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BATTLE DESCRIPTION IN THE ANCIENT HISTORIANS, PART II: SPEECHES, RESULTS, AND SEA BATTLES*

(continued from Greece & Rome 64.1)

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 October 2017

Jon E. Lendon
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If Herodotus borrowed from Homer the way the later tradition of historical battle description described fighting, adapted the array of the armies from the Homeric catalogue, and himself invented the ‘weighing’, the historian's declaration about why one side defeated the other, Thucydides was the creator of the battle speech – the paraklēsis or parainesis, cohortatio in Latin – that so frequently became a part of the depiction of ancient battles. There is, of course, a great deal of incidental talking and encouragement during fighting in Homer, and many of the sentiments that later authors were to use can be found in Homer as well. Herodotus borrowed from him the habit of including incidental snippets of encouragement before or during battles by the way (6.11, 8.83, 9.17–18, 9.42), and the habit was adopted here and there in later authors, and especially by Livy. So similarly the epipōleēsis, the general's going along the ranks of his army and addressing a few appropriate remarks to each different contingent: this imitated Agamemnon's tour of his forces in Book IV of the Iliad, and was to have a long life in historical authors.

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Research Article
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Greece & Rome , Volume 64 , Issue 2 , October 2017 , pp. 145 - 167
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Copyright © The Classical Association 2017 

Battle speeches

If Herodotus borrowed from Homer the way the later tradition of historical battle description described fighting, adapted the array of the armies from the Homeric catalogue, and himself invented the ‘weighing’, the historian's declaration about why one side defeated the other, Thucydides was the creator of the battle speech – the paraklēsis or parainesis, cohortatio in Latin – that so frequently became a part of the depiction of ancient battles.Footnote 1 There is, of course, a great deal of incidental talking and encouragement during fighting in Homer, and many of the sentiments that later authors were to use can be found in Homer as well.Footnote 2 Herodotus borrowed from him the habit of including incidental snippets of encouragement before or during battles by the way (6.11, 8.83, 9.17–18, 9.42), and the habit was adopted here and there in later authors, and especially by Livy.Footnote 3 So similarly the epipōleēsis, the general's going along the ranks of his army and addressing a few appropriate remarks to each different contingent: this imitated Agamemnon's tour of his forces in Book IV of the Iliad, and was to have a long life in historical authors.Footnote 4

But it was Thucydides who established the habit of including longish, formal, sometimes paired speeches, speeches whose artificiality he is often happy to wink at by attributing a single tightly organized oration to a committee of speakers (2.86.6, 7.65.3), or a single coherent speech with a beginning, middle, and end to a general who is said to have addressed his troops while passing along the ranks (4.94–5, 6.67–8, 7.76–8) – speeches, in other words, that the reader was at least half-conscious the author had written for his character, and that the author was conscious that the reader knew he had written.Footnote 5 If one seeks Thucydides’ literary antecedents for long battle speeches, they are likely not Homer but the extended military harangue poems of Callinus and Tyrtaeus.Footnote 6

All pre-battle speeches in Thucydides are formally intended, of course, to encourage the warriors to whom they are given.Footnote 7 And some of them do only that. Such are the speeches of Pagondas and Hippocrates before Delium (4.92 and 4.95): Our cause is just! Defend our land! The gods are on our side! Remember the exploits of our ancestors! Brave men need no long speeches! So too Brasidas’ speech in Lyncestis (4.126), and the speech of Nicias before the Battle of the Anapus River (6.68). Those who seek a literary explanation for such speeches (and we must, because Thucydides was hardly compelled to include them) will find it in the author's desire to mark important battles (as short speeches do in Homer) and to delay the action to build up suspense.Footnote 8

But Thucydides can also use battle speeches to characterize the speaker, give insight into the plans of the commanders, or bring his reader up to speed on the peculiarities of a tactical situation: so Demosthenes before the Spartan attack at Pylos (4.10), and Brasidas before the Battle of Amphipolis (5.9; see also 7.5.3–4).Footnote 9 Battle speeches can work on the emotions of the reader, producing pathos (7.61–4, 7.69.2, 7.77), as they did in Homer.Footnote 10 And if we may classify the speeches of Phormio and the Peloponnesian commissioners before the Second Battle in the Corinthian Gulf in 429 bc (2.87–9) as battle speeches (they are somewhat removed from the action), they and the consequent fighting seem to debate and then confirm the proto-Platonic philosophical position that courage depends on knowledge.Footnote 11

Thucydides, then, created a genre of speeches with broad and attractive possibilities for his successors.Footnote 12 And here and there later authors took up his challenge. Appian allowed Cassius to deliver a long political manifesto before Philippi (B Civ. 4.90–100).Footnote 13 Procopius uses a battle speech to treat his reader to a lecture on the importance of logistics (8.23.14–22). Tacitus gave Germanicus a very Thucydidean piece of micro-tactical analysis before the Battle of Idistaviso (Ann. 2.14; compare Xen. Hell. 2.4.13–17), and, of course, he chose a battle speech – that of Calgacus before Mons Graupius – for his immortal denunciation of the iniquities of Roman imperial rule (Agr. 30–2).Footnote 14 But there are two battle speeches before Mons Graupius, and, after the fireworks of Calgacus, the modern reader is nothing less than astonished by the conventional sentiments that Tacitus compels his father-in-law and hero, Agricola, to pronounce (Agr. 33–4).Footnote 15

In fact, most pre-battle speeches after Thucydides are entirely conventional in their sentiments – in good authors and in bad. It is as if the only Thucydidean speeches that most later authors remembered were those before Delium, Nicias before the Anapus river, and Brasidas in Lyncestis, and that they then relentlessly rehearsed the topoi in those speeches for nine hundred years; so predictable are the themes that one scholar has reduced them to a pie chart.Footnote 16 Highly skilled authors could, of course, make literary use of the very conventionality of the battle speech. The familiarity of the sentiments that Tacitus has Agricola express tell the reader that Agricola is, in a fallen world, a lonely, proper, old-fashioned, virtuous Roman.Footnote 17 Much of the power of the long battle speech that Sallust gives to Catiline (Cat. 58) depends on the reader recognizing how entirely conventional it is – and making the reader wonder how so perfectly wicked a man can perform the office of general, and die in the fight, like so perfect a Roman.Footnote 18 And, occasionally, an author may write a speech in which the topoi are handled in such a way that we suspect that he intended his reader to recognize the harangue as flawed and unconvincing, even if its deluded audience did not: such, for example, are the speeches that Caesar writes for Pompey and Labienus before Pharsalus (48 bc; B Civ. 3.86–7).Footnote 19

Thucydides hints at why the battle speeches in the historians are so similar when he depicts the desperate Nicias before the battle in the Great Harbour at Syracuse

saying [in indirect discourse] such other things as men say in such a crisis, when they are not guarding themselves against seeming to speak in an old-fashioned vein: bringing forth appeals to wives and children and ancestral gods – much the same appeals in whatever circumstances – but thinking them useful in the anxiety of the moment they shout them out anyway.

(7.69.2)Footnote 20

Real ancient generals did, certainly, have the custom of delivering speeches to their troops before battle, but the battle speeches we have in historical texts (like, for the most part, all the other speeches in the historians) appear to be historians’ own compositions.Footnote 21 Nevertheless, Nicias shows that, even by Thucydides’ time, customs existed in the real world for generals’ speeches, and those real-world speeches were by habit and function commonplace. And the speech-giving of real generals constituted a sea anchor to innovation in battle-speech writing in the historians, because the audience already ‘knew’ what such speeches should say, and that their sentiments should and must be commonplace.

Overly florid and rhetorical battle speeches were mocked: ‘No one talks so foolishly when near the steel’, said Plutarch, commenting on overwrought speeches in historians (Mor. 803b). The boundaries of plausibility within which the historian worked when he wrote battle speeches were considerably narrower than those of the other genres of speeches a historian might write for his characters. To depart from commonplace was to betray the conspiracy of author and reader in which the reader pretended not to notice that the historian had written the general's speech. It could be done – was done spectacularly by Tacitus, for example, in the speech he wrote for the freedom-loving Briton Calgacus – but it had a narrative price in plausibility that most authors, most of the time, did not want to pay. On the contrary: ancient authors often undergirded the verisimilitude of battle speeches with circumstantial details. Thus the strange (to us) fastidiousness with which ancient historians ‘staged’ the speeches they had written for generals, so often carefully specifying whether they were delivered to the troops gathered in assembly, by riding along the lines, or to officers alone, or were transmitted through messengers.Footnote 22 It is as if the historian feared, and guarded against the fact, that the battle speech was the part of his battle description most likely to break the frame of plausibility, and so took countermeasures. But the historian's main countermeasure against the laughter of his reader was to ensure that his general said absolutely nothing out of the ordinary. The poets, unbound to this eerie fairy jig with the truth, could write more freely: compare the speeches Lucan writes for his demonic Caesar and his pathetic Pompey before Pharsalus (7.250–329, 342–82) – perhaps the finest battle speeches in the whole ancient tradition – to the cold, unbuttered toast that Appian serves up for the same speeches (B Civ. 2.72–4).Footnote 23

Battle speeches therefore tend to dissolve the old debate about whether speeches in ancient historians can be trusted as historical or must be regarded as the historians’ free compositions.Footnote 24 It is unlikely that the battle speeches in the historians were frequently the very words spoken by the historical general, but so constrained was the genre, both on real battlefields and in the historians, that, with a basic sense of the tactical situation (Attacking or defending? Anywhere to retreat to? Women and children in danger?), an ancient historian could probably write for his character something very close to the speech the real-life general originally gave.Footnote 25 So are the battle speeches ‘fictional’ in any meaningful sense? And does it matter?

The most interesting puzzle that the fossilized battle speeches in the ancient historians present is that, given the constraints on their content and style, the custom of including them in works of history survived over so many centuries. Regarded as a literary genre, we would expect such speeches to die out or to change and evolve over time, driven by aemulatio, the desire of their authors to better the efforts of their predecessors who worked in the same genre.Footnote 26 But, after Thucydides, generals’ speeches went the way of the coelacanth: over vast eons they subsisted but did not change. They did not even become interestingly baroque over the centuries like the Greek epigram.Footnote 27

Perhaps historians’ willingness over nearly a thousand years to write painfully similar battle speeches reflects not just the expectations of their audience but also an ancient theory about military leadership. The Homeric hero competed both in fighting and in public speaking, and leaders ever since the Iliad – and later leaders probably not least because they read the Iliad – appear often to have regarded their primary role qua leaders, if not fighting with their own hands, as that of motivators of their troops; everything else came after.Footnote 28 Many military thinkers judged that the proper workshop of the ancient general was the mood of his soldiers, their elation or panic. So taught Xenophon, in his didactic Cyropaedia.Footnote 29 So taught ancient manuals of stratagems – the second great strand of ancient military theory, alongside ‘tactics’ – and the surviving representatives of the genre, although they naturally cover all aspects of military trickery, show a strong bias towards psychology.Footnote 30 And so, finally, taught the mid-first-century ad Greek military author Onasander in The General, a compilation of centuries of military lore, a work perfectly clotted with suggestions about military psychology.Footnote 31 As Onasander sums it up, in battle the duty of the general is to

ride the ranks, show himself to those in peril, praise the brave, threaten the cowardly, encourage the hesitating, make up anything missing, countermarch a unit (if necessary), bring aid to the exhausted, and foresee the moment, the hour, the future.

(33.6)

In Onasander, the general's functions relating to the psychology of his men, six in number, dwarf his strictly tactical responsibilities.Footnote 32

The survival of generals’ speeches in the historians may, then, be the result of the continuing power of the psychological in ancient military thinking. A battle speech – and the more conventional the better – was a way for the historian to signify to his reader that the general understood his duty in that department, that the general was a proper general.Footnote 33 Harangues are recorded at every length, from full-length speeches (by the standards of the historians), to summaries, often in indirect discourse (Livy 30.32.6–8; App. Pun. 42), to mere mentions in passing that a harangue was given (Sall. Iug. 49.6).Footnote 34 These passing mentions in a few words occur, rather to our astonishment, even in the early books of Dionysius of Halicarnassus – that is, in descriptions of battles so early in Roman history that we can be quite confident that Dionysius (or less probably a source) was inventing the details of the battle (8.84.1, 10.21.2), and so had no need to mention a general's speech if he was not going to write one for the general. But mention them he did. As long as the psychological remained paramount in real ancient generals’ vision of their function, the general's speech in the historians, however commonplace, however truncated, could never die out. Such a speech consisted of what ‘an excellent (agathos) commander would be likely to say to excellent men as exhortation in the face of danger’ (Arr. Anab. 2.7.9). The commander who gave the speech might not win the battle, but his speech (of whatever length – even no more than a mention) identified him as an agathos, as at least a worthy opponent for the opposing commander who bore away the victory.

The results of battle

Battle speeches are a powerful example of the sway of the Thucydidean model over subsequent authors’ habits of battle description. But an even more striking instance of that influence is the adoption by posterity of Thucydides’ formula for describing the consequences of battle. For Herodotus’ way was, arguably, the more natural one for the tradition to embrace. Noticing how Homer gave epitaphs to his dead heroes (sometimes even putting them into the mouths of their slayers), Herodotus based the way he described the results of battle on the heroic epitaph (6.114–17), albeit usually much shortened, combined naturally (for the greatest heroes often ended up among the fallen) with explicit rankings of the bravery of individuals – ‘The bravest of them all was Dieneces, a Spartan…and next after him in excellence came two Spartan brothers, Alpheus and Maron’ (7.226–7) – and the relative merit of contingents – ‘in that sea battle of all the warriors of Xerxes the Egyptians were best’ (8.17).Footnote 35 Herodotus was only intermittently interested in the numbers of the men slain or ships lost: he gives them for Marathon (6.117) and Plataea (9.70), when the differentials were enormous, but not for Thermopylae, Artemisium, Salamis, or Mycale. And when he does mention numbers it can be because they prove the heroism of a contingent: at Artemisium the Egyptians were the best because, inter alia, they captured five Greek ships (8.17).

Nothing prevented Herodotus’ Greek and Roman successors from following his way of describing battle's end. Competition between individual warriors, units, contingents, and wings of armies would ever remain a feature of ancient battle; the Greeks long continued to give prizes to the warrior who was ‘best’; and the Romans had their military decorations, given both to individuals and, under the empire, to units. There was, in other words, always potential material for Herodotean honour-roll-of-heroes results-of-battle passages.Footnote 36 More often than not, too, acts of individual heroism were described in the action of the battle, providing an easy transition into heroic epitaphs once the battle was finished. Dionysius of Halicarnassus picked up Herodotus’ way of ending battles, and long after him Procopius did as well.Footnote 37

But that was not the way of the majority when recounting the results of a battle. Instead, for the most part, Thucydides’ far more austere practice prevailed: no ranked heroes, no ranked contingents, and only a few names, not epitaphs, for the distinguished dead:

After the battle the Athenians set up their trophy and gave back their dead to the Potidaeans under truce. There died of the Potidaeans and their allies a little fewer than three hundred, and of the Athenians alone one hundred and fifty and Callias the general.

(1.63.3)

The trophy, the appeal of the losers for the dead bodies, the total casualties on both sides (or ships lost and captured, in a naval battle), the names of dead generals – that, for the most part, was all.Footnote 38

Thus were the results of battle described as long as Greek military customs prevailed (Lucian, Hist. conscr. 20; Ver. hist. 1.37–9). With the coming of the Romans, elements now anachronistic (the trophy, the recovery of the bodies under truce) fall out of the description, but Roman elements, such as the number of enemy standards captured and the number of hours a battle lasted (two things the Romans seem to have recorded), might be introduced.Footnote 39 In general the results-of-battle passage tended to shrink over time, and can find itself reduced to a sounding recitation of the numbers of dead alone, and sometimes (as in the later works of Tacitus) not even that.Footnote 40 But what remains through all of antiquity is the Thucydidean austerity, the almost anti-heroic quality of the relation of the results, which can offer a surprising contrast in tone to the rest of the battle description. Polybius’ description of the Battle of Chios (201 bc) is highly wrought, with heroic deeds, tricks, narrow escapes, and paradoxes (16.2–6). But once the two sides have withdrawn the battle-piece ends with a list: ‘There were sunk of Philip's ships in the battle with Attalus, one ten-banked ship, one nine-banked ship, a seven, and a six, and of the rest ten decked ships and three trihemiolas’ (16.7.1; compare Amm. Marc. 16.12.63). The change in tone is vertiginous, and we cringe at the popping of the stylistic balloon. But the master, Thucydides, demanded his respect.

Conclusion: the problem with sea battles

After his return from space, the satirist Lucian (with whose adventures we began Part I of this article) had the misfortune to be swallowed by a gigantic whale, in whose cavernous insides he fought a war against the fishy inhabitants to liberate the humans living there, who resented paying a tribute of oysters to piscine overlords. But one day the periodic opening of the whale's maw revealed a sea battle between giants assembling on a strange and distant sea. Each a hundred yards tall, the giants rowed long islands as galleys, their mighty oars consisting of trees with branches and leaves still attached. At the back of each island a steersman plied his steering oar from a hill; a coxswain gave the rowers their cadence; and at the front of each ship were stationed hoplites as marines (but they did not need to wear plumes on their helmets, because their hair was of burning flames). Eventually six hundred of these monstrous galleys were in sight, two fleets contending over the ownership of herds of dolphins. And when battle was joined some islands ran together prow to prow, and some were rammed and sank, and some islands boarded others and the marines fought it out between them (the grapnels they threw were octopuses, whose tentacles held opposing ships tight). Giant oysters were hurled as missiles, and hundred-foot sponges were wielded as weapons. ‘And finally [one side] won and they sank about one hundred and fifty of the enemy islands, and took three more with their crews, and the others backed water and fled.’ After a pursuit, the victors turned back to recover the wrecks (they had lost eighty of their own islands), and set up their trophy on the head of the very whale from which Lucian had witnessed the struggle (Ver. hist. 1.40–2).

We never learn why one side defeated the other in this fantasy sea battle, and the action, although told on the scale of individual galley-islands, is oddly generic: unspecific ships ram and are rammed, and somewhere hoplite marines fight and octopuses grapple and oysters are thrown. Lucian's description of the fantasy land battle in the heavens between the kings of the sun and the moon was far more circumstantial, and could be followed stage by stage. But the contrast is as it should be, for, to write a satirical sea battle, Lucian has picked up exactly the narrative qualities of many sea battles in the ancient historians.Footnote 41 He is loyally – indeed, with mocking pedantry – reflecting wider habits in the ancient description of battles on the waves.

The conventions of ancient battle description suited the ancient land battles they described reasonably well. The high and low cameras that the ancient author brought to his task were probably better matched to the reality of ancient land combat than the medium-height, movements-of-units-level camera preferred by modern writers. And it may well be that the division of ancient battle descriptions into distinct segments (array, speeches, action, weighing, results), with little logical relationship to each other, often reflected both the reality of how ancient battles developed and a befitting modesty about tracing chains of causation through chaotic reality. Similarly, the friendliness of ancient battle description to psychological phenomena (which tended to operate at the individual and army level, just the levels ancient authors were watching) matched ancient reality – and ancient military theory – well: modern battle description is covertly materialist, and psychology can find itself pushed to the side.Footnote 42

Over time, however, the conventions for describing ancient land battles took on a vitality of their own. No surprise: they were founded on the one hand upon a literary tradition – that of Homer, and then Herodotus and Thucydides – that was laurelled with supreme cultural authority; and on the other upon a little-changing military reality in which, if a classical historian cared to check, he would find generals in every century arraying their troops and delivering speeches to them, and armies in every century (for the most part at least) attacking and fleeing as if they were single great multi-celled beasts. To our minds, the ancient tradition of describing land battles might have evolved more wholesomely if historians’ consultation or experience of reality (for a number of ancient historians were generals or soldiers) had thrown up contrasts and so led to changes or adjustments in literary convention: but most real battles were very conventional in fact, and so reality supported literary convention and literary convention played its part in moulding reality, resulting in a circle of mutual reinforcement.Footnote 43

The reality of ancient galley battles was, however, different from that of land battles. Even in the earliest clashes of which we have detailed accounts – at Lade (494 bc) and in the Persian Wars (480–479 bc) – naval warfare was fast and dynamic, a struggle of manoeuvre; the role of the commander was more that of tactician and less that of heroic inspiration.Footnote 44 In other words, ancient sea battles were better suited to modern habits of battle description, with a camera hanging at medium height following the independent actions of manoeuvring ships and fleet contingents (Hdt. 6.14). But antiquity never developed a set of protocols for describing sea battles distinct from those it used for battles by land. And so for the most part ancient sea battles continued to be viewed in terms of the action of the whole (or rarely the left, middle, and right), interspersed (where possible) with the actions of heroic individuals, either leading contingents into action, or sometimes fighting hand to hand when ships came together (Diod. Sic. 20.52.1–3). And historians resorted to the generic presentation of mass action (somewhere there was ramming, somewhere fighting on the decks) when they needed fighting filler for their accounts of combat.Footnote 45

Thus did Thucydides tell the story of the naval battle in the Great Harbour of Syracuse.Footnote 46 Never did the historian set the scene more solemnly (7.56–69). The Syracusans begin to barricade the mouth of the harbour to prevent an Athenian escape. What is on their minds? The glory of destroying the Athenians at sea once and for all! They hope to shatter the might of Athens! The battle will be titanic in its consequences and, as it turns out, in the numbers and nations of those participating: unexpectedly, to catch the reader's breath in his throat at the magnitude of the enterprise, Thucydides rolls out a long Homeric catalogue of the allies of each side. Then leap back to the preparations: as the Syracusans are blocking the entrance to the harbour, the Athenians hold a desperate, tension-raising (for the reader) council of officers. They have no more food; they must reduce the size of their fortifications and man as many ships as possible for a last desperate effort at escape. Now, with battle decided upon, Thucydides gives his reader the exceptionally long and moving battle speeches of Nicias to the Athenians and their allies and Gylippus (along with the Syracusan generals) to their opponents, the former declaiming in the face of gathering doom, the latter confident, almost triumphant before the fact of victory. Now the fleets are manned – but wait! Rather than immediate fighting we have a second, desperate, pathetic address to the Athenians by Nicias – think of your wives, your children, your gods! When finally the fleets move into action, Thucydides’ reader is in as quivering a state of nervous anticipation as ancient Greece's supreme master of prose could devise.

But the harbour into which the triremes of Athens and Syracuse steer is the lair of a literary Charybdis.Footnote 47 Thucydides lists the three Athenian generals in charge, and gives the Syracusans a sketchy array – left, right, and centre. Then the Athenians sail against the opening of the harbour and the half-completed Syracusan barrier. They have an initial success there, but the rest of the Syracusan and allied fleet now comes into action, the fighting becomes general, and…Thucydides loses the thread. A modern account would naturally pick up the three Syracusan contingents. How did each fare? Which overcame the Athenians opposed to them and how? But that would require use of the middle-height camera, the modern camera that follows the deeds of units, that camera alien to the noble tradition of Homer. Instead, Thucydides jerks his camera into the more comfortable upper air, and offers a generalizing and contrived account of the action. First generic, unidentified ships fight each other generically in a generic space with all geographical markers now forgotten – ramming (but less than usual, because of the tight quarters), the soldiers aboard shooting missiles, hoplites boarding and fighting on the decks. Then, in an awkward device, Thucydides makes each of the duty stations on each ship – rowers, steersmen, marines – compete generically with each other. Next, grasping for yet more filler, he resorts to paradoxes: rather than ram, ships collide by mistake; ships ramming are rammed by others, and then others, and raft up; sometimes a pilot must plan at once to attack and defend. Nor is this fighting filler original: Thucydides is borrowing liberally from Aeschylus’ account of the Battle of Salamis.Footnote 48 Finally, the historian turns Homeric: first he mentions the noise of the battle, that venerable Iliadic habit, and then reports Iliad-like in-battle shouts of encouragement and reproach.Footnote 49 Thucydides is ransacking all his mental upholstery to find enough goose-down to cram the pillow of his account to a plumpness appropriate to the most important battle in his whole work.

But then, suddenly, he pulls away. There will be no more fighting filler. Thucydides abandons any attempt to depict the naval action itself, and shifts his point of view to the shore, describing – in an immortal passage – the emotional reactions of the onlookers on both sides, their fears, their cheers, their shrieks, their bodies swaying as they watch the action: ‘We're winning! We're losing!’Footnote 50 Quite incidentally, in the midst of this gorgeous meringue of frothy emotion, this masterpiece of vividness, enargeia, the Syracusans win the battle. But Thucydides is hardly going to stop to tell us why – there is no weighing passage, and all he says is that ‘finally the Syracusans and their allies, after the sea battle had lasted a long time, turned the Athenians to flight’ (7.71.5) – because he hastens right on to the emotion, the terror, felt by the defeated, the wailing and the groaning. Thucydides has found an escape from fighting filler and, with a relief perhaps no less than that of the victorious Syracusans themselves, he sets his course joyfully out of the narrative vortex of the fighting into the calmer evening waters of purple prose.

Thucydides’ solution was noticed. Antiquity regarded his description of the Battle in the Great Harbour as exemplary, and antiquity rushed to copy it.Footnote 51 This we can tell when we notice emotional onlookers ushered onto the sidelines of a land battle that Dionysius of Halicarnassus imagined Romulus had fought in the first days of Rome; into Polybius’ Battle of Cynoscephalae; into Sallust's war against Jugurtha; into Caesar's vision of the sea battle at Massilia in 49 bc; and into Cassius Dio's account of Agrippa's defeat of Sextus Pompey at Naulochos in 36 bc.Footnote 52 Thucydides’ brilliant, idiosyncratic escape from generic fighting filler became, in the hands of later authors, exactly the sort of generic fighting filler that the earlier historian was trying to escape: in this instance, we can actually see the creation of fighting filler as it occurs. And the natural end of this was Lucian's fantasy sea battle, where the action is entirely fighting filler, finishing with a wholly unexplained victory.

Greek and Roman historians who described battles were trying to give truthful accounts of real events. But a literary tradition (Homer, Herodotus, and Thucydides) that demanded humble respect was clasped in an unnatural embrace with ancient military reality – the simplicity and similarity of most ancient land battles. This produced a manner of describing battle that was perhaps more constrained by generic convention than any other topic that an ancient historian might address. Once mature, these conventions not only specified the stages a battle description should have, but often made the historian feel that he had to do justice to those stages even if he had no true information about them at hand. Thus generic fighting filler material, either taken (for the most part) from contemporary military practice or adapted to contemporary military practice from other writings (such as borrowing Thucydides’ observers from the shores of the harbour at Syracuse), material in both cases not necessarily true of the battle being described, and in both cases infuriatingly hard to detect and discard.

We can therefore know with confidence much more of battles in general – of what usually happened in battle – than of any given ancient battle, and our reconstructions of the fighting habits of an era are more likely to be accurate than our reconstructions of what befell on a given field. To move beyond, to establish the events of specific battles, requires first the ever-repeated question – How can he have known that? – and then that scholars work contrary to their prejudices. Students of the ancient historians must leave their comfortable search for genre elements in battle descriptions and look for what is idiosyncratic (and so perhaps true), while students of ancient history must open their unwilling eyes to the narrative structures imposed by, and the material supplied by, genre (and so perhaps untrue, at least of that battle). Both must learn to laugh with the satirist at the comedies and treacheries of Lucian's True Story.

Appendix: select bibliography on battle description in Greek and Latin historical authors

Herodotus: J. Dillery, ‘Reconfiguring the Past: Thyrea, Thermopylae and Narrative Patterns in Herodotus’, AJPh 117 (1996), 217–54; D. Boedeker, ‘Pedestrian Fatalities: The Prosaics of Death in Herodotus’, in P. Derow and R. Parker (eds.), Herodotus and his World (Oxford, 2003), 17–36; L. Tritle, ‘Warfare in Herodotus’, in C. Dewald and J. Marincola (eds.), The Cambridge Companion to Herodotus (Cambridge, 2006), 214–20; P. Vannicelli, ‘To Each His Own: Simonides and Herodotus on Thermopylae’, in J. Marincola (ed.), A Companion to Greek and Roman Historiography, 2 vols. (Malden, MA, 2007), ii.315–21.

Thucydides: J. de Romilly, Histoire et raison chez Thucydide (Paris, 1956), 107–79 (trans. E. T. Rawlings as The Mind of Thucydides [Ithaca, NY, 2012], 60–105); V. Hunter, Thucydides the Artful Reporter (Toronto, 1973); G. M. Paul, ‘Two Battles in Thucydides’, EMC 31 (1987), 307–12; P. Hunt, ‘Warfare [in Thucydides]’, in A. Rengakos and A. Tsakmakis (eds.), Brill's Companion to Thucydides (Leiden, 2006), 385–413; E. Foster, ‘Campaign and Battle Narratives in Thucydides’, in R. K. Balot, S. Forsdyke, and E. Foster (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Thucydides (New York, 2017), 301–15; and see above, n. 46, for literature on the battle in the Great Harbour at Syracuse.

Xenophon: V. J. Gray, ‘Two Different Approaches to the Battle of Sardis in 395 b.c.: Xenophon Hellenica 3.4.20–24 and Hellenica Oxyrhynchia 11 (6).4–6’, California Studies in Classical Antiquity 12 (1979), 183–200; J. G. Howie, ‘The Major Aristeia in Homer and Xenophon’, Papers of the Leeds International Latin Seminar 9 (1996), 205–13; J. E. Lendon, ‘The Rhetoric of Combat: Greek Military Theory and Roman Culture in Julius Caesar's Battle Descriptions’, ClAnt 18 (1999), 290–5, 306; F. Echeverría, ‘Hoplite and Phalanx in Archaic and Classical Greece: A Reassessment’, CPh 107 (2012), 304–8.

Polybius: V. D'Huys, ‘ΧΡΗΣΙΜΟΝ ΚΑΙ ΤΕΡΠΝΟΝ in Polybios’ Schlachtschilderungen. Einige literarische Topoi in seiner Darstellung der Schlacht bei Zama (XV 9–16)’, in H. Verdin, G. Schepens, and E. de Keyser (eds.), Purposes of History (Louvain, 1990), 267–88; J. E. Lendon, ‘The Rhetoric of Combat: Greek Military Theory and Roman Culture in Julius Caesar's Battle Descriptions’, ClAnt 18 (1999), 283–5; S. Koon, Infantry Combat in Livy's Battle Narratives (Oxford, 2010), 31–3, 64–72.

On the Latin tradition of battle description in general: M. Lovano, ‘Rome: A Story of Conflict’, in B. Campbell and L. A. Tritle (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Warfare in the Classical World (New York, 2013), 74–90.

Caesar: R. D. Brown, ‘Two Caesarian Battle-Descriptions: A Study in Contrast’, CJ 94 (1999), 329–57 (collecting earlier literature); J. E. Lendon, ‘The Rhetoric of Combat: Greek Military Theory and Roman Culture in Julius Caesar's Battle Descriptions’, ClAnt 18 (1999), 273–329; K. Kagan, The Eye of Command (Ann Arbor, MI, 2006), 116–80; S. Koon, Infantry Combat in Livy's Battle Narratives (Oxford, 2010), 33–5, 73–81; D. Nolan, ‘Caesar's Exempla and the Role of Centurions in Battle’, in J. Armstrong (ed.), Circum Mare. Themes in Ancient Warfare (Leiden, 2016), 34–62.

Diodorus Siculus: J. Hornblower, Hieronymus of Cardia (Oxford, 1981), 37–9, 187–96; M. Alganza Roldán and M. Villena Ponsoda, ‘La descripción de la táxis en Diodoro de Sicilia’, in J. Lens (ed.), Estudios sobre Diodoro de Sicilia (Granada, 1994), 229–42 (first published in FlorIlib 2 [1991], 21–32); M. Alganza Roldán, ‘Intertextualidad y tradición literaria. La batalla de las Termópilas en la Biblioteca Histórica de Diodoro de Sicilia’, in J. C. Iglesias Zoido (ed.), Retórica e historiografía. El discorso militar en la historiografía desde la antigüedad hasta el renacimiento (Madrid, 2008), 259–72.

Sallust: P. Fiedler, ‘Die beiden Überfallschlachten auf Metellus und Marius im Bellum Iugurthinum des Sallust’, WS 78 (1965), 108–27.

Livy: T. Stade, Die Schlachtenschilderungen in Livius’ erster Dekade (Schneeberg, 1873); K. Witte, ‘Über die Form der Darstellung in Livius Geschichtswerk’, RhM 65 (1910), 381–417 (dismissing Stade as ‘wertlos’, 382 n. 2); H.-G. Plathner, Die Schlachtschilderungen bei Livius (Breslau, 1934); H. Bruckmann, Die römischen Niederlagen im Geschichtswerk des T. Livius (Bochum-Langendreer, 1936); P. G. Walsh, ‘The Literary Techniques of Livy’, RhM 97 (1954), 100–2, 112–14 (reprinted in J. D. Chaplin and C. S. Kraus [eds.], Oxford Readings in Classical Studies. Livy [Oxford, 2009], 205–7, 218–20); P. G. Walsh, Livy. His Historical Aims and Methods (Cambridge, 1961), 158–63, 197–204; J. Bartolomé Gómez, Los relatos bélicos en la obra de Tito Livio (Estudio de la primera década de Ab urbe condita) (Vitoria, 1995; with a typology valuable beyond Livy); S. P. Oakley, A Commentary on Livy Books VI–X, 4 vols. (Oxford, 1997–2005), i.83–4; P. Erdkamp, ‘Late-Annalistic Battle Scenes in Livy (Books 21–44)’, Mnemosyne 59 (2006), 525–63; D. S. Levene, Livy on the Hannibalic War (Oxford, 2010), 261–316; S. Koon, Infantry Combat in Livy's Battle Narratives (Oxford, 2010), esp. 23–36.

Dionysius of Halicarnassus: E. Gaida, Die Schlachtschilderungen in den Antiquitates Romanae des Dionys von Halikarnaß (Breslau, 1934; valuable beyond Dionysius).

Tacitus: H. Allgeier, Studien zur Kriegsdarstellung bei Tacitus (Heidelberg, 1957), esp. 185–96; K. Wellesley, ‘Tacitus as a Military Historian’, in T. A. Dorey (ed.), Tacitus (London, 1969), 84–7, 92–5; A. J. Woodman, ‘Self-Imitation and the Substance of History: Tacitus, Annals 1.61–5 and Histories 2.70, 5.14–15’, in A. J. Woodman and D. West (eds.), Creative Imitation and Latin Literature (Cambridge, 1979), 143–55, 231–5 (reprinted in A. J. Woodman, Tacitus Reviewed [Oxford, 1998], 70–85); M. Roberts, ‘The Revolt of Boudicca (Tacitus, Annals 14.29–39) and the Assertion of Libertas in Neronian Rome’, AJPh 109 (1988), 118–32; R. Ash, ‘An Exemplary Conflict: Tacitus’ Parthian Battle Narrative (Annals 6.34–35)’, Phoenix 53 (1999), 114–35; E. Manolaraki, ‘A Picture Worth a Thousand Words: Revisiting Bedriacum (Tacitus Histories 2.70)’, CPh 100 (2005), 246–8; R. Ash, ‘Tacitus and the Battle of Mons Graupius: A Historiographical Route Map?’, in J. Marincola (ed.), A Companion to Greek and Roman Historiography, 2 vols. (Malden, MA, 2007), ii.434–40; D. S. Levene, ‘Warfare in the Annals’, in A. J. Woodman (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Tacitus (Cambridge, 2009), 225–38.

Plutarch: J. Marincola, ‘History without Malice: Plutarch Rewrites the Battle of Plataea’, in J. Priestley and V. Zali (eds.), Brill’s Companion to the Reception of Herodotus in Antiquity and Beyond (Leiden, 2016), 101–19.

Appian: I. Hahn, ‘Appianus Tacticus’, AAntHung 18 (1970), 293–306; B. Goldmann, Einheitlichkeit und Eigenständigkeit der Historia Romana des Appian (Hildesheim, 1988), 50–84; A. M. Gowing, The Triumviral Narratives of Appian and Cassius Dio (Ann Arbor, MI, 1992), 209–23; G. S. Bucher, ‘Fictive Elements in Appian's Pharsalus Narrative’, Phoenix 59 (2005), 50–76; D. Carmona Centeno, ‘Los motivos del estandarte y del general-soldado en las colecciones de exempla y su posible influencia en Apiano’, in M. L. Harto Trujillo and J. Villalba Álvarez (eds.), Exempla Fidem Faciunt (Madrid, 2012), 115–18.

Arrian: P. A. Stadter, Arrian of Nicomedia (Chapel Hill, NC, 1980), 90–101, 126–7.

Cassius Dio: G. B. Townend, ‘Some Rhetorical Battle-Pictures in Dio’, Hermes 92 (1964), 467–81; D. Harrington, ‘Cassius Dio as a Military Historian’, AClass 20 (1977), 159–65; A. M. Gowing, The Triumviral Narratives of Appian and Cassius Dio (Ann Arbor, MI, 1992), 209–23; D. Potter, ‘War as Theater, from Tacitus to Dexippus’, in W. Riess and G. G. Fagan (eds.), The Topography of Violence in the Greco-Roman World (Ann Arbor, MI, 2016), 327–31.

Herodian: H. Sidebottom, ‘Herodian's Historical Methods and Understanding of History’, ANRW 2.34.4 (1998), 2784–5, 2816 n. 195; D. Potter, ‘War as Theater, from Tacitus to Dexippus’, in W. Riess and G. G. Fagan (eds.), The Topography of Violence in the Greco-Roman World (Ann Arbor, MI, 2016), 331–5.

On battle in late antique historians in general, and on Ammianus Marcellinus, Procopius, Eunapius, Agathias, and Theophylact Simocatta: literature is gathered by C. Whately, ‘War in Late Antiquity: Secondary Works, Literary Sources and Material Evidence’, in A. Sarantis and N. Christie (eds.), War and Warfare in Late Antiquity, 2 vols. (Leiden, 2013) i.121–6.

Ammianus Marcellinus: N. Bitter, Kampfschilderungen bei Ammianus Marcellinus (Bonn, 1976; also valuable on the tradition as a whole); J. Matthews, The Roman Empire of Ammianus (London, 1989), 286–301 and 520 n. 1; K. Kagan, The Eye of Command (Ann Arbor, MI, 2006), 23–95.

Procopius: P. Rance, ‘Narses and the Battle of Taginae (Busta Gallorum) 552: Procopius and Sixth-Century Warfare’, Historia 54 (2005), 424–72; I. Colvin, ‘Reporting Battles and Understanding Campaigns in Procopius and Agathias: Classicising Historians’ Use of Archived Documents as Sources’, in A. Sarantis and N. Christie (eds.), War and Warfare in Late Antiquity, 2 vols. (Leiden, 2013), ii.573–7; C. Whatley, Battles and Generals. Combat, Culture, and Didacticism in Procopius’ Wars (Leiden, 2016).

Agathias: I. Colvin, ‘Reporting Battles and Understanding Campaigns in Procopius and Agathias: Classicising Historians’ Use of Archived Documents as Sources’, in A. Sarantis and N. Christie (eds.), War and Warfare in Late Antiquity, 2 vols. (Leiden, 2013) ii.573–7; C. Whatley, Battles and Generals. Combat, Culture, and Didacticism in Procopius’ Wars (Leiden, 2016), 84, 93, 162–3.

Footnotes

*

In addition to those thanked in Part I, my thanks are due to J. C. Iglesias Zoido and D. Carmona Centeno for their kind responses to queries and for making papers available prior to publication. Unattributed translations are my own.

References

1 For a concise history of the battle speech (extending into modern times), see Hambsch, B., ‘Feldherrnrede’, in Ueding, G. (ed.), Historisches Wörterbuch der Rhetorik, 12 vols. (Tübingen and Darmstadt, 1992–2015), iii.225–38Google Scholar, gathering older literature on the role of Thucydides in the tradition at 236 n. 23. More recently on the importance of Thucydides, see Carmona, D., La escena típica de la epipólesis de la épica a la historiografía (Rome, 2014), 7, 69–97 Google Scholar (with 1–10 for a general introduction to the topic of battle speeches); Zoido, J. C. Iglesias, ‘La arenga militar en la historiografía griega. El modelo de Tucídides y sus antecedentes literarios y retóricos’, in Zoido, J. C. Iglesias (ed.), Retórica e historiografía. El discurso militar en la historiografía desde la antigüedad hasta el renacimiento (Madrid, 2008), 238–57Google Scholar. These volumes also usefully collect other recent scholarship on battle speeches, which has become considerable: much of it grows out of the projects undertaken by J. C. Iglesias Zoido's Grupo de investigación arenga (see <http://areng4.wixsite.com/arenga>, accessed 6 May 2017). Older literature is conveniently gathered by Woodman, A. J. and Martin, R. H., The Annals of Tacitus. Book 3 (Cambridge, 1996)Google Scholar, ad loc. Tac. Ann. 3.45.2.

2 Keitel, E., ‘Homeric Antecedents to the Cohortatio in the Ancient Historians’, CW 80 (1987), 154–60Google Scholar; she points out (160) that there is even a precedent for paired speeches, those of Hector and Achilles in Book 20. Also Zoido, J. C. Iglesias, ‘The Battle Exhortation in Ancient Rhetoric’, Rhetorica 25 (2007) 142–6CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 E.g. Livy 2.45–6; Plathner, H.-G., Die Schlachtschilderungen bei Livius (Breslau, 1934), 13 Google Scholar; Gómez, J. Bartolomé, Los relatos bélicos en la obra de Tito Livio (Estudio de la primera década de Ab urbe condita) (Vitoria, 1995), 216–20Google Scholar. For an extremely full list of generals’ utterances of all types, see D. Carmona Centeno, M. L. Harto Trujillo, J. C. Iglesias Zoido, and J. Villalba Álvarez, ‘Corpus de arengas en la historiografía grecolatina’, in Iglesias Zoido (n. 1), 537–64.

4 Carmona (n. 1).

5 For ancient awareness of the artificiality of such speeches, see Polyb. 12.25.7–9; Cic. Orat. 66.

6 See Iglesias Zoido (n. 1), 234; Trujillo, M. L. Harto, Las arengas militares en la historiographía latina (Madrid, 2008), 51 Google Scholar; Carmona (n. 1), 6.

7 For the battle speeches in Thucydides, see Luschnat, O., Die Feldherrnreden im Geschichtswerk des Thukydides (Leipzig, 1942)Google Scholar; Leimbach, R., Militärische Musterrhetorik. Eine Untersuchung zu den Feldherrnreden des Thukydides (Stuttgart, 1985)Google Scholar; Iglesias Zoido (n. 1); Tsakmakis, A. and Themistokleous, C., ‘Textual Structure and Modality in Thucydides’ Military Exhortations’, in Tsakmakis, A. and Tamiolaki, M. (eds.), Thucydides Between History and Literature (Berlin, 2013), 391–400 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8 For battle speeches as narrative retardation, see Harto Trujillo (n. 6), 66–7. On the marking of important battles in Homer and the historians, see Keitel (n. 2), 166–71. It presents an interesting literary puzzle when a speech or speeches are absent from a historian's description of a major battle (Plathner [n. 3], 51, gathers such absences in Livy, Books 21–42, pointing especially to Cannae). One reason is the reluctance of some authors to write their own versions of the speeches already written by their predecessors (see Marincola, J., ‘Speeches in Classical Historiography’, in Marincola, J. [ed.], A Companion to Greek and Roman Historiography, 2 vols. [Malden, MA, 2007], i.129)CrossRefGoogle Scholar: Livy may have decided not to give Hannibal a speech before Cannae because his source, Polybius (3.111), had done so.

9 On tactical analysis in Thucydides’ speeches, see Luschnat (n. 7). For the influence of Brasidas’ speeches in Thucydides upon later battle-speech writing, see Zoido, J. C. Iglesias, ‘La incitación a la batalla en Tucídides. Brásidas y la creación de un modelo de arenga militar’, in Gómez, J. Bartolomé (ed.), Los desastres de la guerra. Mirada, palabra e imagen (Madrid, 2010), 53–75 Google Scholar.

10 Keitel (n. 2), 166–7.

11 Luschnat (n. 7), 21–32. de Romilly, J., Histoire et raison chez Thucydide (Paris, 1956), 138–50Google Scholar (trans. Rawlings, E. T. as The Mind of Thucydides [Ithaca, NY, 2012], 80–7Google Scholar), notes how well the following events conform to Phormio's predictions, and the similar agreement of events in Thucydides’ narrative to preceding speeches (even echoing their diction) is a theme of Hunter, V. J., Thucydides the Artful Reporter (Toronto, 1973)Google Scholar.

12 Leimbach (n. 7) contended that Thucydides’ speeches were intended to be exemplary.

13 See Gowing, A. M., ‘Appian and Cassius’ Speech before Philippi (Bella Civilia 4.90–100)’, Phoenix 44 (1990), 158–81CrossRefGoogle Scholar. This speech is given considerably before the battle.

14 For a catalogue of the literary functions of battle speeches, see Harto Trujillo (n. 6), 63–73.

15 For the speeches of Calgacus and Agricola, see Woodman, A. J., Tacitus. Agricola (Cambridge, 2014), 236–8, 256–7Google Scholar.

16 For catalogues of these topoi, see Albertus, J., Die ΠΑΡΑΚΛΗΤΙΚΟΙ in der griechischen und römischen Literatur (Strassburg, 1908), 46–93 Google Scholar; Pritchett, W. K., ‘The General's Exhortations in Greek Warfare’, in Pritchett, W. K., Essays in Greek History (Amsterdam, 1994), 101–5Google Scholar; Harto Trujillo (n. 6), 99–134. For the pie chart, see Ventura, M. V. Manzano, Los discursos de exhortación militar en la Farsalia de Lucano (Madrid, 2013), 251 Google Scholar. For analysis of battle speeches in terms of ancient rhetorical theory (in which they did not, however, feature largely, and into the categories of which they fit poorly), see Cruz, F. Romero, ‘Sobre las arengas de Tucídides’, Minerva 4 (1990), 93–104 Google Scholar; Harto Trujillo (n. 6), 74–86; Carmona (n. 1), 183–231. For the topoi of battle speeches finding their way into speeches of other genres, see Keitel, E., ‘Otho's Exhortations in Tacitus’ Histories’, G&R 34 (1987), 73–82 Google Scholar.

17 For Tacitus’ Agricola as a symbol of the better values of the Roman past, see Kraus, C. S., ‘Long Ago and Far Away…The Uses of the Past in Tacitus’ Minora ’, in Ker, J. and Pieper, C. (eds.), Valuing the Past in the Greco-Roman World (Leiden, 2014), 228–37Google Scholar.

18 Earl, D. C., The Political Thought of Sallust (Cambridge, 1961), 93 Google Scholar, calls this a ‘perversion of the political vocabulary’, and notes that both of Catiline's speeches, and the letter Sallust quotes, are expressed in entirely traditional Roman terms (93–5).

19 On Pompey and Labienus, see Brown, R. D., ‘Two Caesarian Battle-Descriptions: A Study in Contrast’, CJ 94 (1999), 346–8Google Scholar; Batstone, W. W. and Damon, C., Caesar's Civil War (New York, 2006), 104, 108–9Google Scholar. Harangues intended by their authors to be interpreted as failures are rare in prose, for reasons that will become clear below, and there is often scholarly dispute about whether allegedly ‘weak’ speeches were actually so. For other harangues that their authors arguably intended to be understood as weak, see Glücklich, H.-J., ‘Rhetorik und Führungsqualität. Feldherrnreden Caesars und Curios’, AU 18 (1975), 33–64 Google Scholar (sed contra Batstone and Damon [this note], 98–101); Lateiner, D., ‘Nicias’ Inadequate Encouragement (Thucydides 7.69.2)’, CPh 80 (1985), 201–8Google Scholar (sed contra Hornblower, S., A Commentary on Thucydides, 3 vols. [Oxford, 1991–2008]Google Scholar, ad loc. 7.69.1–2); Hornblower (this note), ad loc. 7.77; Bartolomé, J., ‘Una aproximación al estudio de las arengas fallidas. Livio, Lucano y Silio Itálico’, Talia Dixit 10 (2015), 1–27 Google Scholar.

20 Cf. Arr. Anab. 2.7.9; Cass. Dio 41.57.1–3, 47.42.2. For why some battle speeches are in direct and some in indirect discourse, see Albertus (n. 16), 43–5; Touhari, O. [sic; error for Touahri], ‘Harangue de chef avant la bataille. Comparaison entre Tite-Live (Histoire Romaine, livre XXVII) et Silius Italicus (Punica, XV, 320–823)’, VL 171 (2004), 122–4Google Scholar; Zoido, J. C. Iglesias, ‘The Pre-Battle Speeches of Alexander at Issus and Gaugamela’, GRBS 50 (2010), 227–31Google Scholar. Speeches are noted as being in direct or indirect discourse in the list of Carmona Centeno et al. (n. 3).

21 For battle speeches in historical works as the compositions of the authors, see n. 24 below. There was a celebrated controversy concerning the historical reality of ancient generals’ giving speeches before battle: see Hansen, M. H., ‘The Battle Exhortation in Ancient Historiography. Fact or Fiction?’, Historia 42 (1993), 161–80Google Scholar; Pritchett (n. 16), 27–109; Hansen, M. H., ‘The Little Grey Horse: Henry V's Speech at Agincourt and the Battle Exhortation in Ancient Historiography’, Histos 2 (1998), 46–63 Google Scholar (reprinted in C&M 52 [2001], 95–116); Pritchett, W. K., ‘Ancient Greek Battle Speeches and a Palfrey’, in Pritchett, W. K., Ancient Greek Battle Speeches and a Palfrey (Amsterdam, 2002), 1–80 Google Scholar. Other contributions were Ehrhardt, C. T. H. R., ‘Speeches Before Battle?’, Historia 44 (1995), 120–1Google Scholar; Clark, M., ‘Did Thucydides Invent the Battle Exhortation?’, Historia 44 (1995), 375–6Google Scholar; Hornblower (n. 19), ii.82–6; and Hammond, N. G. L., ‘The Speeches in Arrian's Indica and Anabasis ’, CQ 49 (1999), 250 CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The controversy is ably summarized by Anson, E., ‘The General's Pre-Battle Exhortation in Graeco-Roman Warfare’, G&R 57 (2010), 304–18Google Scholar. There are three main arguments decisive for the historical reality of the practice of giving such speeches (which has no direct bearing on the historical accuracy of the battle speeches in the historians). The first is that ancient authors, even when not writing such a speech, refer to giving them as a custom and point to failures to give such speeches, they being expected (Thuc. 7.69.2, with Zoido, J. C. Iglesias, ‘¿Se pronunciaron realmente les arengas de Tucídides? El testimonio de Th. 7.61–70’, Athenaeum 88 [2000], 515–28Google Scholar; Caes. B Gall. 2.20–1, 5.33; Caes. B Civ. 3.90, cum militari more; Onasander 1.13–16; Tac. Hist. 4.33.1; Veg. Mil. 3.12), and allude to or enter into controversy about their efficacy (Thuc. 5.69 and Xen. Cyr. 3.3.44–55, both with Zoido, J. C. Iglesias, ‘Sobre la verdadera utilidad de la paraínesis en la historiographía de la época clásica. Tucídides y Jenofonte’, Veleia 32 [2015], 47–61 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Onasander 13.3). Second, such speeches have a prominent role in ancient technical military literature ( Aguilar, D. Paniagua, ‘La arenga militar desde la perspectiva de la tradición polemológica grecolatina’, Talia Dixit 2 [2007], 1–25 Google Scholar), which takes their reality for granted, as did the Byzantine tradition of military handbooks (Hambsch [n. 1], 230; Eramo, I., ‘A Word from the General: Ambrosianus B 119 sup. and Protreptic Speeches in Byzantine Military Manuals’, in Zoido, J. C. Iglesias and Pineda, V. [eds.], Anthologies of Historiographical Speeches from Antiquity to Early Modern Times [Leiden, 2017], 98–9, 110–12Google Scholar). A Byzantine treatise on the composition of such speeches survives, the Rhetorica militaris of Syrianus Magister (now conveniently accessible in Eramo, I., Siriano. Discorsi de guerra [Bari, 2010])Google Scholar, as do anthologies of such speeches (Eramo [this note (2017)], 100–9, 113–14). Third, there are also many Roman artistic depictions of the practice, especially on the Columns of Trajan (L. E. Baumer, ‘Adlocutio. Ikonographie und Programmatik der kaiserlichen Heeresansprachen an den Trajanssäule’, in Baumer, L. E., Hölscher, T., and Winkler, L., ‘Narrative Systematik und politisches Konzept in den Reliefs der Traianssäule. Drei Fallstudien’, JDAI 106 [1991], 278–87)Google Scholar and Marcus Aurelius ( David, J.-M., ‘Les contiones militaires des colonnes Trajane et Aurélienne. Les nécessités de l'adhésion’, in Scheid, J. and Huet, V. [eds.], Autour de la colonne Aurélienne [Turnhout, 2000], 213–26CrossRefGoogle Scholar), and on coins (J. Gómez Santacruz, ‘La iconografía del discurso militar [adlocutio] en Roma. Arquitectura conmemorativa y numismática’, in Iglesias Zoido [n. 1], 367–404). Auxiliary arguments are the archaeological attestation of structures for addressing troops (tribunals etc.) in Roman camps ( Polo, F. Pina, Las contiones civiles y militares en Roma [Zaragoza, 1989], 229–36Google Scholar); and, finally, that the practice of giving speeches before battle (and collecting them) has existed in every recoverable period of Western history and continues to the present ( Yellin, K., Battle Exhortation. The Rhetoric of Combat Leadership [Columbia, SC, 2008]Google Scholar; for medieval and early modern collections, see the essays in Iglesias Zoido and Pineda [this note]).

22 Pritchett (n. 16), 82–4; Carmona Centeno et al. (n. 3); and Harto Trujillo (n. 6), 34–40, categorize battle speeches thus, incidentally showing that the provision of such details was conventional. There is material for a whole book (Carmona [n. 1]) on speeches specified as being given by generals passing along the ranks (epipōleēsis), and Buongiovanni, C., ‘Il generale e il suo “pubblico”. Le allocuzioni alle truppe in Sallustio, Tacito, e Ammiano Marcellino’, in Abbamonte, G., Miletti, L., and Spina, L. (eds.), Discorsi alla prova (Naples, 2009), 67–75 Google Scholar, collects other details of the staging of such speeches included by historians: the structure from which the general spoke (see also Pina Polo [n. 21], 229), what he sat on, how he called for silence, etc.

23 On the Pharsalus speeches in Lucan, see esp. Goebel, G. H., ‘Rhetorical and Poetical Thinking in Lucan's Harangues (7.250–382)’, TAPhA 111 (1981), 79–94 Google Scholar. Manzano Ventura (n. 16), 67–8 nn. 201–4, gathers other literature.

24 Both Polyb. 12.25a–b and Lucian, Hist. conscr. 49, want the historian to find out and report the real words spoken by generals in their harangues, but Polybius himself did not achieve that goal in his speeches (see Marincola [n. 8], i.125). Later historians writing a harangue for the same general in the same battle where an earlier historian had already written one (where they did not simply decline to do so – see n. 8 above) appear to have felt somewhat constrained by the outlines of the earlier speech (Marincola [n. 8], i.129), but usually remodelled the speech heavily to create their own work of art and to stress themes that they favoured: ibid.; see also Gowing (n. 13); Centeno, D. Carmona, ‘ Variatio en el discurso exhortativo. La batalla de Zama’, Anuario de estudios filológicos 28 (2005), 5–19 Google Scholar; Iglesias Zoido (n. 20), 232–9; L. Ballesteros Pastor, ‘The Speeches in Justin's Corpusculum Florum: The Selection and Manipulation of Trogus’ Historiae Philippicae’, in Iglesias Zoido and Pineda (n. 21), 79–94. This suggests that they did not consider the earlier speech to represent something close to the actual words spoken, nor did they themselves expect to approach the words the historical general pronounced in writing their own version.

25 See Marincola (n. 8), i.122. Kemper, S., ‘Livius voor coaches. Redevoeringen van generaals bij Livius’, Lampas 38 (2005) 364–92Google Scholar, compares battle speeches to the stereotyped remarks made by modern athletic coaches before a game.

26 The tendency of Greek and Roman historians to avoid writing their own versions of surviving speeches by historical figures (Marincola [n. 8], i.129) and also of speeches written by previous historians (n. 8 above) flies in the face of the ancient habit of aemulatio, trying to do the same thing as a predecessor, only better. But note that within works of history the giving of such speeches by leaders could be considered to be a competition between those leaders, e.g. Hdt. 8.83; Xen. Hell. 1.1.30–1, with L. Miletti, ‘Contesti dei discorsi alle truppe nella storiografia greca. Erodoto, Tucidide, Senofonte’, in Abbamonte et al. (n. 22), 47–61.

27 We end our survey advisedly with the sixth-century ad Procopius; the battle speeches of the seventh-century Theophylact Simocatta are baroque indeed: 3.13, 5.4.

28 For competitive fighting in the Iliad, see Lendon, J. E., Soldiers and Ghosts. A History of Battle in Classical Antiquity (New Haven, CT, 2005), 20–36, 397–8Google Scholar, with references and literature; for competitive speaking, see Schofield, M., ‘ Euboulia in the Iliad ’, CQ 36 (1986), esp. 9–10CrossRefGoogle Scholar. For the ancient controversy about the role of morale in battle, see Lendon, J. E., ‘The Rhetoric of Combat: Greek Military Theory and Roman Culture in Julius Caesar's Battle Descriptions’, ClAnt 18 (1999), 290–304 Google Scholar; Whately, C., Battles and Generals. Combat, Culture, and Didacticism in Procopius’ Wars (Leiden, 2016), 25–31 Google Scholar.

29 Breitenbach, H. R., Historiographische Anschauungsformen Xenophons (Freiburg in der Schweiz, 1950), 70–87 Google Scholar; Lendon (n. 28 [1999]), 290–5; Lendon, J. E., ‘Xenophon and the Alternative to Realist Foreign Policy: Cyropaedia 3.1.14–31’, JHS 126 (2006), 88–91 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

30 See the works of Frontinus (first century ad), Polyaenus (second century ad), and Julius Africanus (third century ad). On this tradition, see esp. Krentz, P. and Wheeler, E. L., Polyaenus. Stratagems of War, 2 vols. (Chicago, IL, 1994) i.vi–xxivGoogle Scholar; Wheeler, E. L., Stratagem and the Vocabulary of Military Trickery (Leiden, 1988)Google Scholar; Wheeler, E. L., ‘Polyaenus: Scriptor Militaris ’, in Brodersen, K. (ed.), Polyainos. Neue Studien/Polyaenus. New Studies (Berlin, 2010), 19–36 Google Scholar.

31 Onasander 1.13, 6.5, 9.3, 10.9, 10.20, 10.25–6, 13, 14.1–3, 22.2–4, 23.1–2, 24, 28, 29.2, 34, 35.5, 36, 38.3, 39.6–7, 41.2, 42.1–2, 42.12–13, 42.17. For this author, see the very learned commented edition of Petrocelli, C., Onasandro. Il generale. Manuale per l'esercizio del comando (Bari, 2008)Google Scholar. And compare, at the end of our era, the similar sentiments of Procopius, as noted by Whately (n. 28), 134–9.

32 See also Tac. Hist. 3.17.1 for the same emphasis on the psychological; but contrast Livy 9.17.15 for a more tactically minded list of a general's duties in battle.

33 See David, J.-M., ‘Le chef et sa troupe’, in Dupont, F. (ed.), Paroles romaines (Nancy, 1995), 35–42 Google Scholar.

34 Ibid., 38–9; Oakley, S. P., A Commentary on Livy Books VI–X, 4 vols. (Oxford, 1997–2005)Google Scholar, ad loc. Livy 9.13.1.

35 See also Hdt. 7.224–32, 8.11, 8.93, 9.71–5, 9.105. For Homer's epitaphs, see Mueller, M., The Iliad (London, 1984), 89–95 Google Scholar. For Herodotus’ imitation of Homer's epitaphs, see Miniconi, P.-J., Étude des themes ‘guerriers’ de la poésie épique greco-romaine (Paris, 1951), 48 Google Scholar; Boedeker, D., ‘Pedestrian Fatalities: The Prosaics of Death in Herodotus’, in Derow, P. and Parker, R. (eds.), Herodotus and His World (Oxford, 2003), 34–5Google Scholar, but also pointing out that Herodotus’ epitaphs are usually far less extended than Homer's.

36 On competition between wings, see Oakley (n. 34), ad loc. Livy 9.40.8–11. For Roman decorations and Greek awards for courage, see Lendon, J. E., ‘Battle Description in the Ancient Historians, Part I: Structure, Array, and Fighting’, G&R 64.1 (2017), 57 n. 51Google Scholar.

37 For Dionysius, see Gaida, E., Die Schlachtschilderungen in den Antiquitates Romanae des Dionys von Halikarnaß (Breslau, 1934), 40 Google Scholar, with e.g. Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. 9.13.3, 20.2.4. For Procopius, 1.18.38, 4.21.26–8, 5.18.29–33, 8.29.22–8; also Amm. Marc. 31.13.12–19.

38 On numbers killed, see Oakley (n. 34), ad loc. Livy 7.17.9. For the recording of the dead, see, for the Greek tradition, Rzepka, J., ‘The Casualty Figures of Alexander's Army’, in Howe, T., Müller, S., and Stoneman, R. (eds.), Ancient Historiography on War and Empire (Oxford, 2017), 169–76Google Scholar; for the Roman, see Peretz, D., ‘Military Burial and the Identification of the Roman Fallen Soldiers’, Klio 87 (2005), 123–38CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

39 On standards captured, see Oakley (n. 34), ad loc. Livy 7.37.16; Erdkamp, P., ‘Valerius Antias and Livy's Casualty Reports’, in Deroux, C. (ed.), Studies in Latin Literature and Roman History XIII (Brussels, 2006), 166 Google Scholar n. *, 169–77, 180–1. On the number of hours a battle lasted, see Oakley (n. 34), ad loc. 8.38.10. Livy had a source – usually identified as Valerius Antias ( Laroche, R. A., ‘Valerius Antias: Livy's Source for the Number of Military Standards Captured in Battle in Books XX–XLV’, Latomus 47 [1988], 758–71Google Scholar) – who gave very full lists of things captured in Roman battles – not only standards taken, but prisoners, wagons, horses, and elephants both killed and captured. But not even Livy regularly reproduced all the details that that source gave him, and the larger tradition chose not to go in that direction.

40 On the absence of casualty figures in Tacitus, see R. Ash, ‘Tacitus and the Battle of Mons Graupius: A Historiographical Route Map?’, in Marincola (n. 8),  ii.439. Subsequent to the results passage there might – rarely but strikingly – be a passage describing the stricken field, usually being inspected by the winning leader (Hannibal's tour of the field of Cannae at Livy 22.51 is perhaps the most famous); for the topoi of such scenes, see Pagán, V. E., ‘The Mourning After: Statius Thebaid 12’, AJPh 121 (2000), 423–52Google Scholar (and n. 14 for their rarity). A short portrait of the victorious general dealing with the consequences of his victory is also sometimes present: see Hau, L. I., ‘The Victor after the Victory: A Narrative Set-Piece in Greek Historiography from Herodotus to Diodorus of Sicily’, in Bragg, E., Hau, L. I., and Macaulay-Lewis, E. (eds.), Beyond the Battlefields. New Perspectives on Warfare and Society in the Graeco-Roman World (Newcastle, 2008), 121–43Google Scholar.

41 Polybius thought that the challenges of describing land and sea battles were sufficiently different that one historian – Ephorus – could be said to be good at the one and bad at the other (12.25f.1).

42 On hostility to psychology, see Keegan, J., The Face of Battle (New York, 1986 [London, 19761]), 27–36 Google Scholar. Kagan, K., The Eye of Command (Ann Arbor, MI, 2006)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, comes to a similarly positive evaluation of ancient battle descriptions, but from different premises than mine.

43 On literature moulding reality, see Lendon (n. 28 [2005]); Whitby, M., ‘Reconstructing Ancient Warfare’, in Sabin, P., van Wees, H., and Whitby, M. (eds.), The Cambridge History of Greek and Roman Warfare, 2 vols. (Cambridge, 2007)Google Scholar, i.59, with i.60–4 on author-participants in battle.

44 Hdt. 6.12–15, 8.9–11, 8.15; cf. Libanius, Prog. 12.11.1 (Foerster viii.489). When a sea battle is not dynamic, but the ships raft up and soldiers fight it out on the decks, Thucydides  marks that as odd (1.49), and in imitation of Thucydides the ‘land battle on the sea’ became a topos: see Gowing, A. M., The Triumviral Narratives of Appian and Cassius Dio (Ann Arbor, MI, 1992), 219 n. 32Google Scholar.

45 On material for the description of a sea battle borrowed from other authors, including from Thucydides’ battle in the Great Harbour at Syracuse, see Reggi, G., ‘Cesare e il racconto delle battaglie navali sotto Marsiglia’, RIL 136 (2002), 71–108 Google Scholar.

46 De Romilly (n. 11 [1956]), 150–72 (= n. 11 [2012], 87–102); also translated as de Romilly, J., ‘A Highly Complex Battle-Account: Syracuse’, in Rusten, J. S. (ed.), Oxford Readings in Classical Studies. Thucydides (Oxford 2009), 359–77Google Scholar. For this battle, see also Tenuta, E. Avezzú, ‘Il racconto di battaglia in Tucidide. Lo scarto stilistico come costante della disfatta in Sicilia’, Bollettino dell'Istituto di Filologia Greca dell'Università di Padova 4 (1977–78), 89–102 Google Scholar; Rutter, N. K., Thucydides Books VI and VII. A Companion to the Penguin Translation of Rex Warner (Bristol, 1989), 55–6Google Scholar; Centeno, D. Carmona, ‘La batalla del Puerto de Siracusa. Tucídides o el imitador de Homero’, SemRom n.s. 3 (2014), 95–115 Google Scholar.

47 See Hunter (n. 11), 113–15.

48 De Romilly (n. 11 [1956]), 162–4 (= n. 11 [2012], 95–7); Finley, J. H., Three Essays on Thucydides (Cambridge, MA, 1967), 47 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Avezzú Tenuta (n. 46), 89–94, 99–101. For Aeschylus on Salamis, see Pelling, C., ‘Aeschylus’ Persae and History’, in Pelling, C. (ed.), Greek Tragedy and the Historian (Oxford, 1997), 1–19 Google Scholar.

49 Carmona Centeno (n. 46) traces the many Iliadic allusions in this battle description.

50 Again, Aeschylus’ Persae may have been his inspiration here; see n. 48. For Thucydides’ description of emotion in battle descriptions as a literary escape mechanism, see Paul, G. M., ‘Two Battles in Thucydides’, EMC 31 (1987), 311–12Google Scholar.

51 For ancient critical praise, and the suggestion that this description ought to be emulated, see Dion. Hal. Thuc. 371; Plut. Mor. 347a–c. For lists of imitations, see Hornblower (n. 19), ad loc. 7.71.1; Walker, A. D., ‘ Enargeia and the Spectator in Greek Historiography’, TAPhA 123 (1993), 353–77Google Scholar.

52 For Romulus, see Dion. Hal. Ant. Rom. 2.41.3; cf. 3.19–20; for Cynoscephalae, see Polyb. 18.25.1; cf. 1.44.5, 3.43.6–8; Livy 33.9.4; for the Jugurthine War, see Sall. Iug. 60.3–4; for Massilia, see Caes. B Civ. 2.4–7; for Naulochos, Cass. Dio 49.9–10. For this topos in general, see Bucher, G. S., ‘Fictive Elements in Appian's Pharsalus Narrative’, Phoenix 59 (2005)Google Scholar, 59 n. 26. Carmona Centeno (n. 46), 109–11, traces Thucydides’ description of the experience of the watchers back to the Iliad. On the depiction of Homeric warfare as viewed, see Myers, T., ‘“What if We Had a War and Everybody Came?” War as Spectacle and the Duel of Iliad 3’, in Bakogianni, A. and Hope, V. M. (eds.), War as Spectacle (London, 2015), 25–42 Google Scholar.