Aelian was published
around 1350. Aelian’s treatise was first translated into Latin by Theodoras of Thessalonica, and was published in Rome in 1487 by Eucharius Silber. Aelian’s Tactics was next incorporated into a two-volume set, which also contained the works of Frontinus and Vegetius, called the Scriptores rei Militaris released by Franciscus Plato de Bendictis in Bologna in 1495 and 1496.

  However, the most popular period for Aelian’s work was during the 16th and 17th centuries. The large pike and musket armies that raged across Europe during this time were heavily modelled on the Macedonian phalanx of two millennia earlier, and interest in Hellenistic military manuals saw something of a resurgence. In 1524, a new edition of Aelian in Latin, by Theodore Gaza, was released in Cologne. In the mid-sixteenth century, a Greek copy of Aelian’s Tactics was combined with the Extracts of Leo IV and the Pneumatica and De Automatis of Heron of Alexandria in a collection now known as the Codex Burney 108, housed in the British Library. A similar collection, the Codex Londinensis add. 15242, was released in 1540. In 1552, M. Lelio Carani released an edition of the Tactics in Italian, titled Eliano De’ Nomi et de gli Ordini Militari, through Appresso I. Torrentino Impressor Ducale in Florence. In the same year, Francesco Robertello released one of the first ‘modern’ and singular editions of the work in Greek (albeit medieval Greek), through Andream & Iacobum Spinellos in Venice, drawing on three earlier manuscripts, predominantly the Codex Venetus Marcianus graecus 516. Robertello’s edition was emphatically referred to as the editio princeps, or ‘the best edition’, despite the fact that Robertello did not break the Tactics into its separate chapters but presented Aelian’s work as a single, constant, monologue.3 Despite this appellation, and perhaps because of the lack of segregation within Robertello’s edition, Sixtus Arcerius later released what then became known as ‘the best edition’, a parallel text in both Greek and Latin, through Lewis Elzevir in Leiden in 1613.4

  The year 1616 saw the release, through Eliot’s Court Press in London, of an English translation of Aelian’s work, heavily annotated with commentaries by Captain John Bingham. This edition, written from Bingham’s garrison at Woudrichem in Holland, was dedicated, much like the work of Aelian before him, to the reigning monarch of the time (in Bingham’s case, Charles I) as a manual on how to conduct his armies. A revised edition of Bingham’s translation was released in London in 1631 by Ralph Mab.