potofsoup

Posted by Bret Devereaux

https://acoup.blog/2025/11/07/fireside-friday-november-7-2025-on-the-roman-strategy-debate/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=fireside-friday-november-7-2025-on-the-roman-strategy-debate

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Hey folks! Fireside this week. I had wanted to have my post on the hoplite debate (the othismos over othismos) ready for this week, but it’s not quite done, so I am shifting that to next week. So instead this week I want to outline another debate in ancient military history, the ‘Roman strategy debate.’ I thought I’d do this in a Fireside because a Patron asked about it and seemed perplexed that it was a debate (me too, buddy, me too) but I can’t really give it a full ACOUP treatment because I have something formal working its way down the pipe and I wouldn’t want to steal my (and my co-author’s) thunder. But what I can do is summarize what the debate is about and why it seems so stuck lately.

I would summarize the core question of the ‘Roman strategy debate’ thusly: “to what degree were the Romans able to engage in strategy and strategic decision-making in their military and foreign policy and to what degree did they do so?” Put a bit more bluntly: did the Romans ‘do strategy’ and indeed could they: did they have both the social-cultural framework to think strategically and did they have the political institutions for central, strategic policy-making?

This is one of those debates that is a bit tricky because the intuitive ‘modernizing’ response is to assume that because our culture thinks about foreign policy in strategic terms (sometimes) that all cultures must and therefore the Romans must and thus the whole debate is silly. And that tends to be the lay-person’s immediate response to the whole thing. But this is a classic trap of assuming things are timeless human universals a priori without first demonstrating they are. So “of course the Romans thought strategically” is, left at that, a bad argument. What makes it tricky is that it is also right in its conclusions and there’s a danger of falling out the other side grumbling about how ‘only academics could be so stupid’ (a near direct quote of one of the strategy advocates below) as to look for proof that the Romans understood foreign policy in strategic terms.

The debate starts in 1976 with Edward Luttwak’s The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire (1976). Luttwak’s argument, at its core, is that looking archaeology he can discern distinct periods of recognizable strategic policy emerging out of the patterns of Roman frontier deployments and defenses (archaeologically visible in Roman forts), with the frontier transitioning from a series of forward-operating bases as launching pads for offensive or retaliatory action to a more rigid prohibitive frontier and then finally to a defense-in-depth operational zone over about four centuries from Augustus to late antiquity. Luttwak was thus arguing that the Romans had long-term strategies, consistent across wide geographic areas and over multiple emperors, that they employed in defending their frontier.

Now here, in the debate (as elsewhere) personalities matter. Luttwak’s book made a big splash and was and is still influential, but it had three strikes against it for a friendly reception by classical scholars. What gets mentioned first, because it is simple, is that Luttwak was not a ‘member of the guild,’ as it were: he was not a classicist, nor a historian, but an IR political scientist who had come up in the think-tank policy world and so this book was an ‘intrusion from an outsider.’ I don’t think that alone need have been fatal – other ‘outsider intrusions’ have been more kindly met – but for the other two strikes.

The next of these is an avoidable but predictable consequence of the first: the book was sloppy. It treats its sources sometimes carelessly, it avoids rather than develops nuance, and Luttwak himself essentially takes the actual granular archaeological data, reduces it to simplified models (presented visually in the book) and then reasons from those. It’s not just that Luttwak isn’t a classicist, but that he does not show the sort of painstaking detail-oriented care historians and classicists are supposed to and so makes a great many tiny missteps, none of which collapse the whole argument but all of which are annoying. Sloppy. And then, finally, Edward Luttwak is a deeply disagreeable person, bluntly and openly contemptuous of the skills and capabilities of his interlocutors, prone to telling tall-tales which aggrandize himself, and openly misogynistic – the sort of fellow who rants about “female PhDs” in print in the Year of Our Lord Two-Thousand and Twenty-Two.

An (over) reaction was guaranteed and not long in coming. If you want a good – and entertainingly written – summary of the reaction and counter-reaction, look for J.E. Lendon, “Primitivism and Ancient Foreign Relations” Classical Journal 97.4 (2002). The form the reaction took, I think, was shaped significantly by the scholarly environment of the 1970s and 1980s (although responses kept coming after that). We’ve talked about this before in regards to the ancient economy, but this was the golden age of ‘primitivism’ as a school of thought, a realization – eventually an overcorrection – that the ancients did not always think like us or share our assumptions and a consequent demand that scholars demonstrate from the sources that the Romans were even playing with the same concepts and assumptions we were.

So the critique of Luttwak that emerged was a fundamentally primitivist critique: that the Romans lacked the necessary conceptual framework to establish strategy policy along the lines that Luttwak was laying out, or at least they lacked the modern institutions to actually set and direct policy in such a clear and coherent way.

I should note that some of these responses struggle because they adopt an overly ambitious definition of strategy, demanding that ‘grand strategy’ be consistent between emperors (it need not be) or geographic regions (still no) or that it be purely rational (oh my no) or assign no value to non-material outcomes like ‘honor’ (nope). Strategy is simply the selection of a goal (‘ends’) and the coordination of methods (‘ways’) and resources (‘means’) to achieve that goal; grand strategy does not demand wider geographic or chronological reach, it is simply strategy that incorporates not only military and diplomatic resources, but also financial, economic, and demographic resources. “We should found a new colony here so that our armies can resupply there and the population can provide a local bulwark against unruly locals” is, in itself, without anything else grand strategy, coordinating economic (supply logistics, farming) demographic (creating a loyal local population) and military means to achieve a strategic end (local security).

Many of the classicists responding to Luttwak thus set the bar for strategy way too high and a result their rebuttals shot wide of the target because you can prove the Romans might be bad at strategy (or at least impaired in its execution) without proving they couldn’t or didn’t try to do it.

The strongest forms of this response, I’d argue, were B. Isaac, The Limits of Empire (1990) and S. Mattern, Rome and the Enemy (1999), though the attacks are a bit different and the latter more successful. Isaac is a ‘hard primitivist,’ in a nearly Finleyite mold: he will concede only that the Romans knew or understood or used the concepts we can see demonstrated in the sources and he will not fill in gaps, however plausible (or likely). So since no Roman source explicitly discusses using deserts, mountains, rivers or walls as defensible ‘scientific’ frontiers based on natural obstacles, he concludes they didn’t (even though that pattern is obvious in certain parts of the empire). It helps Isaac’s argument that he’s focused on the East (Luttwak was focused on the West) where the defensive patterns are less immediately obvious although I’d argue they are still clearly defensive patterns (predicated on different geographic and logistical concerns) that Isaac essentially wills himself not to see.

Isaac’s approach survived about three years before being comprehensively dismantled in spectacular fashion by Everett L. Wheeler in a two-part article, “Methodological Limits and the Mirage of Roman Strategy” JMH 57.1 and 57.2. Wheeler has a peerless command of the ancient sources – as Lendon quips, “about ancient military and Roman foreign affairs no man alive knows more” – and his double-article is a master-class in historical argumentation, going point by point and showing that the gaps Isaac identifies aren’t gaps at all, that the sources do demonstrate the concepts he thinks are missing in plain text, over and over again. Once again, personal factors intrude: Wheeler’s blow to Isaac’s argument was fatal, but the ghost of it survives in part because Wheeler wrote in the Journal of Military History, which most classicists do not read, so unless a classicist is doing serious work on the topic (and thus following up footnotes) they’ll meet Isaac and Isaac’s supporters, but perhaps not the glassed-from-orbit demolition of his argument.¹

Mattern’s² counterpoint came later and has survived better. Essentially Mattern’s argument is that the Romans are not ‘doing strategy’ in the way Luttwak imagines because they are not making decisions in those terms – moving pieces on maps, calculating state interest in security, revenues and such. Instead, Mattern notes that Roman leaders were not trained in military science but in philosophy, rhetoric, even poetry and the Roman empire simply lacked the institutions – war colleges, general staffs, foreign offices, planning bureaus and such – to plan strategically and to coordinate those plans over large geographic areas. I should note that I think Mattern actually oversteps a bit on this point for the simple if deceptive reason that it is Roman aristocrats of a literary bent who provide most of our evidence for the Roman imperial aristocracy, but that does not mean there were not more militarily focused Roman senators, merely that they did not write or their writings did not survive and thus we do know less about them. A lot of our understanding, for instance, on the Roman political career in this period is based on Pliny the Younger, not because he was typical, but because a lot of his writing survives, but of course that means he was atypically a literary type.

In any case, Mattern argues as a result that literary and rhetorical frameworks, rather than strategy, formed the basis for Roman defensive policy: the Romans didn’t think in security and revenues and defensive lines, but in terms of honor, reputation, fear, ethnic stereotypes and the like. Of course the problem, which Lendon hints at but doesn’t quite say in the aforementioned article, is that ‘honor’ and ‘fear’ are old-timey words for ‘credibility’ and ‘deterrence’ – you can end up re-inventing IR-realism here in different words. However for Mattern, this distinction, combined with Rome’s primitive institutions, meant that – while the Romans may have been able to conceive of strategic planning – they did not do it, being culturally predisposed to base their policy on honor and lacking the institutions for true strategic planning in any case.

And to be frank, the argument has been a bit stuck since then. Proponents of ‘Roman strategy’ often point out that ‘strategy’ as a concept is rather more modest than the primitivists would suppose and that Rome meets the definition (note for instance K. Kagan, “Redefining Roman Grand Strategy” JMH 70.2 (2006)), but typically noting that actions that result from strategy rather than the process that produced them (which is hard to document in the imperial period where we have little insight into the emperor’s decision-making). Meanwhile, opponents of the notion tend to continue to to alight on institutional or knowledge limitations, arguments you can see come out clearly in some of the chapters of F.S. Naiden and D. Raisbeck, Reflections on Macedonian and Roman grand strategy (2019) – very capably reviewed here – particularly Richard Talbert’s chapter on Roman geographic knowledge (or the lack thereof). The latest major broadside in all of this is J. Lacey, Rome: Strategy of Empire (2022), which doesn’t really move the argument forward: Lacy argues for Roman strategy by again presenting outcomes – “look at these forts, these troop movements, these decisions – how could they be random or uncalculated when they work so well?” Which is a decent point but not a new one – that is fundamentally the point Luttwak made in 1976 – and so unlikely to convince even if it is right.

My own view on this – and you are going to hear an echo of this complaint next week on hoplites too – is that not enough of the folks working on this topic have a solid grounding in comparative non-modern military history. The classicists are, by and large, all classicists and have very little firm foundation outside of that subfield, while Lacey and Luttwak are international relations scholars and that is a field that is relentlessly modern and modernizing in its outlook.³ But if you know something about how strategic policy was developed, shaped and implemented in the 1400s, 1500s, 1600s into the 1700s – largely before much of the modern apparatus of strategic policy making was invented, but late enough that we can see the process very clearly (and where no one doubts that strategy is happening) – the question is clarified immensely: of course the Romans are doing strategy, albeit – as all polities will – doing it in a complex stew of internal politics, personality and individual concerns; Mattern is by no means wholly or even mostly wrong to stress these.

Indeed, they are doing strategy with institutions that look quite a lot like the institutions (and attitudes) of early modern strategy-making, under the sort of communications and coordination constraints that early modern states wrestled with. The British Parliament or the Dutch Stadtholder or the King of France could get new directives to governors and generals in the New World no faster than Augustus could get them to legati Augusti pro praetore in Germany. And yet they did strategy just fine.

But I ought not steal too much thunder from the aforementioned article in which I have made some rather small contribution alongside my co-author. Of course, if you want to follow the progress of that project as it moves (hopefully) towards eventual publication, Patrons get monthly updates on my professional activities – research, teaching, writings, etc.

On to Recommendations:

I suppose I ought to lead with some of the things mentioned here. If you are looking to get a handle on the Roman strategy debate, I think Lendon’s “Primitivism and Ancient Foreign Relations” CJ 97.4 (2002) is the best and most engaging summary of the first 30 or so years of it and available to anyone with access to JSTOR.

And you may be thinking, “but Bret, how – since you are so clever and talented – can you not realize that I am not a college student or faculty member and so do not have unlimited access to JSTOR?” Ah, but you actually do have a lot of access to JSTOR: free JSTOR accounts, available to all, allow for reading most of the content on JSTOR with a limit of one hundred articles per month. An enormous amount of scholarship in a wide range of fields is thus available to you, for free (albeit generally not the most recent issues of the journals in question).

More recently, a large international research team has just unveiled itiner-e, an amazing new project that mapped not only major Roman roadways, but minor ones as well. This is a really great project – most maps of the Roman road network only include the really major arterial roadways, but of course we’ve long known about many smaller. Even better, they’ve released a handy, easy to use map model of their research which you can use online, where you can click on any road segment and get a neat summary of what we have about it – if the location is secure or conjectured, if it has a name, what sources we have for it, etc. Visualizing not just the presence of roads but the density of them in certain areas really does help remind us that Roman power (and population) was not uniformly dense.

And of course there is also a new edition of Pasts Imperfect, with a keynote essay by Rhiannon Garth Jones on the Ottoman reception of Roman antiquity, including things like Suleyman the Magnificent staging a Roman triumph to reinforce his presentation of the Ottoman Empire as the valid successor state to Rome. Great stuff and a useful reminder that ‘the West’ was never the sole heir of classical antiquity or the Roman past.⁴

Finally for this week’s book recommendation, I want to recommend T.E. Ricks, Waging a Good War: How the Civil Rights Movement Won its Battles, 1954-1968 (2022), which seems well on its way to being something of a modern classic. Ricks presents a history of the civil rights movement through the 1950s and 1960s, not as a social history (though there is some of that) but as a military history, focused on the training, organization, discipline, tactics and strategy necessary for civil rights to succeed despite limited resources and in the face of intense resistance. He also discusses the strategic missteps made by white supremacist leaders that created opportunities for civil rights activists to exploit, making this a narrative of contest, rather than having a one-sided focus on the agency of activists.⁵

Each chapter (there are 13, plus an introduction and conclusion) reads as a campaign history of a specific effort in the struggle, from the Montgomery Bus Boycott to the Memphis labor efforts during which Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated. In each, Ricks analyzes why the civil rights organizations either succeeded or – in some cases – fell short. He comes away with an emphasis on key factors for any movement attempting to produce large-scale mass change: training, discipline, organization (‘support structures’), planning, strategy and an orientation towards change and eventually reconciliation with those who were once opponents. One of the great values of the campaign-approach is that it makes visible to the reader what many, even at the time, could not see: the weeks and months and years of planning and preparation that went into each campaign, training activists and preparing them. Non-violence required tremendous training and discipline which in turn needed to be prepared; people are not, after all, non-violent by nature. And non-violence, in turn was a strategy and a necessary, effective one which frequently confused and outmaneuvered white supremacist authorities who were prepared for violent confrontations and utterly unprepared for non-violent ones.

The book is thus generally a good introduction to how strategic planning works in a context that isn’t quite ‘war’ (although Ricks in some ways understands this movement as something like a soft ‘civil war,’ albeit with one sided committed to non-violence, a reminder that the line between war and politics is very fuzzy because on some level it does not exist; drink!). But it is also an extremely valuable text for folks thinking about modern protest movements. There is a danger in modern protest movements of falling into a sort of ‘cargo cult activism’ where the most visible and memorable components of previous protests – signs, marches, songs, calls for a general strike, etc. – are imitated without an understanding of what those actions were intended to achieve. One thing that comes out very clearly in this book is that the leaders of the civil rights movement always had a very strong sense of what the goal was of any particular campaign and also how they would achieve it: protests were calibrated to exert pressure on the specific people or groups who were blocking or could enable the change desired. They were not irritable gestures or ‘letting off steam’ but calculated, targeted precision blows designed to strike, on by one, at the pillars that supported white supremacy’s legal manifestation in the United States. That model of training, discipline and strategy is a good one for any modern change-making movement to think long and hard on.

And that’s the week. Next week, hopefully, hoplites!

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