A!!! CIRCE ,THE GODNESS OF .....THE NEWS

  Bret Devereaux     Collections ,  Legion and Phalanx     May 16, 2025   30 Minutes This week we’re going to do something a bit silly, in part because I have to prepare for and travel to an invited workshop/talk event later this week and so don’t have quite the time for a more normal ‘full’ post and in part because it is fun to be silly sometimes (and we might learn something). One of the standard pop-history counter-factuals that one sees working on ancient military history is some version of “What if Alexander the Great went West instead of East?” It has come up quite a few times here in the comments! And of course we should begin by noting the question is itself a bit silly. Alexander didn’t go East on a lark, his invasion was planned even before he became king and indeed when he became king a Macedonian army was already in Anatolia laying the logistical predicates for his invasion. Alexander thus wasn’t in a position to really decide suddenly to ‘...

Jens H Johansson Follow 3 min read · Jan 1, 2022 The Romans didn´t have the most advanced military technology   but rather the best methods, and the best methods applied on an industrial scale combined with the capability to quickly learn any methods and technologies used by Rome’s enemies. Below is an image of a reenactment of Roman legionnaires The average legion until the decline of the Roman empire  was a bunch of mostly “conscripted” guys who had been trained both as individuals and as military units in an industrial training machine and all legionnaires used similar effective methods and similar tools, equipment, and training. The Roman military mastermind and scholar, Vegetius  explained Rome’s success this way: ”We find that the Romans owed the conquest of the world to no other cause than continual military training, exact observance of discipline in their camps, and unwearied cultivation of the other arts of war. Without these, what chance would the inconsiderabl...