Hey folks! Fireside this week. I had wanted to have my post on the hoplite debate (the othismos<\/em> over othismos<\/em>) ready for this week, but it\u2019s 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 \u2018Roman strategy debate.\u2019<\/strong> I thought I\u2019d 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\u2019t really give it a full ACOUP <\/em>treatment because I have something formal working its way down the pipe and I wouldn\u2019t want to steal my (and my co-author\u2019s) thunder. But what I can do is summarize what the debate is about<\/em> and why it seems so stuck<\/em> lately.<\/p>\n I would summarize the core question of the \u2018Roman strategy debate\u2019 thusly: \u201cto 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?<\/strong>\u201d Put a bit more bluntly: did the Romans \u2018do strategy\u2019 and indeed could they<\/em>: did they have both the social-cultural framework to think strategically and did they have the political institutions for central, strategic policy-making?<\/p>\n This is one of those debates that is a bit tricky because the intuitive \u2018modernizing\u2019 response is to assume that because our culture<\/em> 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\u2019s immediate response to the whole thing. But this is a classic trap of assuming things are timeless human universals a priori<\/em> without first demonstrating<\/em> they are. So \u201cof course<\/em> the Romans thought strategically\u201d is, left at that, a bad argument. What makes it tricky is that it is also right<\/strong><\/em> in its conclusions<\/strong> and there\u2019s a danger of falling out the other side grumbling about how \u2018only academics could be so stupid\u2019 (a near direct quote<\/em> of one of the strategy advocates below) as to look for proof that the Romans understood foreign policy in strategic terms.<\/p>\n The debate starts in 1976 with Edward Luttwak\u2019s The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire<\/a><\/em> (1976). Luttwak\u2019s 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<\/strong> (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.<\/p>\n Now here, in the debate (as elsewhere) personalities matter. Luttwak\u2019s 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 \u2018member of the guild,\u2019 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 \u2018intrusion from an outsider.\u2019 I don\u2019t think that alone need have been fatal \u2013 other \u2018outsider intrusions\u2019 have been more kindly met \u2013 but for the other two strikes.<\/p>\n The next of these is an avoidable but predictable consequence of the first: the book was sloppy<\/em><\/strong>. 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\u2019s not just that Luttwak isn\u2019t 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<\/em>. And then, finally, Edward Luttwak is a deeply<\/em> 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 \u2013 the sort of fellow who rants about \u201cfemale PhDs\u201d in print<\/em> <\/a>in the Year of Our Lord Two-Thousand and Twenty-Two.<\/p>\n An (over) reaction was guaranteed and not long in coming. If you want a good \u2013 and entertainingly written \u2013 summary of the reaction and counter-reaction, look for J.E. Lendon, \u201cPrimitivism and Ancient Foreign Relations\u201d Classical Journal<\/em> 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\u2019ve talked about this before<\/a> in regards to the ancient economy, but this was the golden age of \u2018primitivism\u2019 as a school of thought, a realization \u2013 eventually an overcorrection \u2013 that the ancients did not<\/em> always think like us or share our assumptions and a consequent demand that scholars demonstrate<\/em> from the sources that the Romans were even playing with the same concepts and assumptions we were.<\/p>\n So the critique of Luttwak that emerged was a fundamentally primitivist critique: that the Romans lacked the necessary conceptual<\/em> framework to establish strategy policy along the lines that Luttwak was laying out, or at least they lacked the modern institutions<\/em> to actually set and direct policy in such a clear and coherent way.<\/p>\n I should note that some of these responses struggle because they adopt an overly ambitious definition of strategy, demanding that \u2018grand strategy\u2019 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 \u2018honor\u2019 (nope). Strategy<\/strong><\/em> is simply the selection of a goal<\/em> (\u2018ends\u2019) and the coordination of methods<\/em> (\u2018ways\u2019) and resources<\/em> (\u2018means\u2019) to achieve that goal; grand<\/strong><\/em> strategy<\/strong> 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. \u201cWe should found a new colony here so that our armies can resupply there and the population can provide a local bulwark against unruly locals\u201d is, in itself<\/em>, without anything else<\/em> grand strategy, coordinating economic (supply logistics, farming) demographic (creating a loyal local population) and military means to achieve a strategic end (local security).<\/p>\n Many of the classicists responding to Luttwak thus set the bar for strategy way too high<\/em><\/strong> and a result their rebuttals shot wide of the target because you can prove the Romans might be bad<\/em> at strategy (or at least impaired in its execution) without proving they couldn\u2019t or didn\u2019t try to do it<\/em>.<\/p>\n The strongest forms of this response, I\u2019d argue, were B. Isaac, The Limits of Empire<\/a><\/em> (1990) and S. Mattern, Rome and the Enemy <\/em><\/a>(1999), though the attacks are a bit different and the latter more successful. Isaac is a \u2018hard primitivist,\u2019 in a nearly Finleyite mold: he will concede only that the Romans knew or understood or used the concepts we can see demonstrated<\/em> in the sources and he will not fill in gaps, however plausible (or likely). So since no Roman source explicitly discusses<\/em> using deserts, mountains, rivers or walls as defensible \u2018scientific\u2019 frontiers based on natural obstacles, he concludes they didn\u2019t (even though that pattern is obvious<\/em> in certain parts of the empire). It helps Isaac\u2019s argument that he\u2019s focused on the East (Luttwak was focused on the West) where the defensive patterns are less immediately obvious although I\u2019d argue they are still clearly defensive patterns (predicated on different geographic and logistical concerns) that Isaac essentially wills himself not to see.<\/p>\n Isaac\u2019s approach survived about three years before being comprehensively dismantled in spectacular fashion by Everett L. Wheeler in a two-part article, \u201cMethodological Limits and the Mirage of Roman Strategy\u201d JMH<\/em> 57.1 and 57.2. Wheeler has a peerless command of the ancient sources \u2013 as Lendon quips, \u201cabout ancient military and Roman foreign affairs no man alive knows more\u201d \u2013 and his double-article is a master-class in historical argumentation, going point by point and showing that the gaps Isaac identifies aren\u2019t gaps at all, that the sources do<\/em> demonstrate the concepts he thinks are missing in plain text, over and over again. Once again, personal factors intrude: Wheeler\u2019s blow to Isaac\u2019s argument was fatal, but the ghost of it survives in part because Wheeler wrote in the Journal of Military History<\/em>, which most classicists do not read, so unless a classicist is doing serious work on the topic (and thus following up footnotes) they\u2019ll meet Isaac and Isaac\u2019s supporters, but perhaps not the glassed-from-orbit demolition of his argument.<\/p>\n Mattern\u2019s counterpoint came later and has survived better. Essentially Mattern\u2019s argument is that the Romans are not \u2018doing strategy\u2019 in the way Luttwak imagines because they are not making decisions in those terms \u2013 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 \u2013 war colleges, general staffs, foreign offices, planning bureaus and such \u2013 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<\/em> a literary type.<\/p>\n 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\u2019t 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\u2019t quite say<\/em> in the aforementioned article, is that \u2018honor\u2019 and \u2018fear\u2019 are old-timey words for \u2018credibility\u2019 and \u2018deterrence\u2019 \u2013 you can end up re-inventing IR-realism<\/a> here in different words<\/a>. However for Mattern, this distinction, combined with Rome\u2019s primitive institutions, meant that \u2013 while the Romans may have been able to conceive of strategic planning \u2013 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.<\/p>\n And to be frank, the argument has been a bit stuck since then<\/strong>. Proponents of \u2018Roman strategy\u2019 often point out that \u2018strategy\u2019 as a concept is rather more modest than the primitivists would suppose and that Rome meets the definition (note for instance K. Kagan, \u201cRedefining Roman Grand Strategy\u201d JMH<\/em> 70.2 (2006)), but typically noting that actions<\/em> 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\u2019s 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<\/em> (2019) \u2013 very capably reviewed here<\/a> \u2013 particularly Richard Talbert\u2019s chapter on Roman geographic knowledge (or the lack thereof). The latest major broadside in all of this is J. Lacey, Rome: Strategy of Empire<\/a><\/em> (2022), which doesn\u2019t really move the argument forward: Lacy argues for Roman strategy by again presenting outcomes<\/em> \u2013 \u201clook at these forts, these troop movements, these decisions \u2013 how could they be random<\/em> or uncalculated<\/em> when they work so well<\/em>?\u201d Which is a decent point but not a new one \u2013 that is fundamentally the point Luttwak made in 1976 \u2013 and so unlikely to convince even if it is right.<\/p>\n My own view on this \u2013 and you are going to hear an echo of this complaint next week on hoplites too \u2013 is that not enough of the folks working on this topic have a solid grounding in comparative non-modern<\/span><\/em> military history.<\/strong> The classicists are, by and large, all classicists<\/em> 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<\/em> modern and modernizing in its outlook. But if you know something about how strategic policy was developed, shaped and implemented in the 1400s, 1500s, 1600s into the 1700s \u2013 largely before<\/em> 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<\/em> is happening) \u2013 the question is clarified immensely: of course<\/em> the Romans are doing strategy, albeit \u2013 as all polities will \u2013 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.<\/p>\n Indeed, they are doing strategy with institutions that look quite a lot like<\/em> 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<\/em> in Germany. And yet they did strategy just fine.<\/p>\n 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 \u2013 research, teaching, writings, etc<\/a>.<\/p>\n On to Recommendations<\/strong>:<\/p>\n 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\u2019s \u201cPrimitivism and Ancient Foreign Relations<\/a>\u201d CJ<\/em> 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.<\/p>\n And you may be thinking, \u201cbut Bret, how \u2013 since you are so clever and talented \u2013 can you not realize that I am not a college student or faculty member and so do not have unlimited access to JSTOR?\u201d Ah, but you actually do<\/em> have a lot<\/strong> of access to JSTOR: free<\/em> JSTOR accounts, available to all<\/a>, allow for reading most of the content on JSTOR with a limit of one hundred articles<\/em> per month<\/a>. An enormous amount of scholarship in a wide range of fields is thus available to you, for free<\/em> (albeit generally not the most recent issues of the journals in question).<\/p>\n More recently, a large international research team has just unveiled itiner-e<\/strong>, an amazing new project that mapped not only major Roman roadways, but minor ones as well<\/a>. This is a really great project \u2013 most maps of the Roman road network only include the really major arterial roadways, but of course we\u2019ve long known about many smaller. Even better, they\u2019ve released a handy, easy to use map model of their research<\/a> which you can use online, where you can click on any road segment and get a neat summary of what we have about it \u2013 if the location is secure or conjectured, if it has a name, what sources we have for it, etc. Visualizing not just the presence<\/em> of roads but the density<\/em> of them in certain areas really does help remind us that Roman power (and population) was not uniformly dense.<\/p>\n![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/acoup.blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/image-1.png?resize=1024%2C843&ssl=1\")
![\"\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/acoup.blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/image.png?resize=771%2C1024&ssl=1\")
<\/figure>\n