Three Salish Sea ferries in one shoot! The photo is from one, another from Vancouver is coming behind, and a third is hidden behind the grey steel upright.
In my article for the Journal of Ancient Civilizations, I tried to be as clear and concise about Greek soldiers in the Achaemenid empire as I could. In the 20th century scholars often used the subjective and partisan term ‘mercenary‘ and focused specifically on Greek soldiers and Greek hoplites. I think its better to think about them differently.
Beginning with Ctesias, Greek writers often mention that thousands of Greeks fought for Achaemenid kings and satraps in exchange for pay (in earlier periods Greeks fought for the king as allies or subjects). Modern researchers have written half a dozen books about these so-called “mercenaries” but have not always considered the Egyptian and Near Eastern context. Since the Old Kingdom, Egyptian armies had contained large contingents of Nubians, Libyans, and other people from the edges of the Egyptian world. The Neo-Assyrians and Neo-Babylonians deported all kinds of people to the cores of their empires, gave them land to work, and extracted civil or military service from them. By the Achaemenid period Babylonians often provided a substitute or paid a fee rather than serve themselves. Hiring Greeks for coins was just another way of obtaining foreign soldiers.
“The Armies of the Teispids and Achaemenids: The Armies of an Ancient World Empire,” Journal of Ancient Civilizations Vol. 27 Nr. 2 (2022) p. 156 hosted here
On these plains above Jena in 1806, the Prussian army was having a really bad day. Photo by Sean Manning, October 2016
In my first book, I talked about how ‘mercenary’ is more a moral and political term than a neutral category. People use different names like allies, volunteers, professionals, Private Military Companies, and mercenaries depending on their moral and political stance on those soldiers (in ancient Greece or Sir Charles Oman’s England, this was deeply tied up in aristocratic suspicion of anyone who had to work for a living). A year or two ago, military historian Alex Burns made a similar point about Hessian soldiers in the American Revolutionary War.
Garrett G. Fagan died of pancreatic cancer in March 2017. His collaborator Matthew Trundle has also died of cancer. From the Canadian Classical Bulletin: Matthew Trundle (12 October 1965–12 July 2019) obtained his PhD from the Department of History, McMaster University in 1996. He then taught at Glendon College in Toronto before being appointed as... Continue reading: Dis Manibus: Matthew Trundle (12 July 2019)
Dr. Jerry E. Pournelle died a few days ago. As someone who only knew him through his work, its hard for me to express what a brilliant, multitalented, frustrating individual he was. The summary of his career on Wikipedia gives some idea: born poor in Louisiana, conscripted into the US Army and sent to Korea as an artillery officer, he made his way through university by keeping a pot constantly simmering in his one-room apartment and got a doctorate in Political Science. Having just gotten started, he moved to Southern California and filled his life with political advocacy, academic work on the strategy of technology and operations research, hobbyist and professional wargaming, science-fiction fandom and the early SCA, fiction writing, a technology column for the early home computer movement in the 1980s and 1990s, and eventually a blog (not to mention marrying and having two children, one a multi-talented academic and another who prefers a quiet life). Like some other Catholic intellectuals in rich English-speaking countries, he was a contrarian by nature and loved a good rant. Throughout his life he was fearless in expressing his political opinions and attacking his political opponents, but since he had very different convictions than I do, particularly later in his life, I will say no more about that here. He did his best to save the world from communism and his country from its most threatening neighbours, and his writings were an important influence on my thought in my teens and early twenties.
A tunnel into darkness under Schloss Neuhaus in Südtirol. Any similarity to the tunnel under the Playmobil pirate island is totally coincidental; I can’t comment on whether there were any giant centipedes, gnolls, or 10′ deep pits inside, although for enough money I might sell a badly-drawn map and some cryptic warnings. Photo by Sean Manning, April 2015.
A few weeks ago, Martin Rundkvist published a light-hearted post on how archaeology spoiled his ability to enjoy dungeon fantasy (the kind of fantasy inspired by D&D, where humans and humans-with-funny-ears venture into underground compounds full of monsters and loot). I think I underwent a similar experience, although it started earlier and the details varied (elementary-school-me worked his way though a library of terrible TSR and Star Trek novels, but teenaged-me never learned the cloak trick). So I have a different perspective on some things than he does. Martin points out that the idea of a handful of heroes assaulting a fortress full of fighters is absurd. But stories about professional dungeon-crawlers and monster-slayers tend to be much more like the Iliad or Beowulf, where a hero can cut through entire armies (with nameless buddies to finish off the wounded) or slay a monster who has ripped up a hall full of warriors, than like our world, where “not even Hercules can fight two.” And everyone knows that dungeons are shaped like that because it is easy to draw on graph paper and copy onto your battle mat, not because it is ‘realistic.’ So this week, I would like to give my historian’s perspective on some of the issues which he looked at from his archaeological perspective.
