Happy Warriors

But perhaps we should not be too surprised at the grave and tired faces of our generals, because they have much to do. The U.S. Army staff departments usefully define a general’s functions: personnel, intelligence, operations and training, logistics, civil-military operations, communications, IT, and resource management. Those functions—eight in number, like the tentacles of an octopus—however reconceived and re-ordered by each succeeding generation, have slowly been strangling the general’s joy in battle since the 17th century.

As Masters of Command reveals, perhaps the most important thing to understand about leading an army in the world of the Greeks and Romans is how much less there was to do, and how much more fun the Great Captains had doing it. Ancient armies did not have IT departments to supervise. An ancient army tended to move not divided into many parts but as a single large blob. “Intelligence” consisted of finding the enemy blob—which was usually not hard to do, because enemy forces perpetually threw off deserters who were happy to help. “Operations” consisted of marching towards the enemy (with or without the famous celerity of an Alexander or a Julius Caesar) and fighting a battle. The deployment of an army for combat was usually stereotyped—the same or similar in every fight—consisting of a line of battle regulated by the relative precedence of units (as in Alexander’s or the Roman Army) or, in a Greek confederate army made up of allies, the precedence of city contingents.  

In battle, armies tended to act as vast entities, advancing to combat or breaking into flight as single organisms. Once the two opposed armies began to move towards each other, a leader’s attempt to redirect a wing or contingent was an act so fraught with peril that it was rarely tried. So “communications” on the battlefield usually came to little: A shield raised on a stick sufficed to order the advance.

Modern historians often anachronistically find far more modern generalship in ancient warfare than actually existed. Perhaps the widest-spread misconception is that, as in a modern army, logistics was a constant anxiety, the commander being concerned about the procurement and transport of every clasp on his soldiers’ armor and every calorie his soldiers consumed. But reading the ancient texts without mentally inserting into them what is absent shows, instead, that supply was only an occasional concern for the ancient general; it was something to be dealt with mostly when he settled upon an eccentric move like marching before the spring harvest or trying to cross a desert.  

In a low-tech world, any village blacksmith could make and repair armor and weapons. And rather than ancient generals having to plan for the gathering and transportation of food, during the normal campaigning season, an ancient army tended to be (in enemy territory as in friendly) besieged by farmers and carters eager to sell the troops things to eat, because a passing army offered the farmer vastly higher prices for his produce than he would ever get at the local market. An army, particularly a successful army like that of Alexander or Hannibal or Caesar, was a tremendous concentration of expendable capital. To ask Alexander, “How do you feed your army?” would have struck the Macedonian king as no less preposterous than a reporter today asking the mayor of New York, “How do you feed all the people in your city?” Food naturally seeks money. 

Paying the troops and providing them with regular opportunities to loot was, for the most part, the full logistical responsibility of an ancient general. And if eager local farmers could not fill the soldiers’ bellies, an ancient army was accompanied by rich men who bought its loot at low prices and had the capacity to carry that loot to where they could sell it for profit. Julius Caesar, in a rush as usual, once sold 53,000 captives as slaves on a single day in Gaul. The middlemen’s ability to buy slaves on that scale, and feed them all the way to the slave markets of Italy, could be transformed in an instant into the ability to feed Caesar’s army.

Without the multitude of modern staff functions to supervise, the relationship between the inspirational leader and his devoted soldiers was the ancient commander’s prime concern. When they did not confine themselves strictly to tactics, ancient military treatises—Xenophon’s The Education of Cyrus (4th century b.c.) and Onasander’s The General (1st century a.d.), for example—focused on the leader’s comportment, his presentation of himself to his troops, and his management of his soldiers’ morale. The general’s conduct and the morale of his soldiers were closely linked, because an ancient general did not shout orders to his subordinates over the radio from a point safe in the rear. 

In the Greek tradition adopted by Alexander the Great, the commander fought heroically in the front rank with his troops, serving as a model for them to compete with; in the tradition of later Hellenistic command—Hellenistic being the period after Alexander and the world he conquered—to which Hannibal and Caesar were heir, the commander rode close behind the battle line with his bodyguard, not to be able to organize dynamic tactical maneuvers but, rather, to serve, when he saw the morale of his troops beginning to flag, as a dose of fast-acting human Prozac, to rush into the fighting and raise the spirits of his troops by his presence and by partaking of their danger.

Masters of Command is a history of leadership in ancient warfare, masterfully interweaving the stories of Alexander, Hannibal, and Julius Caesar. It seeks to be of use to students of leadership, “from the war room to the boardroom.” But the irony of our own times is that ancient-style leadership of souls—joyful, heroic, charismatic, inspiring—is far more likely to be found in a Silicon Valley CEO than in an Army general. 

J. E. Lendon, professor of history at the University of Virginia, is the author of Song of Wrath: The Peloponnesian War Begins and Soldiers and Ghosts: A History of Battle in Classical Antiquity.