"Between Miltiades and Moltke": a history of the earliest handbooks on ancient Greek warfare

What is it about?

The authors of the first serious scholarly works on Greek warfare were not free to write their surveys as they wished. In the nineteenth-century German-speaking world, the supreme authority on all military history rested with the Great General Staff, the intellectual nerve centre of the Prussian army. Officers rejected the ability of historians to understand warfare and imposed their pragmatic perspective on any attempt to study past wars. How did classicists and historians respond to this challenge? This book explores how the scope and method of the first handbooks on Greek warfare were shaped by their environment; it questions the ancient wisdom that practical expertise is the best guide to writing military history.

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Photo by Savannah Wakefield on Unsplash

Photo by Savannah Wakefield on Unsplash

Why is it important?

This study demonstrates just how much our own environment can shape our approach to history. Even our understanding of something as remote in time as ancient Greek warfare can be determined by modern assumptions, institutions, and power structures - as they were in Imperial Germany. Military history was always a misfit in the modern university, and its ongoing struggle to define what it is and who has the authority to write it has transformed the way we see the ancient Greeks. "I will require my students to buy it and read it. I want to require every military historian to read it, and all the historians and classicists of ancient Greece should read your Introduction chapter." - Lee L. Brice