#bret devereaux

[st-just]

This isn’t because they are ‘lazy’ – the ‘lazy peasant’ (or poor worker generally) is a standard hypocrisy of the literature of the leisured aristocratic class towards poor farmers, today and in the past – but because they have priorities which are simply not served by labor maximization. For these families, the marginal value of working harder to produce a little bit more which they cannot eat and will likely be taken from them anyway is minimal; they focus on the goals they have. Why should these peasants break their backs so that leisured aristocrats can have more economic activity to tax? Remember: these people were poor, not stupid.

-Bret Devereaux, Bread: How Did They Make It?

#quote #history #sociology #Bret Devereaux

[nerianasims]

But war, war is something fascists value intensely because the beating heart of fascist ideology is a desire to prove heroic masculinity in the crucible of violent conflict (arising out of deep insecurity, generally). Or as Eco puts it, “For Ur-Fascism there is no struggle for life, but, rather, life is lived for struggle…life is permanent warfare” and as a result, “everyone is educated to become a hero.” Being good at war is fundamentally central to fascism in nearly all of its forms – indeed, I’d argue nothing is so central. Consequently, there is real value in showing that fascism is, in fact, bad at war, which it is...

And the most fundamental strategic objective of every state or polity is to survive, so the failure to ensure that basic outcome is a severe failure indeed.

Judged by that metric, fascist governments are terrible at war. There haven’t been all that many fascist governments, historically speaking and a shocking percentage of them started wars of choice which resulted in the absolute destruction of their regime and state, the worst possible strategic outcome. Most long-standing states have been to war many times, winning sometimes and losing sometimes, but generally able to preserve the existence of their state even in defeat. At this basic task, however, fascist states usually fail...

Fascist governments, as Eco notes, “are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy.” Fascism’s cult of machismo also tends to be a poor fit for modern, industrialized and mechanized war, while fascism’s disdain for the intellectual is a poor fit for sound strategic thinking. Put bluntly, fascism is a loser’s ideology, a smothering emotional safety blanket for deeply insecure and broken people (mostly men), which only makes their problems worse until it destroys them and everyone around them...

Fascism – and indeed, authoritarianisms of all kinds – are ideologies which fail to deliver the things a wise, sane people love – liberty, prosperity, stability and peace – but they also fail to deliver the things they promise.

These are loser ideologies. For losers. Like a drunk fumbling with a loaded pistol, they would be humiliatingly comical if they weren’t also dangerous. And they’re bad at war.

#bret devereaux #fascism #war

[space-wizards]

Bret Deveraux, summarizing the various ways Sparta sucked ass. Convenient!

#acoup #bret devereaux

[confusedbyinterface]

The fact that Cleopatra stays for a month after Caesar’s death suggests to me that she hoped to get Caesarion recognized as Caesar’s heir, which in turn suggests that Cleopatra had a poor grasp of Roman law and politics, both not realizing that her mere presence was a liability to the one person she needed to succeed (and not be stabbed 23 times) and also that the quest to get Rome to acknowledge Caesarion as Caesar’s heir was almost certainly hopeless. Caesarion could not be Caesar’s heir; as a non-citizen Caesarion wasn’t even a valid target as primary heir of Caesar’s will and so the chances of getting him recognized as Caesar’s heir through a Roman court was basically nil. In any case, Caesar’s will made Octavian his sole heir, which is a twist Cleopatra really ought to have seen coming since Caesar was openly preparing the fellow and planning to bring him along on his next campaign. Personally, I suspect Caesar always knew Caesarion wouldn’t be acceptable in Rome and never had any intention of making him his heir; that Cleopatra doesn’t seem to have known this is a striking indictment of her political acumen. And if you are thinking, “but wait, Antonius later seems to think he might be able to sell this at Rome” – yes, he might well have. He was also a lot less politically astute than Caesar.

Devereaux wouldn't say "Famous himbo Marcus Antonius" but I'm certainly thinking it

#roman history #cleopatra #marc antony #julius caesar #bret devereaux #acoup

[heroineimages]

The hammer Sparta has, of course, is hoplite battle. Sparta seeks to solve almost all of its issues by applying a hoplite phalanx to the problem, regardless of if the problem can be solved by a hoplite phalanx. Spartan strategic thinking is thus marred by both a failure to consider military solutions that did not consist of traditional hoplite battles, as well as an inability to consider or execute non-military solutions at all.

Bret Devereaux, "This. Isn't. Sparta."

#Bret Devereaux #history #Greek history #Classical Greece #blog posts #discussion

[lifeattomsdiner]

pffffffft

(source)

#history #bret devereaux

[stainlesssteellocust]

I like Bret Deveraux and his content but I hate those people who read one (1) ACOUP article and immediately think they’re god’s gift to ancient history

#bret devereaux #acoup #a collection of unmitigated pedantry #history

[fallowhearth]

And I think the answer is that there are actually two kinds of city builders: games about cities as spaces for people and games about cities as systems for production. Most modern city builders are, in fact, the former, interested in the city as a place for people to live and work. [...]

And here, the jump backwards in design for Neb[uchadnezzar] and P[haroah: A New Era] was quite sharp. I knew back when I played Caesar III in 1999, I was supposed to kind of imagine a real living city underneath the systems I was interacting with. By contrast, in 2021 or 2023, the decision not to have even the fig-leaf of such a simulation is a design choice. Instead, strip off the thin layer of paint and you realize that mechanically these games have more in common with Factorio or Satisfactory than they do with Farthest Frontier or Cities: Skylines. Cities are not living, breathing spaces for people in Neb. or P:ANE but rather mechanistic mega-factories for producing specific goods (mostly armies and monuments) and so what gets simulated are the elements of industrial production; people who aren’t workers don’t matter. [...]

Certainly some of that is the old Impressions influence, but I also think it speaks to the way the ancient world is understood by developers and the public. Medieval city builders have increasingly come to imagine cities as being driven by and fundamentally being about the people who live in them (with some exceptions, e.g. Stronghold). But ancient cities are instead instrumental: economic engines for social elites to produce things they want with. Notably nearly all of the ancient city builders explicitly place the player as a ruler, a pharaoh, a Roman governor, a Mesopotamian king (in contrast to the player as a mayor or other sort of elected representative) and generally their scenarios are set by having the political powers that be set objectives for the city.

Bret Devereaux

#Bret Devereaux #city building games #I never finished Nebuchadnezzar either #I'm not 100% on some of the analysis in this article but it's interesting

[theoutcastrogue]

The normal expectation for Greek tyranny is that the system works like the Empire from Star Wars: A New Hope, where the new tyrant abolishes the Senate, appoints his own cronies to formal positions as rules and general makes himself Very Obviously and Formally In Charge. But this isn’t how tyranny generally worked: the tyrant was Very Obviously but not formally in charge, because he ruled extra-constitutonally, rather than abolishing the constitution. This is what separates tyranny, a form of extra-constitutional one man rule, from monarchy, a form of traditional and thus constitutional one-man rule. [...]

Having seized power, those tyrants do not seem to have abolished key civic institutions: they do not disband the ekklesia [assembly of citizens] or the law courts. Instead, the tyrant controls these things by co-opting the remaining elite families, using violence and the threat of violence against those who would resist and installing cronies in positions of power. Tyrants also seem to have bought a degree of public acquiescence from the demos [the citizen body] by generally targeting the oligoi [the few, the elite]. And it isn’t hard to see how the fiction of a functioning polis government could be a useful tool for a tyrant to maintain power.

That extra-constitutional nature of tyranny, where the tyrant exists outside of the formal political system (even though he may hold a formal office of some sort) also seems to have contributed to tyranny’s fragility. Thales was supposedly asked what the strangest thing he had ever seen was and his answer was, “An aged tyrant”, and indeed tyranny was fragile. Tyrants struggled to hold power and while most seem to have tried to pass that power to an heir, few succeed; no tyrant ever achieves the dream of establishing a stable, monarchical dynasty. Instead, tyrants tend to be overthrown, leading to a return to either democratic or oligarchic polis government, since the institutions of those forms of government remained.

#Bret Devereaux #theory #the city speaks

[jurakan]

Bret “Orc Logistics Guy” Devereaux watched “Rings of Power”

Highlights:

#ACOUP #Bret Devereaux #Rings of Power #LotR

[dwellordream]

“The process of (usually violently) gathering food in hostile territory is referred to in a military context as ‘foraging,’ a fairly bloodless word for what could be a quite ugly process.

As we discussed in our series on farming, one of the structural problems farmers faced is that they eat every day but the harvest only comes in once a year. The obvious solution was stockpiling the results of the harvest to last through the year. As a result just before the harvest a farming village has a year’s worth of grain growing in its fields and just after the harvest a year’s worth of grain threshed, winnowed and sitting in its granaries, barns and farmhouses.

That stock depletes over time (as the farmers eat it) hopefully never quite reaching zero before the next harvest comes in. The same cycle (on slightly different timing) goes for green fodder, with grasses ripening in the late spring and being most scarce in winter.

Most armies could do relatively little with grain in the fields, but by aiming to commence operations in late spring/early summer allows the army to arrive in enemy territory right as the winter wheat (the main European/Mediterranean wheat crop) has been stockpiled in the granaries having just been harvested (in early summer, the exact days vary by region).

I should note that grain is not the only concern here; the availability of green fodder (read: grass) is also crucial; green fodder tends to come in somewhat earlier than grains and often marks the true beginning of the campaign season. Having readily available green fodder vastly reduces the logistics demands of horses and other work animals, making it much easier to keep the rest of the army supplied.

Roman armies, for instance, were mobilized in March (Roman Martius, the month of Mars, because the Romans are not subtle) for this reason; the general rule of thumb is that the campaigning season in Europe began with the Spring Equinox in late March. But this timing means that by the time the army is mustered and moving into enemy territory, the harvest is close.

Meanwhile recall that the farms are not scattered randomly; they are clustered into small settlements, which connect to each other and larger settlements by roads and paths. Each small settlement (villages, hamlets, monasteries (in the post-antique); for simplicity’s sake I’m just going to say ‘village’) is essentially a food piñata for the army: full of food but some violence required for extraction.

Thus as an army advanced it could break off smaller units to take side roads and paths to the villages of the countryside. The villagers generally would be no military obstacle: outnumbered, untrained, unarmed and often unaware there was an army coming (remember, this is a world where the fastest moving information is ‘man on horse’ so a foraging party could often outrace news of its coming) they had few options for direct resistance.

The foraging party could then demand the villagers turn over their produce or, more often (since villagers tended to flee foraging parties and for good reason as we’ll see) simply break into houses, granaries and barns to seize it. They could also seize and lead off farm animals for meat. Thus the army could be supplied off of the produce of the enemy (or at least, the enemy’s poor rural population).

Now I said ‘smaller units’ but we should be clear here, ‘foraging parties’ tend to actually be quite large. The concern isn’t the villagers; a normal village typically has only around 5-20 households (so a few hundred people, roughly half of them adults) and isn’t configured for defense anyway. But you are in enemy territory and so while part of the party forages another part – large enough to defend itself from a significant enemy force – needs to be keeping guard.

Rogers’ (op. cit., 77-8) notes that foraging parties could represent up to a third of a medieval European army’s total army’s strength, typically split between fast-moving outriders who surprised settlements and slower moving foragers who then caught up to loot them. The Rule of the Knights Templar, which included campaign regulations, specified that knights could not send out members of their retinue to forage or even fetch wood without permissions (Verbruggen, The Art of Warfare in Western Europe During the Middle Ages (1997), 78), essentially banning small-scale foraging in favor of larger parties.

…The non-combatants of the army were also likely to be a part of the foraging party, participating in both the ransacking of settlements and of course the carrying off of loot and supplies. Roman camp servants (generally enslaved persons), the calones we mentioned last time seem regularly to have been part of foraging parties and we know that they were at least sometimes armed.

It is hard to see non-combatants in medieval sources but a knight’s retinue would include both lower-class combatants and servants; in some cases ‘forager’ was a specific position in such a retinue (Rogers, op. cit. 28) but we have to imagine in many cases servants whose job was ‘carry stuff’ would, of course be employed carrying looted supplies too.

In early modern armies it is very clear that camp women were a regular part of foraging parties, connected to the role they had in managing the camp’s cooking and logistics. Early modern artwork showing scenes of forage or pillage regularly features camp women (see below) and sources repeatedly mention camp women involved in what Lynn (op. cit.) terms the ‘pillage economy’ as a joint venture with their husbands or other menfolk.

It speaks to the normalization of this part of warfare that despite how stunningly violent foraging could be (as we’ll get to), common soldiers in early modern armies do not seem to have thought twice about bringing their wives along.

…Now the peasantry in these situations cannot really fight back, but that doesn’t mean they have no options at all. Unlike the approaching army, the peasants know the local landscape and (if given enough warning) can easily vanish into it (like those shepherds vanishing into the forest). As Landers puts it, “armed men could usually rely on violence or the threat of it to take what they wanted, but they had to find it first” (op. cit. 215).

Peasants were canny survivors who knew how to, for instance, quickly hide valuables or food or grab what they could and flee. A significant portion of their grain was kept back, for instance, as seed grain to plant for the following year; it didn’t need to be eaten and so the smart peasant might intentionally hide it if he thought there was risk of being foraged.

A foraging army could try to defeat this resistance through terror: burning the farms of farmers who fled or holding captured farmers hostage against their hidden food and valuables. The value of getting to the peasants with enough speed to capture them before they melted away into the countryside made cavalry particularly valuable for an army foraging.

Horsemen, moving fast could reach the village before they knew the attack was coming, preventing peasants from hiding grain or fleeing (so they could be forced to divulge the location of supplies or ransomed). At the same time, political authorities who suspected their region might come under attack may give orders to move all of the surplus food into the fortified settlements, dramatically reducing the forage available in the countryside.

How much food might be available in the best case? Well a fairly typical village might have a couple hundred people in it (something like a dozen households; peasant households tend to be large). Their grain for the whole year (so 365 days worth of grain) is going to be gathered in just a few weeks at the harvest in early summer or late spring.

So a village, for instance, of around 200 people is going to have something like 70,000 man-days of grain on hand (plus or minus; some of those people don’t eat as much as an adult male soldier, but then there is also some surplus grain, feed for animals and other non-grain foodstuffs).

If you could get all of that food (which the peasants are trying to prevent), you could fill the packs of an army of 10,000 to march for another week. Of course actual rural settlement is going vary a lot more than this (larger villages, smaller hamlets, small unwalled towns bigger than both, the occasional isolated homestead).

Now that ideal will rarely be achieved, especially over a large area. Military rules of thumb typically approach foraging from the standpoint of how much population density Y is required to support X number of troops under campaign conditions.

…Consequently an army that wanted to move quickly would accept that it was going to miss quite a lot of the available forage in an area, either by doing a continuous but not very intensive ‘initial pass’ or by performing high intensity foraging operations only every few days. After all, the army’s ability to carry food is limited in any event.

Moreover, remember that these armies often lack detailed maps and so many small settlements may escape being plundered by simply being missed; others by seeing smoke or other signs of an army with time to grab everything of value and hide or flee. Being careful and methodical could mean getting more food out of the countryside, but it would also be slower and our army does not want to slow down.

That means foraging does not hit every village in a region evenly: some villages may be extensively searched, with all of the hidden seed grain and valuables found, others may be given a quick once-over with just the storehouse looted, while others will be missed entirely. Our sample 200 square miles of daily foraging reach might have something like two dozen villages in it of varying sizes.

…Of course the season also matters here. So far we’ve been assuming the army hits a village more or less in June or July, immediately following the harvest. But as the months go by the amount of grain in those village storehouses is going to dwindle as it is eaten by the peasantry, meaning that the potential gains from foraging peak after the harvest and then decline over the year.

A general planning the logistics of his army needs to be thinking about how he will feed his soldiers not just in June but also in October and potentially even in January or February. As noted by late fall the amount of food available in the countryside has declined by half; our sample 20,000 man army suddenly goes from being at a comfortable 5% of available forage (at that 25 per square mile density) to a far less comfortable 10% (at which point it would become pressingly necessary to keep moving to avoid exhausting local supplies).

The campaign season (beginning in late March or early April) is thus neatly timed so that the army’s initial stockpiled supplies from friendly territory can carry it until the early summer harvest when forage suddenly becomes plentiful. But the risk then lay at the beginning of winter as forage started to dwindle again. One possible response was to only keep the army together during the ‘campaigning season’ and send everyone home for the winter, but having to restart the campaign every year could be a real problem if long sieges were required or if wars had to be fought at great distance.

Armies that stayed ‘in being’ over the winter tended to go into ‘winter quarters’ – a phrase that gets used in primary sources and also in a lot of campaign histories without generally being defined. The concern here is that both the bad weather of winter making campaigning hard but also the scarcity of forage would make offensive operations unsustainable, so the army ‘hunkers down’ for the winter.

You can tell supplies are a key factor here because armies go into winter quarters even in regions that have very mild winters. The choice of location and its preparation were crucial. Roman armies were year-round campaigners even from a relatively early point and so the need to prepare winter quarters shows up repeatedly in the sources, with a variety of solutions to the problem of what to do with the army during winter.

Commanders might, for instance, ‘winter’ their armies near controlled ports or rivers to enable resupply by sea (or by coastal depots carefully stocked up during the year) or near friendly communities which could supply them via taxation, requisition or markets. Alternately, a general might identify a particularly agriculturally rich region to ‘winter’ on, relying on the robust local supply (typically from a dense population in a rich agricultural area) to see the army through winter, often in addition to food stockpiles built up by foraging during the campaigning season (which of course have to be located in depots; as we’ve discussed the army cannot carry multiple months of food with it on the march).

…All of this goes to how a general is going to plan the march of an army: he needs to ensure his army moves slow enough to forage sufficient supplies but not so slow it ends up foraging the same people twice. He also needs to think about the size of his army: too big and local forage will be insufficient at any speed (and also large armies with lots of supplies are slow). And of course the route of march matters: large armies must stay in densely populated, easy to forage territory while smaller armies can subsist in areas with far fewer local farmers (and at substantially less damage to those local farmers).”

- Bret Devereaux, “Logistics, How Did They Do It, Part II: Foraging.”

#bret devereaux #history #military #ancient #medieval #renaissance

[st-just]

Impossible to overstate how endearing I find it when nerds write like this.

#random internet stuff #bret devereaux

[brutish-impulse]

This is the third part of the fourth part of our four(ish) part (Ia, Ib, IIa, IIb, IIIa, IIIb, IVa, IVb) look at the how the Roman military system and its manipular legion were able to defeat the Hellenistic military system and its Macedonian sarisa phalanx in the third and second centuries BC.

Never change, Bret!

#history #bret devereaux

[space-wizards]

You can also help this project by building temples in my name at traditional spots on the Nile…or by just sharing it with your friends, I guess. I would prefer a large temple complex, however. I’ve always wanted my own large temple complex.

#bret devereaux #acoup

[confusedbyinterface]

Thinking about those early jurists from the Roman Republic, when "lawyer" wasn't really a job yet. They weren't getting paid for it they just liked writing legal documents enough they did it as a hobby.

#roman history #history #bret devereaux #acoup #a collection of unmitigated pedantry #legal history

[heroineimages]

Passing judgment on those priorities, to a degree, comes down to taste. It is easy to cast the public building and patronage of the arts that most Greek elites engaged in as crass self-aggrandizement, wasting their money on burnishing their own image, rather than actually helping anyone except by accident. And there is truth to that idea – the Greek imagination has little space for what we today would call a philanthropist. On the other hand – as we’ll see – a handful of spartiates will come to possess a far greater proportion of the wealth and productive capacity of their society. Those wealthy spartiates will do even less to improve the lives of anyone – even their fellow spartiates. Moreover, following the beginning of Spartan austerity in the 550s, Sparta will produce no great artwork, no advances in architecture, no great works of literature – nothing to push the bounds of human achievement, to raise the human spirit.

--Bret Deveraux, "This. Isn't. Sparta. Part IV"

#bret devereaux #quotes #history #Greek history #blogs