[Authors and titles are listed at the end of the review]
This book offers an admirably broad survey of courage and/or cowardice as it is presented in Near Eastern, Greek, and Roman sources from the Bronze Age to the age of Justinian. It comprises an Introduction, twenty-three chapters by individual specialists in their fields distributed among five thematic sections, and an Epilogue.
Jenn Finn’s Introduction summarizes the need for the in-depth examination of the topics the volume offers, surveys the state of scholarship on them, and outlines the structure of the work.
The first of the thematic sections, “Courage and Cowardice: Setting the Groundwork”, opens with Sarah Melvile’s survey of courage in Mesopotamian royal inscriptions. These show that the gods provide courage to kings who inspire it in their soldiers. Enemies flee in the face of a king’s radiance or because the gods have withdrawn their support owing to an enemy king’s transgressions. Emrys Schlatter next argues that there’s no single term for courage or cowardice in the Iliad. Military excellence derives from a cluster of physical and emotional characteristics and qualities that are witnessed by participants and that give rise to a reputation. Flight from battle is merely the result of a realistic evaluation of one’s own abilities vs. an opponent’s. Lidewij van Gils and Luuk Huitink examine courage as represented in generals’ speeches, in historians’ comments on battles, and as described in battles themselves. Rhiannon Ash surveys examples of courage and cowardice in Roman historiography, which are revealed to be complex and intertwined concepts. Philip de Souza catalogues examples of naval daring in Greece and Rome. He notes that it was easy to accuse sailors of cowardice because their hit-and-run raids typically entailed retreat to ships when strong opposition appeared.
Angela Hobbs’s examination of how courage is defined in Plato, Aristotle and the Stoics opens section 2 on “Philosophy.” The philosophers see courage on the battlefield as part but not the entirety of courage, which is linked to various other concepts and ideals. Next Matthew Christ takes up Xenophon’s views on courage. Education makes men courageous, while the dishonor resulting from cowardice is also effective. The job of a leader is to convince men that if they are courageous, they will share in benefits of victory. Finally, Jared Secord shows that under the Empire philosophers established hierarchy of courage, tending to downplay courage in ordinary soldiers while allotting emperors (and others) a higher form of it. Writers of military manuals believed generals should be philosophers, but as warfare become more important in late second century, generals’ courage became more closely associated with war.
Section 3, “Courage and Its Limits,” begins with Gina Konstantopoulos’s look at courage and fear in Sumerian texts dealing with gods and humans. Courage is described in these mainly as not showing fear, and while gods rarely show fear, humans do. Katherine Lu Hsu next examines courage and cowardice among non-Greeks, women and non-elites in the Iliad. While goddesses evince courage in battle, human women don’t fight. The Amazons of myth, who do, must be defeated by men, while non-elite fighting in Iliad absent. These portrayals represent means to maintain elite men’s power: only they can do deeds that accomplish kleos and validate their title to lead. Sara Phang shows that little virtus appears in Tacitus’s Histories. Instead, the recklessness and rage of the soldiers are prominent. Senatorial officers are cowardly because they have little experience in war and are ready to surrender or change sides. They do not look back to exempla of courage to guide their actions in the present. Charlie Trimm notes that an enemy’s courage is rarely mentioned in Ancient Near Eastern texts; rather, they flee when a king appears in battles. When enemy courage is described, it is to enhance a king’s martial prowess in defeating them. However, in the Hebrew Bible the Israelites experience fear, even defeat, because, unlike other Near Eastern cultures, the success of their king was not synonymous with the success of Yahweh. Sabine Müller next argues that Macedonian kings were expected to be courageous warriors, an image reflected in their coinage. Portraits of Alexander are in keeping with this image although literary presentations of him reveal both idealization and in some cases a negative bias. Finally, Nikolaus Overtoom notes that prejudiced Greek and Roman sources present the Parthians as courageous but also duplicitous and cowardly barbarians, because they do not understand their hit-and-run tactics and strategy, mistaking these for fear and cowardice.
The next section, “The Individual and the Collective,” begins with Katheryn Milne’s demonstration that courage in the Roman Republic was shown only in battles, and that because Roman soldiers fought in formations, the only acts that warranted military decorations were for voluntarily exposing oneself to risk outside of these. She goes on to discuss what it took to win these in context of ancient hand to hand combat. Lee Brice next shows that fear is simply a physiological reaction to stress due to danger while cowardice is a cultural label for fear. Individual soldiers experience fear, but it becomes a problem when it spreads to a group of soldiers. Training, discipline, morale, horizontal and vertical cohesion, and leadership were ways to manage fear, which originates in the unknown and impending combat. Lastly, Philip Rance argues that Procopius’s depictions of courage in single combats and elsewhere owes little to Homer. He drew instead on accounts of members of Belisarius’s staff, elite warriors who were eager to show courage in battle.
Section 5, “Fear and Flight, Punishment and Reward,” begins with Anthony Spalinger’s examination of four key New Kingdom battles, Kadesh, Megiddo, Pinachy, and Kamose, in terms of their focus on the pharaoh’s courage and others’ fear. His analysis of pictorial evidence enhances his analysis of the literary testimonies. Philippe Clancier demonstrates that royal inscriptions, chronicles, and Assyrian letters in first millennium Mesopotamia all show the king as always courageous and his enemies as cowards, frightened by his majesty. Fear of the king is a good thing since it causes submission and the proper ordering of the world. Cezary Kucewicz next confronts the paradox that throwing away one’s shield is a crime and shameful in classical Greece while in the archaic period a more ambivalent attitude prevailed: sometimes it is allowed to save one’s life as in Archilochus’s well-known poem. A change occurred in the early sixth century as poleis assumed more control over warfare and phalanges replaced the fluid combat of archaic warbands. Earlier, fleeing was simply a personal issue; now an individual’s flight might cause a phalanx to collapse, so communities passed laws to prevent it. Courage in Thucydides, according to Edith Foster, is the ability to act, while fear prevents action. No moral judgement attaches to either. The designation of courage is impartial; anyone can demonstrate it. Courage consists in confronting challenges. The inability to meet them is not cowardice but a species of aporia that can affect even those whose training and bravery are the greatest. Next John Hyland shows that fear of the king in Achaemenid Persia keeps the strong from hurting the weak. Kings are fearless and are given victory by god, as shown by the flight of enemies. While courage is manly and fear womanly, a strategic retreat could be acceptable. However, Darius’s flights after Issus and Gaugamela were not efforts to protect him because his death had cosmic implications but rather his defeats showed he’d lost divine favor, which made defeat inevitable and undercut his title to rule. Finally, David Potter notes that habituation kept imperial soldiers in battle, along with fear either of letting their comrades down or of punishment. Under the empire, emperors never called soldiers comilitiones. Military awards went to senators and equestrians, more as rank increased, and not to common soldiers. Rather, military standards were a common point of veneration. Military discipline meted out by centurions was harsh, but effective. However, the community created among soldiers was more important to maintaining discipline.
An “Epilogue” by Andrei Zavaliy concludes the work, offers extensive summaries of the narrative chapters, and suggests some future lines of research. Since most readers are likely to consult the work rather than read it cover-to-cover, his chapter would form a very good starting point.
Despite the high quality of the individual chapters it contains, there is a sense that, while the book is certainly not less than the sum of its parts, it is not significantly more. What it lacks is a strong synthesis drawing together and comparing what the specific chapters have to say about courage and cowardice on the ancient battlefield. For example, one looks in vain for any analysis of the striking shift from Bronze Age conceptions of these qualities in humans as dependent on the divine to classical Greece and Republican and Imperial Rome, where they are products of a range of human initiatives: training and discipline, legislation, unit cohesion, or even the ability or inability to take action, among other things. The expansion or shrinking of definitions of courage as military activity waxes or wanes also would be worth exploring. The book really offers only a prolegomenon to a full study of courage and cowardice on the battlefields of the ancient Near East and Mediterranean. It is to be hoped that someone, perhaps the volume’s editor, will build on these chapters to write that important work.
Authors and titles
Introduction
- Courage and Cowardice in Ancient Mediterranean Warfare: a Continuum of Virtue? (Jenn Finn)
Part 1: Courage and Cowardice: Setting the Groundwork
- lū awīlāt! (Be a Man!) The vocabulary of Courage in Mesopotamian Royal Inscriptions (Sarah C. Melville)
- Dancing for Ares: Courage and Concepts of Martial Excellence on the Homeric Battlefield (Emrys Schlatter)
- “Standing Your Ground”: Discourses of Courage on the Battlefield in Greek and Roman Historiography (Lidewij van Gils and Luuk Huitink)
- “Deserted by His Men, He Fell” (Tacitus, Annales20.2): Paradigms of Courage and Cowardice in Roman Historiography (Rhiannon Ash)
- Courage and Cowardice in Ancient Naval Warfare (Philip de Souza)
Part 2: Philosophy
- Courage and Cowardice in Greece and Rome: the Philosophical Debate (Angela Hobbs)
- Xenophon on Leadership and Courage (Matthew Christ)
- Emperors and Courage in the Military Handbooks of the Roman Empire (Jared Secord)
Part 3: Courage and Its Limits
- May It Learn to Fear Me: Divine and Human Models of Courage and Cowardice in Sumerian Texts (Gina Konstantopoulos)
- Beyond Heroes: an “Economy of Kleos” in Greek Myth (Katherine Lu Hsu)
- Courage and Cowardice in Tacitus’ Histories (Sara Elise Phang)
- Praising Courageous Enemies in the Ancient Near East as the Background to Hardening Pharaoh’s Heart (Charlie Trimm)
- Courage and Cowardice in Ancient Warfare: Alexander the Great between Fact and Fiction (Sabine Müller)
- Concepts of Courage and Cowardice in the Formation of the Parthian State (Nikolaus Leo Overtoom)
Part 4: The Individual and the Collective
- Military Courage and the Ordinary Infantryman in the Roman Republic (Kathryn H. Milne)
- Fear and Collective Action in the Roman Military (Lee L. Brice)
- Heroes, Homer, and Historiography on the Late Antique Battlefield: Constructing Courage in Procopius’ Wars (Philip Rance)
Part 5: Fear and Flight, Punishment and Reward
- Courage and Cowardice in Egyptian Royal Narratives: Some Literary Aspects of Human Behavior (Anthony J. Spalinger)
- The Courage of the Victor and the Cowardice of the Vanquished in First Millennium BCE Mesopotamia (Philippe Clancier)
- Rhipsaspia in Ancient Greek Literary Tradition (Cezary Kucewicz)
- Courage in Thucydides (Edith Foster)
- Flight from Battle and Constructions of Cowardice in Achaemenid Persia (John O. Hyland)
- Imperial Courage (David Potter)
Epilogue
- Courage: an Ambivalent and Elusive Virtue (Andrei G. Zavaliy)