Aineias the Tactician: How to Survive Under Siege

238 Pages·2002·4.337 MB·English

by  David Whitehead, Aeneas (Tacticus)

AINEIAS THE TACTICIAN: A COMMENTARY
Current and forthcoming titles in this series:
Catullus to Ovid: Reading Latin Love Elegy, J. Booth & G. Lee
Euripides: Medea and Electra,J . Ferguson
Homer: Odyssey, P. Jones
Sophocles: Antigone & Oedipus the King, J. Wilkins & M. Macleod
Suetonius: The Flavian Emperors, B. Jones & R. Milns
Tacitus: Annals XIV, N. Miller
Virgil: Aeneid, R.D. Williams
AINEIAS
THE LACTICIAN
HOW TO SURVIVE UNDER SIEGE
A Historical Commentary, with
Translation and Introduction
David Whitehead
Second Edition
Published by Bristol Classical Press
General Editor: John H. Betts
For Anastacia Kersey
Cover illustration: North range of ruins at Eleutherai
(photograph courtesy of Graham Shipley,
School of Archaeology & Ancient History, University of Leicester)
First published in 1990 by Oxford University Press
Second edition published,
with permission of Oxford University Press,
in 2001 by
Bristol Classical Press
an imprint of
Gerald Duckworth & Co. Ltd
61 Frith Street
London WI1D 3JL
e-mail: [email protected]
Website: www.ducknet.co.uk
© 1990, 2001 by David Whitehead
All rights reserved. No part of this publication
may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or
transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic,
mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise,
without the prior permission of the publisher.
A catalogue record for this book is available
from the British Library
ISBN 1-85399-627-0
Offset from the Oxford University Press
edition of Aineias the Tactician
by David Whitehead
Printed in Great Britain by
Booksprint
CONTENTS
Preface to Second Edition vi
Preface vil
Bibliography and Abbreviations xi
Introduction
1. The passive perspective ]
2. The work and its author 4
3. Form and content 17
4. Invasion and siege 22
5. Treachery, unanimity, and the survival of the polis 25
6. Genre and readership 34
Divergences from the Budé Text 43
Translation 45
Commentary
98
Addenda
208
Index
213
PREFACE TO SECOND EDITION
Authors who feel that their books have gone out of print too soon
need others to share their view before a reprint is likely. Here my
thanks must go first and foremost to John Betts, for accepting and
expediting the proposal I put to him in spring 2001; but it is one I
would probably never have made if two scholars, John Ma and
Graham Shipley, had not told me (independently and unprompted)
that in their opinion Ainetas deserved a second lease of life. I am
further indebted to Dr Shipley for permission to use his photograph
of the walls of Eleutherai which appears on the new front cover.
The present volume falls somewhere between simple re-issue and
true second edition. Beyond the tacit correction of a handful of
misprints (most of them kindly pointed out to me, in 1991, by Paul
Cartledge), what makes it a re-edition is the section of Addenda,
positioned between the commentary and the index. This is in two
parts: i) general material on Aineias himself, and ii) miscellaneous
matters arising out of the introduction and, particularly, the com-
mentary. Concerning material in category ii, readers who go to the
Addenda section first will be directed back to the relevant pages; in
the introduction and commentary themselves, asterisks (*) signpost
the same link in reverse.
D.W.
November 2001
PREFACE
‘It is a book that should awaken the interest of the student
of history and at the same time appeal to the average fifth-
form school-boy’ (T. Hudson-Williams). Since the ‘appeal’ of
any writer—to readers of any age (or sex)—cannot but
be a matter of individual response, resistant to artificial
manufacture where it fails of spontaneous arousal, I must
leave readers of this volume on Aineias to experience it
or not, in his case, as they may. His historical interest
and importance, by contrast, are matters which one can
legitimately seek to demonstrate in an introduction to and
commentary on his own words. In accordance with the format
of this series, Aineias’ words appear here in translation only. I
have naturally considered it my prime responsibility to
translate his Greek accurately, to explain as fully as possible
to Greekless readers the problems in translation which often
arise from either vagueness on his part or the physical state of
the transmitted Greek text (or both), and in general to bring a
greater internal coherence and order to his thought than in
truth it frequently exhibits in its raw condition. Such is the
basic task of any translator and commentator.
But what to provide in addition? An all-encompassing
commentary on Aineias would approach him from three main
angles: (1) Lincuistic—his idiosyncratic language and dialect,
broadly characterizable as an embryonic form of the koine; (2)
GENERIC—his position in the very early stages of what was
later (in Hellenistic, Roman, and Byzantine times) to become
an identifiable genre of technical military handbooks; and (3)
HISTORICALt—he significance of his treatise as what Bengtson
called a ‘Kulturbild’ of the fourth-century Greek polis. A
commentary which does justice to all these three facets of the
work has yet to be written. Hunter and Handford, for
example, essentially covered only (1) and (3); the Budé
edition of Dain and Bon—which in any case falls short of
being a full, line-by-line commentary—only (2) and (3). In
the present volume the (virtual) exclusion of (1) is dictated
alike by my inexpertise in that area and by the nature and
Vill PREFACE
inherent constraints of this series. But the reader should also
be warned that I have been decidedly sparing in my attention
to (2)— save in respect of non-Aineian military thinking in his
day—and have preferred instead to concentrate on (3). That a
particular piece of Aineias’ advice was repeated or elaborated
by one or more of the later (often very much later) factici is
rarely, I venture to say, of much heuristic value to historians
of classical Greece, for whom—as indeed for Aineias himself
—the relevant context of his precepts is the actual prosecution
of, and defence against, siege-warfare in and before the mid
fourth century rather than after it. Accordingly the names of
Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon feature more frequently
in what follows than do those of (e.g.) Philo, Asclepiodotus, or
Nicephorus Uranus; and by the same token I have drawn,
amongst post-classical writers, most heavily on the likes of
Polyaenus and Frontinus who preserve apposite classical
material in anecdotal form.
Working, since 1986, on Aineias—I transliterate his name
directly from the Greek, to evade intrusive Vergilian over-
tones—has been a challenging experience for one whose
previous research interests had focused on Athens (a city for
which Aineias displays, in the pardonable hyperbole of the
Loeb edition, an ‘utter neglect’). What I owe to published
work is, I trust, fully acknowledged in the usual ways, general
and specific; but I have also to thank various individuals for
informal aid. In Manchester, in the early stages, my grasp of
many ambiguous passages, especially ones involving items of
arms and armour, was shaped by discussion with my
colleague Alastar Jackson. He and Nick Sekunda have
between them prevented my treating Aineias as even less of a
pure Kriegsschriftsteller than he really was. Subsequently, in
Washington (see below), my ignorance of cryptography has
been rectified—to a degree greater than may be apparent
here—by bibliographical help from Rose Mary Sheldon. And
as to my fellow editors, I gladly acknowledge the stimulus of
encouragement and, in the case of Brian Bosworth especially,
much constructive criticism.
Benevolent institutions, too, have fostered my endeavours. A
subvention from the Wolfson Foundation enabled me to pay,
at appropriate professional rates, for the translation of
PREFACE ix
material on Aineias from Russian and other Eastern European
languages that I cannot read; and the project as a whole has
come to fruition in Washington DC, where during 1988-9, on
sabbatical leave from my University, I have enjoyed the
pleasure and privilege of a ‘Junior’ (i.e. Visiting) Fellowship
at the Center for Hellenic Studies.
The material which appears here as Sections 1, 2, 3 and 5 of
the Introduction has been presented as lectures and colloquia
on both sides of the Atlantic, and has had successive
improvements thereby effected in it. For this I thank the
Manchester branch of the Classical Association, the Sheffield
University Ancient History Society, and, in the United States,
university audiences at Brown, Colgate (a Marc R. Gutwirth
Classics Memorial Lecture), Columbia—Missouri (the third
Fordyce W. Mitchel Memorial Lecture), Harvard (a James
Loeb Classical Lecture), Pennsylvania, and Princeton.
D.W.
18 May 1989