The Romans were at least as warlike as the Greeks, and their historians and biographers also, sooner or later, found themselves writing military history. Here only the more important will be discussed. The earliest surviving works with a military content are the lives of various generals, including, for example, Miltiades and Hamilcar, by Cornelius Nepos (c.110-24 bc). But these are slight and eulogistic and show little insight. More important is Sallust (Gaius Sallustius Crispus, 85-36 bc), one of whose surviving works is a monograph on the Jugurthine war. But Sallust was mainly interested in the impact the war allegedly had on the contemporary political scene and the moral decline of Rome's ruling class, and the military narrative is secondary.
Unfortunately Sallust's moralizing and rhetorical attitude set the tone for his successors, and one looks in vain in Roman writers for the precision and perception of a Thucydides or a Polybius (see Greek historians). The most important for the republican period is Livy (Titus Livius, probably 59 bc to ad 17), who wrote a history of Rome from its foundation to 9 bc, of which 35 out of an original 142 books survive, with summaries of the rest. Apart from his unhistorical approach, Livy has also been attacked for failing to be critical of his sources, particularly Roman annalists. But although his stories of Rome's early wars are obviously partly legendary, there was probably little hard evidence, and his accounts of later wars, if one discounts the rhetoric, do not suffer too badly from comparison with Polybius. If we only had Livy's account of Cannae, for example, we would still know what happened. Livy also has the merit of preserving details of the political background and of Roman dispositions, and where Polybius' narrative is lost, he is invaluable.
Born in 20 or 19 bc, Velleius Paterculus summarized the history of his world from Greek mythology to ad 29. As a soldier himself, he sometimes provides invaluable evidence, for example on Tiberius' campaigns in the Balkans, but the narrative is so compressed that his quality as a military historian can hardly be assessed.
Quintus Curtius Rufus, possibly the suffect-consul of ad 43, wrote a history of Alexander ‘the Great’ in ten books, of which much is missing. He is valuable on Macedonian customs and in preserving parts of the lost work of Clitarchus which was probably based on first-hand accounts and the source of the so-called ‘vulgate’ tradition also lying behind Diodorus (see Greek historians). But Curtius also used other material and tended to hop from source to source in the interests of his own rhetorical approach to history, with disastrous results.
Sextus Iulius Frontinus, three times consul between ad 73 and 100, wrote a lost book on military science of which he was inordinately proud, and a collection of military anecdotes under the title Stratagems which he hoped would be of practical use to soldiers. Whether they would have been is dubious, but they contain a fund of historical information, some of which is interesting. A younger contemporary of Frontinus was Cornelius Tacitus (ad c.56-c.120), of whose five surviving works, three deal in part with military events. Thus the life of his father-in-law, Agricola, contains an account of the latter's campaigns as governor of Britain from ad 77 to 84. Since this is biography, indeed eulogy, we should not expect too much, but even so it is disappointing, lacking any real precision or awareness of the military problems.
Better are Tacitus' two historical works, the Annals and the Histories. The former originally contained an account of the period from Tiberius to Nero, but substantial sections are missing, and Tacitus was more interested in events in Rome than on the frontiers. When he does include military events, he tends to use them to point a contrast with the often lurid goings-on at the centre, and he makes little or no attempt to explain overall imperial strategy. Nevertheless, within limits, the narrative is reasonably detailed and comprehensible, though some of the descriptions of battles seem to be modelled on earlier writers.
The Histories, written before the Annals, were originally an account of the period from ad 68 to 96, but only the beginning, covering the civil wars of ad 69—the ‘Year of the Four Emperors’—and the following year, survives. This, too, has been severely criticized for lack of both chronological and topographical precision. But enough is there to enable us to follow the campaigns without too much difficulty, and modern research has confirmed the essential accuracy. In any case, such is the pace and brilliance of the narrative that one feels that one can forgive the author almost anything.
Suetonius (Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus, ad c.70-c.130) deserves a mention because of the evidence he provides for 1st-century imperial campaigns, though he is a biographer first and foremost. But it was left to Rome's twilight to produce perhaps her best military historian, Ammianus Marcellinus (ad c.330-95). He saw service all over the empire from Gaul and Germany to Mesopotamia, and also travelled widely before finishing his history in Rome in the 380s. This originally covered the period from ad 96 to his own time, but the first thirteen books, taking the narrative to 353, are lost. The surviving books deal with the period 353 to 378, culminating in the disastrous battle of Adrianople. Much of the military narrative is still marred by imaginative rhetoric, but where Ammianus uses eyewitnesses, and particularly where he was present himself, it is detailed and analytical.
Finally, contemporary with Ammianus, was Eutropius who wrote a summary of the history of Rome to ad 364 in ten books, using Livy for the republic, a lost work on imperial history which also lies behind some of Ammianus, for example, for the empire, and his own experience for later events. Despite its brevity, Eutropius' work is generally sensible, and is particularly useful where Livy is lost.
Bibliography
- Hornblower, Simon, and Spawforth, Antony, The Oxford Classical Dictionary (
3rd edn. , Oxford, 1996)
— John Lazenby
