Fireside this week! I am still a bit behind after attending the annual meeting of the Society for Military History \u2013 conferences always leave me a bit tired and slow to get back to writing, even as they also stimulate my thinking \u2013 so the conclusion of our look at Rings of Power<\/em> must wait another week. Nevertheless, I thought I\u2019d share some of the thoughts that SMH has sent percolating in my head.<\/p>\n For this week\u2019s musing<\/strong>, I thought I might continue some of my general thoughts from the really interesting roundtable at the Society of Military History organized by Lee Brice on the nature of ancient discipline. I think \u2018discipline\u2019 is one of those concepts that is both quite important<\/em>, but also ends up turned into something of a totem, where folks confuse indicators (often visual indicators) of discipline with the actual outputs<\/em> they expect from discipline. And that is in part because \u2018discipline\u2019 means a set of inputs (rewards, punishments, regulations), a set of outputs (collective battlefield maneuvers, cohesion and obedience) and also<\/em> the process by which the former can produce the latter.<\/p>\n So let\u2019s try to pull those apart a bit.<\/p>\n Our word \u2018discipline\u2019 comes from Latin, disciplina<\/em>. And immediately the challenge is that the normal historian\u2019s \u201cresort to the original language\u201d for greater precision is unavailable, because disciplina<\/em> is every bit as broad as \u2018discipline\u2019 and in most of the same ways. At its root, disciplina<\/em> means \u2018teaching\u2019 (from disco<\/em>, discere<\/em>, \u201cto learn,\u201d thus a discipulus<\/em> is a student (\u2018learner\u2019), etc.) and so in a military concept \u2013 because this is a word that does appear outside of a military context \u2013 it means something at its root like \u2018training\u2019 \u2013 both in the sense of the act of training and also in the sense of the knowledge imparted<\/em> by training.<\/p>\n But it clearly also comes to include something more: the result<\/strong> (or expected result) of training. Disciplina militaris<\/em>, \u2018military discipline\u2019 thus comes to mean a code of behavior rather than merely drill, something emperors can \u2018restore\u2019 when they reform an army. And as J.E. Lendon demonstrates at length in Soldier\u2019s and Ghosts<\/a><\/em> (2006), disciplina<\/em> is the thing in the Roman mind which tempers courage, zeal and ability (virtus<\/em>): it holds a soldier back when he needs to be held back. And we know from other authors, particularly Polybius, that the Romans created this disciplina <\/em>in part through a system of rewards and punishments, although here an immediate caveat is necessary: Roman \u2018discipline\u2019 in this sense is proverbially harsh because that is how Polybius presents it, but in actual practice we know that many of those brutal punishments he discusses were basically never used. The vision of the Roman military as swift to punish and fierce in punishments isn\u2019t quite true, at least for the Middle Republic.<\/p>\n Nevertheless, one sees both in historical militaries and in modern discussions of military issues, this sort of fetishization of \u2018harsh discipline,\u2019 by which is meant punishments, strict regulations and so on, as the way to produce what we might call \u2018combat discipline\u2019 in the sense of soldiers that comply swiftly and effectively with orders.<\/p>\n So as a matter of cognitive hygiene, I think its worth parceling out the different sorts of discipline, because while discipline as a single idea is useful<\/em>, we also want to make sure we can break it up into its component parts to understand what we mean.<\/p>\n First, we have a category of \u2018input discipline<\/strong>,\u2019 which we can break down further. First, there is \u2018discipline as teaching,\u2019 which I\u2019d further break down into individual training<\/strong> and group drill<\/strong> (this distinction matters for the outputs!). Then there is \u2018discipline as rewards and punishments\u2019 \u2013 with much of the attention often incorrectly placed on punishments \u2013 which I might call corrective discipline<\/strong>. Then finally, there is \u2018discipline as regulations and life habits (habitus<\/a><\/em>), which is, I think, distinct from corrective discipline. This is the category for things like Roman generals restoring \u2018discipline\u2019 by having their soldiers build lots of field fortifications or restricting their diets to essentials and thus inuring them to hardship and encouraging obedience. This is a tricky category, the one where I think there\u2019s the greatest temptation to fail to consider if the input is actually connected to the output and to instead make a fetish out of the input. In any case, I\u2019d call this regulatory discipline<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Then, of course, we have \u2018output discipline<\/strong>,\u2019 which are the results that \u2018discipline,\u2019 broadly construed, is supposed to produce. The most prominent of these is what Wayne Lee calls collective, synchronized discipline<\/strong>, the ability to get units of soldiers to fight together in a synchronized, mutually reinforcing way at greater and greater degrees of complexity. That may perhaps be related to, but is not the same as obedience<\/strong> to discipline<\/strong>, the quality of an army which obeys the orders it is given, even when they are unpleasant or difficult. This latter point is something that jumps out at descriptions of the Roman army in Greek writers (particularly Polybius and Josephus): they are shocked by Roman generals\u2019 ability get their soldiers to do uncomfortable things, like dig earthworks, carry their own supplies, eat simple rations and carry lots of tools. But note how, while obedience to discipline<\/strong> and synchronized discipline<\/strong> are often conflated, they\u2019re not the same<\/em>: a lot of early modern pike-and-shot armies had tremendous synchronized discipline, but were mutiny-prone and it was often difficult to get them to do things like haul their own supplies or prepare their own food.<\/p>\n Finally, we have the \u2018outputs\u2019 that get associated with discipline but which do not require it: individual combat skill<\/strong> and cohesion<\/strong>. The association is really strong because in the early modern European military tradition (itself imitating the Roman military tradition), these values were produced through drill (which also produces synchronized discipline) and regulatory discipline. But equally, we see high combat skill in societies which do not practice drill (non-state warriors are an easy example) and high cohesion from societies which lack either drill or strong regulatory discipline (hoplites, for instance).<\/p>\n So \u2018discipline\u2019 as an intellectual category<\/em> still has value, not the least because our sources often think it does, but we should be mindful that it is more of a category than an object: a set of interrelated ideas, rather than a single practice. And in particular, that category is a set of \u2018inputs\u2019 which military leaders assume (sometimes wrongly!) reliably produce a set of desired outputs that in turn they imagine make armies more able to win battles, which is the thing they want.<\/p>\n On to recommendations<\/strong>:<\/p>\n First off, in my last roundup, I forgot to include yet one more podcast I did: I was on Tides of History<\/em> with Patrick Wyman talking about the military of the Roman Republic<\/a> (particularly the Middle Republic during the Punic Wars). And for those who enjoyed that, I am set to record a follow-up episode next week (to go up some time later than that) to cover the other side and talk about the Carthaginian military during the Punic Wars! I\u2019m quite excited for that, because I think the common understanding of Carthage\u2019s armies (\u2018mercenaries!\u2019) is actually mostly wrong \u2013 a point on which we may return for a blog post later in the year.<\/p>\n Meanwhile, just yesterday we got the latest edition of Pasts Imperfect<\/em> <\/a>and it is a doozy of a crossover as the team behind another ACOUP<\/em> favorite, Peopling the Past<\/a><\/em> popped over to discuss their project and what they have coming up. Also via Pasts Imperfect<\/em>, I want to shout out the Mapping Color in History<\/em> <\/a>database which tracks the use of different pigments in different Asian paintings. As we talked about with textiles<\/a>, in a world before synthetic dyes, pigments and colors were a product of the materials you could get and those pigments mattered a lot, so this is a fascinating database of what could be used (with an outside-of-Europe perspective, no less \u2013 valuable because most of the scholarship on this topic focuses on Europe).<\/p>\n Also via Pasts<\/em> Imperfect<\/em> but worth pulling out, an open access study, \u201cGeochemical and Pb isotpic constraints on the provenance of the Lupa Capitolina<\/em> bronze statue<\/a>\u201d (2025) has shown that \u2013 to the surprise of few Classicists, but I imagine many other folks \u2013 that the famed statue of Romulus, Remus and the she-wolf at the Capitoline (the Lupa Capitolina<\/em> of the title) is, in fact, not ancient. Neither Roman, nor Etruscan, but rather High Medieval, probably made with copper from Carolingian\/French\/Holy-Roman-Imperial Europe.<\/p>\n Finally, for those on Bluesky, Evan Schultheis (M.A. Winthrop University) posted a fascinating thread on Byzantine swords,<\/a> with quite a lot of detail and pictures, discussing their design and development. I found it quite informative, so I imagine many of you will too!<\/p>\n And for this week\u2019s book recommendation<\/strong>, a mix of literature and history, John Garth\u2019s Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth<\/a><\/em> (2003). This is the sort of book that is both exactly its title and at the same time quite a bit more than its title. There is, of course, a necessary caveat: the reader who goes into Garth\u2019s work hoping for a history of the First World War will be disappointed, as the narrative remains fixed on J.R.R. Tolkien and while Tolkien saw far too much of the war, he also didn\u2019t see a very large portion of it. This is a book about Tolkien in<\/em> the Great War, not Tolkien and<\/em> the Great War. There was, I should note, an attempt to make a film out of this book<\/a>, which turned out alright, but lost much of the power of the book in the translation to the compressed medium that is film.<\/p>\n It is also not just a book about Tolkien or the \u2018Threshold of Middle-earth.\u2019 Garth follows Tolkien from his youth to his demobilization in 1919, but the scope here is wider, encompassing the core four members of Tolkien\u2019s circle of friends, the \u201cTea Club, Barrovian Society\u201d (T.C.B.S.) as they emerge, begin to write and display brilliance and depth of feeling and then of course as the Great War gets to the grim business of killing nearly all of them. The book is really about the T.C.B.S. \u2013 particularly its core four, Tolkien, Christopher Wiseman, Geoffrey Bache Smith (d. 1916) and Robert Gilson (d. 1916) as much as it is about Tolkien. The narrative is, in its own way, that single tragic line from Tolkien\u2019s own foreward, \u201cBy 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead\u201d expanded into a book, and there is value in that. In the process, Garth walks the reader through the slow genesis of Tolkien\u2019s legendarium and his development as a myth-maker, presenting the developments of Tolkien\u2019s writing side by side both with the snippets of his colleagues writing and the narrative of Tolkien and his compatriot\u2019s lives.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/acoup.blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/04\/PXL_20250329_121524471.jpg?resize=1024%2C616&ssl=1\")