14 The Ideal of the Roman General in Byzantium: The Reception of Onasander’s Strategikos in Byzantine Military Literature

What is it about?

Byzantium was heir to a tradition of Greco-Roman military literature stretching back to the fourth century BC, a legacy manifest in both the collection, editing and adaptation of surviving texts from classical antiquity and the composition of new military treatises. This broad genre always exhibited diversity of content, style, language and approach reflective of different categories of author and audience. Among Byzantine readers, writers and editor-copyists, one of the most popular, influential and fashionable ancient military works was Onasander’s Strategikos (Στρατηγικός), a treatise on generalship written by a Platonic philosopher in the 50s AD. Onasander presents a wide-ranging evaluation of the qualities, duties and conduct of an ideal general, while his abstractive analysis of the Roman military leadership is notable for its sensibility towards ethical aspects of war and modern-seeming psychological insights. Accordingly, the Strategikos is often characterized as a “philosophical” discourse addressed to well-born aspirants to high command, distinct from specimens of “scientific” military literature. The currency and reputation of Onasander’s work as a military “classic” in Byzantium may be gauged by its ample manuscript transmission and abundant evidence for late antique/Byzantine interest in the text, as witnessed by editorial interpolations and frequent citations, adaptations and paraphrases. This paper charts how Onasander’s text was successively modified by Byzantine writers/editors from the sixth to eleventh centuries and influenced the form and content of Byzantine military writing. Investigation of the Byzantine reception of the Strategikos aims to account for the enduring popularity, authority and relevance of the treatise, and to identify its potential readership and impact, highlighting the socio-cultural, intellectual, didactic and literary functions of this genre as a component of the education, outlook and “Roman” identity of military and civilian élites.

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