Introduction

ABSTRACT

The literature on insurgency has, for the most art, skipped over the ancient world or has grossly over-simplified the discussion of events. The historians contributing papers to this volume hope to fill in that gap by discussing ancient insurgencies in the context of their own cultures. By examining how insurgencies are achieved, why they succeed or fail, what kind of response they draw from the occupying power, and what they achieve, we can come to conclusions about what contributions ancient civilizations made to what we understand about the nature of insurgencies.

KEYWORDS:

• Insurgencies
• ancient world
• guerrilla warfare
• COIN

As the literature on insurgency grows daily, even now some military historians choose to neglect the topic.¹ The neglect is even more acute when discussing ancient insurgencies. Historians too often either have skipped over the ancient world entirely, or grossly over-simplified the discussion of events. General histories of guerrilla warfare, e.g., those of Walter Lacquer,² John Ellis³ and Max Boot⁴ give a glancing attention to insurgencies in the ancient world in a few early chapters, but their conclusions are the same: that the methods developed at this time confirm the long-standing, if not ‘primitive’ nature of guerrilla warfare.⁵ Such attitudes feed into contemporary debate over the nature of insurgencies in societies in Africa and Asia, and they reinforce the stereotypical perception of insurgent warfare as, by nature, ‘tribal’ and ‘primitive’. Patrick Porter has covered this topic in his book, Military Orientalism.⁶ These crude Eurocentric perceptions begin disappearing once you examine other disciplinary areas such as African or Asian history.

Ancient historians, too, have written surveys of war in the ancient world with no mention of insurgency, counterinsurgency, or ambush.⁷ To its credit, Brill has published a Companion to Insurgency and Terrorism in the Ancient World. Editor, Lee Brice, in his introduction, commented on the fact that study of insurgency and terrorism has lagged behind the work of modern conflict studies.⁸ But even that volume focused solely on the ancient West. We still need a global approach to the study of insurgency, and this necessitates drawing analogies from other regions.⁹ Jonathan Roth, in his Epilogue to the same Brill volume, writes: ‘A global approach to the study of insurgency and terrorism necessitates not only drawing modern analogies from world history, but looking at the ancient world of other regions, principally China.’¹⁰ Thus, there is a strong case for a series of papers on insurgent movements and imperial responses in the ancient world as part of a re-examination of the historiography of guerrilla warfare. Our collection, therefore, has included India, China and the Middle East. We extended the chronological scope to include the Marathas because the sources on earlier Indian history are lacking in this particular area. We have tried to avoid a Eurocentric view of rebellion in the pre-modern world while also acknowledging non-western imperialism.

One of the main difficulties with applying modern literature on insurgency to the ancient world is that our basic conceptualization of insurgency has arisen from and reflects a modern western tradition that was applied through colonialism.¹¹ Modern counterinsurgency thinking is largely a product of the era of decolonization, when concepts and ideas were developed on how to deal with political challenges by independence movements. They are both based on a model of politics and development which is culture – and time-specific and, therefore, will not apply to all parts of the world in all times. By adding examples from India and China, for example, we immediately notice the uprisings that are against an imperial government but are not caused by outside occupation by foreigners.

Another time-specific problem is that in the ancient world we are dealing with pre-modern societies that did not have nation states. It was a world devoid of modern communications, where transportation and speed never went faster than a horse and fighting took place without guns. We must be careful of inappropriately applying contemporary concepts to places where they are anachronistic. A certain amount of that anachronism already takes place when we apply modern military terminology to describe an ancient situation.¹² We should be especially wary of having jargon drive the research, and we should also be aware that concepts do not have static meanings over time; they evolve. Insurgency can trace its roots back to the Latin insurgere, but has it always meant the same thing?¹³ What we might have called simply putting down a rebellion now has the faddish U.S. military acronym COIN for counterinsurgency, but does this add anything to our understanding?¹⁴

What we wish to discover are the similarities between ancient and modern uprisings. The ancient reality was that large areas of other peoples’ territory were taken over by imperial armies and incorporated into empires. The waging of warfare against many different kinds of fighters on different terrain was the goal of any empire seeking world domination. Where empires occur, their practices include violence and dehumanization. There is a traumatic and humiliating process of consolidation immediately following the conquest in which new rules, new taxes, and occupation by new of troops may be resented. The population becomes volatile, and the danger of rebellion stays high. This, of course, does not rule out revolts that take place later after a long occupation.¹⁵

Native groups fought off their powerful occupiers, and, even when they lost, they still dreamed of breaking free from domination. The Roman sources themselves talk about the idea of liberty, the threat to ancestral values and lifestyle, and the corruption of early administrators when they describe the motives for revolt against Roman authority.¹⁶ As Steven Metz has written: ‘Insurgency has existed as long as people have used violence to resist states and empires.’¹⁷ COIN does not confront any new forms of insurgency today. This kind of fighting has been here before, even if the context and the weapons have changed. As Colin Gray has written: ‘Insurgency or irregular warfare are global phenomena and they always have been.’¹⁸ For these reasons Walter Laqueur’s 1998 premature prediction that guerrilla war was ‘on the decline’ seems unlikely.¹⁹

Western nations, nevertheless, have still clung to the idea of insurgency as a war of a peculiar type. Some define small war by their modes of operation. Combatants use methods that we label as guerrilla warfare, ambush and terrorism. What we now call guerrilla warfare or irregular warfare (petit guerre) was certainly an element of ancient insurgency, but we also find rebels facing state forces in pitched battles and undertaking sieges of cities and fortified locations as in India and China. We should avoid the term ‘people’s war’ because it leads to the false assumption that the ‘people’ have in some way become mobilized into a popular mass army operating against a foreign or colonial regime. This may have happened in Mao’s China, but it did not happen in the ancient world. David Cherry’s observations on North Africa will highlight this fact.

So, although modern and post-modern writers refer to ‘new wars’ as contrasted with ‘old wars,’ irregular warfare is an old, old story and so are the methods applied to wage it on both sides.²⁰ It has always been about political power. Who has it and who wants to take it away. Politics is inextricable from all wars, but especially true in insurgencies and counterinsurgencies. COIN is about the control of people and territory; this is why it does not matter whether one reads Thucydides, Sun Tzu or Clausewitz on war. They all tell us about the unchanging nature of warfare.²¹ Read properly, they can tell us about the nature of war in all periods, among all belligerents, employing all weapons, and deploying an endless array of declared motives. This is why those authors never leave the curriculum. Although ancient groups did not have a highly developed sense of their political self, insurgency remains a highly political act, arising from some sense of grievance.

Definitions

Part of the problem in studying insurgencies is agreeing on definitions. It is clear that, even today, there is no universally agreed upon set of definitions for the study and practice of insurgency and counterinsurgency. And if we do not have one, the ancients certainly did not. The ancients did not even have a dedicated word for insurgent or insurgency. The word for ‘criminal,’ ‘bandit,’ and ‘insurgent’ might be the same. And while the modern term insurgency may not perfectly correspond to what the ancient texts describe, we do have something to gain by looking at the events through a new lens.

Defining small wars and insurgencies has become an academic industry in and of itself. The invention of categories and subcategories gives the illusion of intellectual control and imagined conceptual genius as this process of analysis by even finer dissection continues.²² And let’s not forget the jargon–that gray area where every dodgy idea hides behind execrable acronyms: ‘fourth-generation warfare,’ ‘network-centric warfare,’ ‘effects-based operations,’ ‘asymmetrical warfare,’ and ‘totally integrated approach.’ In the end, small war is war. It is about killing people, breaking things, and taking territory. Insurgency is warfare. Since Clausewitz has more than adequately written on the nature of war, and since all war has the same nature, it matters not whether it is regular or irregular. Scholar and strategists often try to persuade us that war is changing in nature as its many contexts alter, and especially that irregular warfare has a nature quite unique to itself. This is nonsense. There are no regular or irregular wars; there are only wars. In search of an advantage, warfare may be waged by methods that contemporary norms regard as irregular. Occupied peoples without an army will, by definition, fight as insurgents.²³

As we use it, insurgency is a fluid term, not just a synonym for revolt; it is a specific form of rebellion. China’s imperial history was fraught with coups, putsches fomented by imperial relatives, powerful generals and entrenched provincial officials, but regime change is not the same as insurgency.²⁴ We are looking for populist revolts, religiously based movements, and groups fighting centralization that threatened the established order. By eliminating the centralization of political and military power that many believed had contributed to the collapse of the Qin Dynasty, the rulers of the Former Han thought they could revert to the earlier practice of discreet localized authority. Unfortunately, this hybrid system actually nurtured a tendency toward rebellion.

Ancient insurgencies

Conceptualizing insurgency as a tactic actually works well in the ancient context. Guerrilla methods, then as always, are aimed at striking the opponent where he least expects it. The main idea behind it is always to avoid enemy strengths and concentrate on his weaknesses. In many respects little has changed in terms of these essential traits since antiquity. As Ian Beckett has written: ‘In terms of insurgency … the past is not another country … the past of guerrilla warfare and insurgency represents both the shadow of things that have been, and of those that will be.’²⁵

There is no reason to find an exact match between ancient events and modern theoretical constructions. When there are peculiarities about insurgencies in the ancient world, they should be highlighted. Unfortunately, the differences have often been subordinated to what might be termed a ‘grand epic view’ of guerrilla warfare transcending the ages. Historians have often written as if the techniques were learned anew in different times and geographical areas as a ‘natural’ form of tribally-based or peasant warfare. Such an approach prevents more serious attention being paid to the variety of economic bases of a huge variety of rural peasant societies over time, the structure of their kinship relations and political elites, and their distinctive religious and cosmological world views. More detailed attention to these differences can, it will be demonstrated in this issue, lead to a more sophisticated view of insurgent movements within the ancient world and certainly compared to the centuries that followed in what used to be termed the ‘Dark Ages’ in Europe before the rise of early nation states between the thirteenth and sixteenth centuries.

The causes of revolts can be the result of an unusually offensive occurrence, like the rape of Boudicca and her daughters, or to a gradual and unrelenting escalation in provincial antagonism towards Roman presence, as in Germany. Insurgencies could arise shortly after occupation (as in Judaea in 6 CE) or in provinces of long standing, led by local aristocrats simply because they saw an opportunity. The best examples of the latter are from Gaul, e.g. Florus and Sacrovir in 21 CE and the revolt of Civilis in 69 CE.²⁶ A combination of the two is possible. Motivations, however, are not always that clear cut. Insurgency is usually a symptom of deeper social, economic, and political shortcomings.

The structure of resistance movements in a given society is conditioned by the socio-economic formation of that society and by the system and apparatus of the state force itself. The form of the resistance movement is determined by the form of control and the collectivity of the resistants themselves, the kinds of pains and severity they suffered, and their understanding or interpretation of their sufferings in this world or in relation to future life. The instruments of control and the communities of controlled peoples are interrelated. It was at the contact point between them that the real conflicts occurred.²⁷ There could be religious motivations, there could be ethnic animosities. Uprisings led by peasants, the urban poor, or slaves (i.e., popular revolts) were relatively rare in the ancient world. And ‘tribes’ do not adequately describe the indigenous groups who participated. Defining the group may not be as easy as it first seems, as David Cherry writes in this issue in the case of North Africa.²⁸ It is possible to come up with more nuanced interpretations of a revolt that do not necessitate the focus on one single ideological motive or a monolithic ethnic group.

We do not always have as much information as we might want on the effect actions of the occupiers had on the sensibilities of indigenous groups. If we did, it might help to explain why certain opposition movements arose. We have much less information about the internal structure of ancient groups than in modern insurgencies. We are not always told when there was a division between the leadership of the insurgents and the ordinary rank and file in terms of dedication and motivation. How much they appealed to impressionable youth may be guessed at but not proven.²⁹

How is subversion achieved?

We should be able to ascertain the techniques and procedures by which subversion is achieved, or at least attempted. Once the mechanisms of subversion can be described, it is possible to offer interpretations of events and how they went down, then we can track how the occupying power responded and what their techniques were for counterinsurgency.³⁰

The conditions of small wars are very diverse. The enemy’s mode of fighting is often peculiar, and each theater of operations can present unique features so that small wars are often carried out by methods totally different from any stereotypical system of regular warfare.³¹ However, ancient insurgencies, like most social movements, pass through several predictable stages and employ somewhat similar methods.

1. In the incipient phase insurgents use a common grievance against a target government as a call to arms.

2. Being much weaker than the government they oppose, insurgents avoid direct confrontation in favor of agitation, sabotage and isolated guerrilla attacks, especially ambush.

3. When pressure is put upon them by the authorities, they may seek safe haven in mountain locations, deserts, or even neighboring states (such as the Marathas in India, or groups retreating from the Romans into the Atlas Mountains in North Africa, etc.).

4. Governments are usually loathe to recognize their own vulnerability and either do not see the fomenting rebellion at all (Germany) or write it off as isolated criminal activity (Judaea). Rebels are referred to in derogatory terms such as ‘disloyal,’ ‘traitors,’ or ‘treacherous villains.’

5. If the resistance movement gains ground and numbers, its military actions can become more frequent and sophisticated until adherents can eventually undertake conventional warfare. (such as the Marathas in India or challengers to the Han in China).

6. Since ambush and raid were also used by robbers, one must also investigate what role criminal gangs played in an insurgency. What the occupying force condemned as brigandage or terrorism, the insurgency celebrated as heroism.

7. A government may find a way to incorporate the insurgent group, as with the Marathas in India.

8. Historically, one of the critical elements in the survival and success of insurgencies is often external support.³² Had the Parthians decided to help the Jews, the outcome might have been different. [See the remarks of Gwynn Davies and Javier Jordán on Judaea in this issue].

Insurgencies highlight the flaws in the control system itself. In the ancient world, control was usually based on patronage systems that did not focus their attention on the population as a whole, but on individuals or groups who could pose a challenge to the system. Modern writers go astray when they emphasize the ‘state power’ of Rome rather than the role of personal power.³³ The Romans did not attempt to control the entire population, but rather attempted to control the provincial elites. In such a system, political power takes the form of concentric circles. Insurgency, resistance and banditry can all be viewed as holes in the social network of social relationships that linked the empire together and bound it to the senatorial aristocracy and to the emperor.³⁴

The occupying power can buy off dissidents or repress them as needed.³⁵ Such systems are brittle and prone to conflict. Rulers can misjudge threats. Rebellion, succession and organized banditry are common. Glen Bowersock has written that ‘Destabilization and alienation lie at the heart of provincial opposition in the Roman provinces. These are the goals of any factional leader.’³⁶ The occupying power, Rome, used violence to repress such opposition. The subject of legitimate state violence in the ancient world, especially Rome, is a controversial one. Exactly how much terror did they use? And did the use of terror stay exclusively with the established state? Practicing violence subverts the perceived legitimacy and the all-powerful image of the established government, thus the beheading of Varus by Arminius and the Germans practicing human sacrifice during this revolt, although such behavior was normally rare amongst the German tribes.

The political side of the question has been discussed by Jorit Wintjes. Does occupation include lots of troops on the ground for peace-keeping or does that get farmed out to local allies? The problems with farming out security functions to local chieftains can be seen in Roman Germany, where it was easy for the Germans to organize an insurgency right under the noses of the Roman occupation.

Government policies in India could drive minorities over the edge, as were the Hindu Marathas over their treatment by the Islamic Mughals. They became particularly vulnerable under the reign of Aurangzeb. The Mughals controlled the Marathas, because they had the use of a large army and regular cavalry to put down the insurgency.

Provincial opposition to Roman imperial rule cropped up periodically but consistently. Although no one contemplated overthrowing the Roman government altogether, there were uprisings especially aimed against cruel or incompetent leaders–Boudicca’s revolt in Britain, or the uprising of the Jews. Revolts could be led by fractious and ambitious groups hoping to gain and maintain freedom (Arminius). Opposition from natives in the provinces took the forms of local insurgencies, revolt encouraged by an external power (normally Parthia), and regional support for uprisings by Romans trying to take over the throne.

Guerrillas are almost always at a disadvantage when facing a sufficiently large, well-trained, disciplined and competently led army. So, what might bring the guerrillas success? Drawn out insurgencies can often be attributed to using too few troops to hold too large an area (especially if there is war on another front), using poorly trained and undisciplined troops, and bad generalship. In both ancient and modern times, uprisings succeed less because of their own strength than because of the weakness of the state forces. No ancient society could field the kinds of numbers we see today, nor did their armies occupy provinces with the same saturation.

Success and failure

Did rebel leaders really think they had a chance to defeat a Roman legion? Sometimes pride in taking on an enemy face to face and not resorting to guerrilla warfare (especially for a tribe with a large army) was a choice. It may have been difficult for a leader to persuade his followers to engage in guerrilla warfare. Caesar provides us with a parallel from his own campaigns in Gaul. Vercingetorix’s proposals to take a guerrilla approach – hit-and-run raids, scorched-earth tactics, and the abandonment or destruction of property – in the war with Caesar were immediately and continuously opposed by his own allies, and he was forced to compromise his approach, disastrously. Boudicca, too, took the Roman army head on.

One of the characteristics needed for a successful insurgency is an inspired, charismatic leader, who must have a cause (freedom) that is made clear to potential recruits. Arminius is an example. He was not the leader of all the Cherusci, and was even considered a troublemaker by tribal leaders, yet he was still able to bring together enough Germans to lead a successful insurgency against the Romans. Ralph Sawyer, in this issue, gives several more examples in China.

Where does leadership of insurgencies come from? Not peasants or the working class but from disgruntled elites. Bad behavior, arrogance, cruelty, and corruption are often cited as motives. Elites, feeling dishonored, losing privilege, or being humiliated is often a cause. Irregular warfare, as opposed to banditry, crime, or recreational brigandage and hooliganism, needs an ideology. It needs at least a facsimile of a big idea. Ideas and culture matter in warfare, and for an insurgency to mobilize and grow it has to have a source of spiritual or political inspiration. The insurgent must get followers with a promise of a better life–free life. They must make promises of a better government by the occupier look like lies or oppression.³⁷

One of the biggest problems the leadership of an insurgency faces is a lack of unity among revolting groups. Local concerns, factions, and feuds could all complicate an insurgency, whether it was Gallic factions in A.D. 21 or local kingdoms under the Han. In the First Jewish War, for example, such groups included the zealots and sicarii,³⁸ bandits,³⁹ urban mobs, or the factions following John of Gischala or Simon bar Giora.⁴⁰ Gwynn Davies has written about the mutual suspicion between these parties, the intense factional competition, and the effect of appointing a heavy-handed administrator had on the already volatile situation.

The Romans themselves did not consider fighting against slaves, insurgents, or bandits–what we today would call asymmetrical warfare–as true warfare, but they had no choice but to respond when faced with it.⁴¹ Since ancient societies wrote mainly about the upper classes, it becomes difficult to discover the roles of marginal groups from which dissidents arose. The distinction between a bandit, a tribal chief, a petty king, or the leader of a rebellion can be open to interpretation, especially by an ancient writer who lumped together leaders in more than one of these categories.⁴² Guerrilla leaders such as Viriathus and Tacfarinas were labeled as ‘bandits.’ Arminius, Boudicca, Julius Civilis, were not. Often the reasons were literary – portraying the ‘noble bandit’ avenging the breach of faith of Roman commanders.⁴³

Once an insurgent leader has an army, the successful use of terrain must also become an integral part of a successful revolt. The presence of ‘wilderness’ in some of the landscapes discussed here gave insurgents the chance to strike and escape. The use of terrain as a force multiplier can be seen clearly in the Varus episode, in the revolt of the Marathas, and in North Africa. Landscape features, like mountain passes, forests, hills, swamps, brush, etc., were used to spring ambushes. Surprise and speed played a much bigger role than force.

Timing of a revolt is also of the essence. Just before the Romans start to tax, during an interregnum, during a change in policy as in China, where local areas were given more autonomy, or if weakness in a leader is perceived, are all good times to start. Had the Jews not spent so much time fighting each other after the death of Nero, they might have been able to negotiate some sort of settlement with Rome.

The response

Insurgencies were (and still are) expensive, annoying, and dangerous. Ancient empires successfully put them down with a few exceptions. Modern military strategists are still trying to figure out why regular forces have great difficulty waging irregular warfare effectively, but in the ancient world it was much simpler. This is because ancient empires had choices at their disposal that do not exist for modern democracies. The modern world has rules of military engagement, Human Rights concerns and the Geneva Convention. The ancients had none of these.

Occupying armies that are faced with attacks from guerrillas or small armed bands all have a series of basic choices. At the crudest level, the occupier could seek to dry up any local or popular support from those guerrillas by massacring the populations or driving them into enclaves where they could be more closely monitored or controlled. This was certainly an option for the Romans. On the other hand, this is a waste of manpower if the goal is to make a colonial province where peasants will be working the land for you. The Romans always tried to set up a treaty relationship to control the population by political means rather than outright genocide. But genocide was never ruled out. This is the source of the phrase put in the mouth of Calgacus that the Romans: ‘Created a wasteland and called it peace.’⁴⁴

Right across the cultural spectrum, occupied peoples sometimes employed standard insurgent tactics such as robbery, brigandage, spying, coercion, subversion of civilians, solicitation of external support, sabotage and event terrorism. The prevention of free movement across open country by ‘enemies’ was a repeated lament of merchants and travelers even in peaceful times. Ancient armies were not unprepared for dealing with what we now call ambush. Columns of troops routinely marched with scouts and flank and rear guards to prevent ambush. If Varus used the wrong scouts, that was just his incompetence.

If detected early, the best methods for short-circuiting a revolt were stealth, intelligence, and betrayal. Assassinating Viriathus in Lusitania effectively shut down that revolt.⁴⁵ Had Varus used the intelligence he was given, he could have easily arrested Arminius, and the Roman occupation of Germany might have continued.

What we learn from the ancients

As we’ve said before, one of the chief dangers of this type of study is anachronism. Since most insurgency theory was developed in a post-colonial Cold War context and recently calibrated to fit the digital age and our own ‘war on terror,’ it is still true that, if you strip away the modernist technologies, you can see violent movements that have been a constant through history, especially against destabilized and repressive states. On the other hand, making broad comparisons between the ancient and modern worlds in general and trying to draw conclusions applicable to modern times is a dangerous undertaking that has, unfortunately, become popular with military writers and Beltway theorists. The fundamental differences in economics, technology, and political and military structures are so great that comparing our civilization with nuclear weapons to people who fought in sandals seems foolish.⁴⁶

There is no such thing as a universal set of counterinsurgency principles, and it certainly would be an anachronism to search for an ancient doctrine of counterinsurgency theory. There was none, except perhaps to wipe out the insurgents. Ancient regimes were totalitarian. Modern scholars often find it a politically inconvenient truth that coercive and repressive counterinsurgency does work, often achieving the desired effect of pacification and stabilization.⁴⁷ On the other hand, as we see from the Indian, Chinese, and Roman examples, coercive measures can be the cause of the revolt, and the military may not have the ability to totally wipe out the dissidents.

What we can learn from these diverse examples of insurgency in antiquity is that irregular warfare does not have a distinctive nature. It can take a wide variety of forms and be practiced in different modes even within the same conflict. In the realm of what the Chinese call ‘unrestricted warfare,’ in principle, anything goes if it works. The term ‘small war’ can include all campaigns other than those where both the opposing sides consist of regular troops. In other words, a small war is waged between state and nonstate adversaries. The legal and political status of the belligerents defines the irregularity. Insurgents may employ different tcics or use different weapons, but in the end their goal is the same–overthrow the power of the occupying force, gain their freedom, and liberate their territory from the occupier.

Discussion of insurgencies in the non-western world has been conspicuously absent from the literature on COIN except when the non-Westerners are the insurgents.⁴⁸ As the papers of Osborne and Sawyer show, all empires had their insurgencies which caused the same problems and required the same flexible strategies to combat them.⁴⁹ The comparison should not be between East and West, but between occupier and occupied. Each side will react in predictable ways in similar situations. There is no ‘eastern’ or ‘western’ way of war, and guerrilla fighting is not a genetic trait of easterners.⁵⁰ Martin van Creveld has compared the conflict between insurgencies and a counterinsurgent force with a child fighting an adult. The insurgents are the weaker opponent and will therefore use any means necessary to do damage to their opponent. This is unfair, not to mention patronizing; insurgents are not children.⁵¹ They are adults with serious grievances, whose land has been taken from them, whose self-determination has been taken from them, and who have suffered violence in the process. When they strike back, they are not like children throwing a tantrum. As Arminius displayed in Germany, they are quite capable of a fomenting a revolt, based on a rational strategy, and succeeding not only militarily, but in ridding themselves of a formidable occupier and changing the foreign policy of an empire.

The most widely used insurgent tactic throughout these examples is the ambush. Ambush is particularly effective against road movement, especially when ground conditions make it difficult for the regular army forces to move off the road and take cover. Tactical manuals today all have sections on preventing ambushes that teach soldiers about the very things discussed here: small ambush, hit and run; annihilation ambush, the type that can take place over a 5 km stretch. It consists of front and rear blocking parties, an attack force deployed at appropriate positions on the road and a fire support group not unlike what Arminius used against the Romans in Germany.⁵²

The occupiers are few, the natives are many, and they know the lay of the land. They are fighting for their own freedom and therefore highly motivated. Many of the counterinsurgency techniques that we moderns think we invented were already used by ancient counterparts.

1. Using fortifications such as walls, ditches, and berms to hem in guerrilla forces.

2. Intelligence collection and the use of agents recruited from the enemy (although Varus is an example of how not to do this).

3. Removing populations (removing Jews from Judaea to Galilee after the Bar Kokhba Revolt.

4. Taking advantage of factions within the enemy force has been around since ancient times. Factionalism plays an especially important role in insurgency and counterinsurgency. Insurgent forces tend to be made up of a loose alliance of forces representing different classes, tribes, religions, and ideologies. The disunity of the Cherusci in Germany, and of the Jews during the First Jewish War are perfect examples. North Africans rarely, if ever, joined in a single rebellion. All rebellions are, in a sense, civil wars; there are always groups that remain loyal to the government (e.g., Segestes).

5. When insurgencies occur, they occupying state denies legitimacy for the rebels. The rebel cause is illegitimate and they use delegitimizing language to describe their participants. (‘terrorists,’ ‘animals,’ ‘brigands,’ etc.)

So, what happened to a power like Rome whose armies were organized, equipped and trained to fight other armies with characteristics similar to theirs, when they were faced with an insurgency that would not play by the rules? Although they were trained to win a victory by defeating a conventional force on a battlefield, when faced with insurgencies, they needed to change their own rules, and they did. The modern claim by COIN proponents today that insurgency is a different kind of war, more complex and difficult to contain, does not hold up in the ancient context. As Decker asserted: ‘Any good soldier can handle guerrillas.’⁵³ And they would have to do so over and over again. And as Susan Mattern has noted: “None of the means the Romans used against rebellion and insurgency worked in the sense of eradicating the problem. The Romans managed insurgency but did not eliminate it.⁵⁴

This is why it is an error to reify irregular warfare, because it is, after all, only a method, not a distinctive phenomenon. There are no irregular wars obedient to some distinct nature of their own. Dividing warfare into ‘regular’ and ‘irregular’ is a serious mistake because many wars are neither purely regular nor irregular. This is especially true in the ancient world where wars were characterized by belligerents resorting to a range of combat modes on a regular-irregular spectrum as we have seen in the examples here. Any side that tried to cling strictly to one or the other would be defeated. Irregular forces do not win unless they can translate their irregular gains into the kind of advantage that yields them military, strategic, and ultimately political effect against the enemy.⁵⁵ The ancient world has given us examples that show how sometimes they were successful, and sometimes they failed.

The ancient world is full of rebellions.⁵⁶ One scholar alone has documented more than 120 separate instances of insurgency against Rome from the reign of Augustus through 190 CE.⁵⁷ The Chinese and Indians, too, were plagued by a history of rebellion. The revolters carried with them ideals, goals, and ideologies. Their motives could range from redress of grievances to a sharing of power to total freedom. Tracing these insurgencies in the ancient world has been difficult because evidence for clandestine practices has to be teased out of the sources which are, of course, one sided in favor of the occupier who writes the history. Counterinsurgency did not get the attention that conquering large cities or defeating great empires got. Crushing an insurgency might get a short notice. Self-aggrandizing campaigns were recorded in detail, but not conflicts with foes considered beneath their attention. They wrote in order to legitimize themselves before their audience. Texts rarely mention defeats, although, when they do, the defeats are huge, as in the case of Varus.

The ancients had no formal military doctrine, but rather operated according to tradition. The Romans were especially pragmatic and would simply do what had worked in previous uprisings. They had plenty of chance to practice. The Romans did not define counterinsurgency as a distinct type of operation, and guerrilla warfare was certainly familiar to them. The Romans were usually the occupying force, but that did not prevent them from mounting their own guerrilla type campaigns, as Jorit Wintjes has pointed out.⁵⁸

Texts do not explain how the occupying power handled counterinsurgencies. Jorit Wintjes asserts that Roman counterinsurgency doctrine could easily be described as ‘kill them all,’ that would actually work if it can be achieved. Genocide was an option, which makes the ancient world much different from our democratic militaries, that have to act under far more restraint.⁵⁹ In some ways, modern COIN is harder. Modern armies do not have all the options that ancient armies had. The Romans could slaughter people and never have to face a world press or public opinion, and thus Vespasian could make it quite clear to the Jews what would happen to provincials who revolted against Rome. As Edward Luttwak once wrote: ‘A massacre once in a while remained an effective warning for decades.’⁶⁰ What the ancient world has taught us, therefore, is that insurgency is an enemy-centric conflict where decisive military victory is attainable as long as one is not squeamish about the application of force. One must out-terrorize the terrorists. The appropriate response is force against the insurgents and their supporters. This is primarily a military activity, and the decisive defeat of the insurgents is the goal. Roman historians treat revolt as if it were an insult and a challenge to which the appropriate response would be vengeance extreme enough to re-instill awe and fear into their rebellious subjects.⁶¹ Thus the use of mutilation, mass deportations, mass destructions and mass slaughter to punish, avenge and deter.⁶²

Each insurgency is unique, but they have some characteristics in common. Warfare between tribes and established central states was a structural constant. Irregular warfare is highly variable in form and is always complex; it has no fixed character. Its irregularity is determined by specific historical and cultural circumstances. In common with the Chinese ch’i and cheng, unorthodox and orthodox, Liddell Hart’s indirect as opposed to direct approach, and symmetrical contrasted with asymmetrical warfare, irregularity is defined by its opposite.⁶³ This is why irregular, indirect, and asymmetrical are all ultimately meaningless concepts since they are definable only in reference to their opposites.

Walter Laqueur wrote that it does not matter whether you are talking about European colonial power in Africa, Romans expanding into the Mediterranean, the U.S. Expanding West or Russia expanding East. There will be resistance. And it will always prove easier to conquer new colonies than it will be to hold them against a hostile population. This is not a new observation. It was made by the Roman historian Florus, who rightfully pointed out that it is easier to subdue a province than to retain one. The simple truth is that no one likes being occupied.⁶⁴

Another way in which modern COIN does not apply to the ancient world is that modern doctrine speaks of winning over the hearts and minds of the locals. This idea is problematic in two ways. First, as Douglas Porch has pointed out, it is based on a 19^th-century concept that is nothing more than an Orientalized Western view of indigenous societies as immutable tribal affiliations.⁶⁵ Secondly, winning over the local population was not the goal of ancient imperialists, and coercion could make it unnecessary. As Edward Luttwak has pointed out, coercion makes up for lack of consent: ‘government needs no popular support when it has obedience.’⁶⁶ He was familiar with the Romans, who waged war to secure the acquiescence, not the support, of the local people. Military defeat of the irregular enemy is desirable but not essential. It is his political defeat, his delegitimization that is crucial. The only hearts and minds the Romans cared about were the ruling elite. If the Romans controlled the upper one percent, then it was the job of the aristocracy to control their populations. The Romans did not care about public opinion of the masses. Intelligence is of supreme importance in detecting and putting down insurgencies, and intelligence is attainable only from defectors or sympathetic elements in the population. For information to be available, your sources must believe you are the winning side. In the case of Roman Germany, the Romans had sympathetic elements among the Cherusci, who did supply them with information on a potential rebellion. But when even a small percentage of that elite turned on the Romans, an insurgency was put together that proved deadly because a particular Roman commander did not seem to care about using the intelligence assets he had on hand.

Contemporary counterinsurgency theory concentrates on what motivates the respective actors and how their actions are judged both by themselves and a wider, transnational community. This is not to be seen in Roman thinking. Jorit Wintjes has written on how the Romans approached their enemies - with utter disregard for their motivation. They were not answerable to international laws or public opinion. Even the civilian population was considered expendable. The Romans could indeed create a wasteland and call it peace. Genocide was what Jorit Wintjes calls ‘the nuclear option.’⁶⁷ When fighting ancient insurgencies, ancient armies were infinitely less restrained than their modern counterparts. As Agricola’s speech before the Battle of Mons Graupius shows, the Romans had only one rule of engagement: win.

The price to be paid to achieve the goal of independence was high. Insurgents will often say they were forced into a revolt, but what pushes people to such desperate measures? Considering the strength and power of the occupying forces, it may seem to us self-defeating and even perverse to take on a giant when one is outnumbered. The heavy hand of Rome in Judaea resulted in the bloodiest and most destructive of anti-Roman insurgencies as described by Gwyn Davies. The results of the Jewish Revolts are staggering. They lost close to a million people in the first revolt.⁶⁸ In the second they lost half their population. They were banned from most of Judaea. Jerusalem was in ruins, and the losses to Jewish literature and learning are inestimable. From this point of view, the insurgency did not seem like a good idea. Yehosofat Harkabi, in his book The Bar Kokhba Syndrome, pointed out that the Jewish achievement on the tactical level became almost irrelevant when elevated to the strategic level. In a war (small or otherwise) the main thing is to win the last battle, not the first one. Clausewitz said that war was meant to achieve results. It is not supposed to be waged on impulse, to vent fury, or to manifest grievances; it must be waged to reach a goal. In an insurgency this is invariably independence.⁶⁹

What can insurgencies achieve?

Ancient insurgencies were bloody and violent. The outcome of a full-scale, hard-line indigenous revolt was devastating for both rulers and subjects. The casualties in the Bar Kokhba Revolt were estimated by Dio at 580,000.⁷⁰ The surviving Jews were exported to Galilee and the Jews in Judaea never recovered. So why start a revolt? Because freedom was possible. There is a great difference in the outcomes of ancient insurgencies. Yes, some were abject failures, but others achieved stunning success. The Germans under Arminius destroyed three entire Roman legions, chased the Romans from their territory, and the area on the eastern side of the Rhine remained ‘free Germany.’

The Revolt of the Seven Kingdoms in China and its suppression lasted only three months, but it was ferocious. Had the seven princes prevailed in this conflict, in all likelihood the Han Dynasty would have collapsed into a loose confederation of states. In the aftermath of the rebellion, while the principality system was maintained, the powers of the princes were gradually reduced and the sizes of the principalities reduced as well, under Emperor Jing and his son, Emperor Wu. With the longevity of the Han Dynasty, the Chinese mindset of its being normal to have a unified empire rather than divided states started to settle in.

Insurgencies may have political, religious, or ethnic origins and economic causes. [See especially Jordán in this issue] We have already mentioned the First Jewish Revolt that tied up four legions and 50,000 men for several years. The greatly outnumbered Hindu Marathas fought the Muslim Mughals using the harsh religious restrictions imposed by Aurangzeb to organize a campaign against the emperor. The failure to completely quell that revolt led to the Maratha’s dominating large swaths of the Mughal empire after Aurangzeb’s death, and it was not long before foreign powers like Britain took advantage of the situation.

The papers in this issue show that insurgencies are political events carried out with violence to achieve a goal.⁷¹ Insurgencies can arise out of a lack of effective governance, lack of sufficient security, or desire to secede from a union. But it is on the political and strategic level, not the tactical, that counterinsurgencies are won or lost. Insurgencies lose because they are too isolated politically, ethnically, religiously or geographically. Their message may be too unpopular or their methods too brutal to gather and sustain the support for the social, political, economic or religious agenda to appeal to a larger segment of the population. When this happens, the counterinsurgents may simply pick sides in a civil war, roll up an insurgency’s infrastructure, incarcerate its support base, decapitate its leadership or destroy its economy to win.

Why this study?

With academic interest in insurgency and counterinsurgency increasing in recent years, it is not surprising that a volume on these topics in the ancient world should be added to the literature that is becoming available on the subject.⁷² Now that a growing body of strategic theorists have recognized that insurgencies are an inextricable part of mainstream strategic studies, we also need to stretch their thinking across time.⁷³ Although contexts change, the past always remains a source of examples. Questions may abound about the nature of insurgencies and the applicability of counterinsurgency ideas to current day situations, but study of the past always remains important.⁷⁴ Insurgencies follow a similar course of development, and therefore parallels can be found.

Eliot Cohen has written about the importance of developing ‘historical-mindedness’ among officers, strategists and policy makers who should be trained to ‘detect differences as much as similarities’ between past and present.⁷⁵ Frequently, history is misused or ignored. And leaders must avoid an overreliance on facile and simplistic lessons learned or single-point comparisons lifted out of context for the purpose of blinkered doctrine and military-bureaucratic struggles that constitute the norm. All too often in U.S. political culture, the past becomes an arsenal for political fights that have nothing to do with the kind of disinterested, professional reflection required of an historian and displayed by Clausewitz two centuries ago. And ideology should never be substituted for strategy.⁷⁶ Assertions of COIN success based on shoddy research and flawed or selective analysis of cases results in historical error, but using them as a basis for professional and institutional imperatives leads to people being killed. Historians must establish the factual record so that mythologized, self-serving versions of the past are not offered as a grand strategic formula for the future.

Another important reason for studies like this one is the need to bring together those scholars of the ancient world with these modern thinkers for a little more cross-fertilization. Although there have been a range of articles on related military topics published in specialized classics journals, these are not often consulted by scholars and students in military studies. The work of classicists has been rather isolated from debates surrounding the typology of guerrilla insurgencies or the formulation of counter-insurgency strategies. Jonathan Roth has already written eloquently about the naïve use of ancient scholarship by military and political scientists.⁷⁷ Cherry picking quotes does not research make. But it is equally true that academics, especially those with no military experience, can deeply misunderstand military life, culture and institutions. The study of insurgencies, terrorism and intelligence is often dominated by social and political scientists, security studies specialists, members of the military, but not by historians. Still less by ancient historians.⁷⁸

More cooperation between the two audiences, more cross-publication in journals, and attendance at each other’s meetings would be useful. As Lee Brice has pointed out: ‘The failure to acknowledge insurgency and terrorism studies has cut historians of the ancient past off from contributing to current topical debates and deprived them of multi-disciplinary analytical tools.’⁷⁹ As Javier Jordán’s contribution to this issue has pointed out, the results of one single empirical case cannot be generalised, but they nonetheless constitute a preliminary element for the construction of a broader theoretical framework concerning the existence of elements of continuity in the phenomenon of insurgency. It is our hope this issue will help bring their work before a wider range of scholars. We have chosen examples from across space and time to show how each society could be amenable to analysis on how it dealt with insurgencies. Studying them affects our understanding of conflict in the ancient past. We also hope these contributions will lead to an understanding of the way insurgencies arose in the ancient world and how they were perceived and counteracted by the occupying powers.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Rose Mary Sheldon

Col. Rose Mary Sheldon received her Ph.D. in ancient history from the University of Michigan. Her dissertation, on intelligence gathering in ancient Rome, won a National Intelligence Book Award in 1987. She is Professor Emerita of History at The Virginia Military Institute where she was holder of the Burgwyn Chair in Military History. She was made a Fellow of the American Academy in Rome in 1980. Dr. Sheldon has been on the Editorial boards of the International Journal of Intelligence and Counterintelligence and The Journal of Military History. She has written more than three dozen articles in such publications as Studies in Intelligence, the American Intelligence Journal, Small Wars and Insurgencies, and the Journal of Military History. Her books include Trust in the Gods, But Verify. Intelligence Activities in Ancient Rome (London: Frank Cass, 2005), Rome’s Wars in Parthia: Blood in the Sand, (Vallentine Mitchell, 2010); Operation Messiah: St. Paul and Roman Intelligence, (Vallentine Mitchell, 2008); Spies of the Bible, (Greenhill Books, 2007); Ambush! Surprise Attack in Ancient Greek Warfare, (Frontline Books, 2012), and Kill Caesar! Assassination in the Early Roman Empire, (Rowman & Littlefield, 2018).

Notes

1. John Keegan, for example, in War and Our World, who ignores it completely. Douglas Porch, Counterinsurgency, 1, believes western counterinsurgency began in 1492 with the Reconquista. On the historiography of insurgency, see Ian Beckett, RHIC, 23–31.

2. Laqueur, Guerrilla Warfare. A Historical and Political Study; Laqueur, Guerrilla. A Historical and Critical Study. For an idea of how inadequate his treatment of ancient historical subject is, see Laqueur, Guerrilla, 6, on the Battle of the Teutoburg Forest and the essay by Sheldon in this volume. Compare also his comments on Tacfarinas to the treatment by David Cherry in this volume.

3. Ellis, From the Barrel of a Gun.

4. Boot, Invisible Armies, 41–43 discusses ancient insurgents as if they were all nomads. See his use of the terms “tribal” and “uncivilized warfare,” 8–12. Compare his brief treatment of the Beth Horon incident to the one in this issue by Gwynn Morgan.

5. See Gann, Guerrillas in History who refers to insurgents “in secret places in the wilderness” where they lived “as wild animals do.” 1.

6. Porter, Military Orientalism. Eastern War through Western Eyes.

7. Raaflaub and Rosenstein, War and Society in the Ancient and Medieval Worlds had the breadth and scope, but no mention of insurgencies. The same with Gil Gambash, Rome and Provincial Resistance, which mentions neither insurgencies nor intelligence. It is actually easier to list the books that do mention insurgencies, terrorism, and ambush than those that do not, for example, Sheldon, Ambush! Surprise Attack in Ancient Greek Warfare.

8. Brice, in Howe, and Brice, Brill’s Companion to Insurgency and Terrorism in the Ancient World, 7. For exceptions, see Mattern, “Counterinsurgency and the Enemies of Rome.”

9. Roth, in the Epilogue to the Brill volume, p. 352, writes: “A global approach to the study of insurgency and terrorism necessitates not only drawing modern analogies from world history, but looking at the ancient world of other reasons, principally China.”

10. Roth, Brill, 352.

11. Metz, RHIC, 33. In: P.B. Rich, and I. Duyvesteyn, (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Insurgency and Counterinsurgency, hereafter cited as RHIC.

12. On anachronism, see Brice, Brill 8.

13. Ibid 9.

14. Porch, Counterinsurgency, 318, has warned against believing that COIN constitutes a separate form of warfare.

15. Mattern, “Counterinsurgency and the Enemies of Rome,” 165.

16. Examples of revolts led by native leaders soon after conquest included Vercingetorix in Gaul, Arminius in Germany, and Boudicca in Britain. See Mattern, 165 and 173, where she writes about subject who adopted Roman ways and become indistinguishable from Romans in the sources.

17. Metz, “Rethinking Insurgency,” 32.

18. Gray, “Irregular Warfare. One Nature, Many Characters,” 36.

19. Laqueur, Guerrilla. A Historical and Critical Study.

20. On “new wars,” see Kaldor, New and Old Wars: Organized Violence in a Global Era, and Münkler, The New Wars.

21. Gray, SSQ 40; Clausewitz, On War; Sun Tzu, The Art of War; and Strassler and Crawley, The Landmark Thucydides.

22. Gray, SSQ 37.

23. Smith and Jones have argued against the idea of viewing insurgency and counterinsurgency as distinct in nature from war in general. The Political Impossibility of Modern Counterinsurgency, 2011. https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0066625/.

24. This was also true in the Roman Empire, although the Romans had a higher rate of assassination. See Sheldon, Kill Caesar.

25. Beckett, “The Future of Insurgency,” 34–35.

26. Mattern, “Counterinsurgency and the Enemies of Rome,” 166.

27. Ota, “The Ancient Mediterranean World Structure and Resistance Movements therein,” 13.

28. See Couper, “Gallic Insurgencies? Annihilating the Bagaudae,” 312–343.

29. On the modern study of such social groups, see: Bultmann, “The Social Structure of Armed Groups. Reproduction and Change during and after Conflict.”

30. See the comments of Bowersock, “The Mechanics of Subversion in the Roman Provinces,” 293.

31. It has been argued that the conduct of small wars is, in many respects, an art by itself, diverging widely from the conditions of regular warfare. See C Callwell, Small Wars: A Tactical Textbook for Imperial Soldiers (1906), quoted in Gray, “Irregular Warfare. One Nature, Many Characters,” 35.

32. On neighboring state as facilitators, see Rich and Duvesteyn, RIHC, 361.

33. Mattern, “Counterinsurgency and the Enemies of Rome,” 174 citing the example of Josephus not seeming to understand the concept of state power.

34. Mattern, “Counterinsurgency and the Enemies of Rome,” 178 who points out that the military aspect of insurgency and counterinsurgency is only the tip of the iceberg when studying how the Romans controlled their empire. They ruled because their social relationships were everywhere.

35. Metz, “Rethinking Insurgency”; Reno, RHIC, 157–71 for modern examples in Africa. As Susan Mattern has written: “To prevent and respond to insurgency, the Romans relied on a complicated network of relationships that reached into almost every stratum of society, plus intensive military occupation of the most volatile areas,” 164. The fact that insurgencies could be successful suggests that control did not go as deeply as she suggests.

36. Bowersock, “The Mechanics of Subversion”.

37. Brill conclusion. On the connection between insurgency and banditry, see Brice’s comments in Brill, 21–22 and the papers he cites.

38. These are not the same groups. The sicarii were an urban phenomenon; they were the followers and descendants of Judas and Zadok of Galilee, who had started the revolt against Rome in A.D. 6. During the war of 66–70 their leaders were Menachem and Eleazar ben-Yair, the grandson and nephew of Judas of Galilee. Josephus called them “The Fourth Philosophy.” Josephus, AJ 18.8. See Morton Smith, “Zealots and Sicarii,” and “The Troublemakers”, 501. Horsley, “The Sicarii: Ancient Jewish ‘Terrorists’,” 435–58; Taylor and Gautron, “Pre-Modern Terrorism,” 42, finds the term “terrorism” anachronistic; Rappaport, “Who Were the Sicarii?” On the historiography of the term; also Taylor and Gautron, “Pre-Modern Terrorism,” 28–33, 42.

39. On bandits in Judaea, see Grünewald, Bandits in the Roman Empire, 91–109.

40. See my discussion of zealots, bandits and urban mobs in Sheldon, Spies in the Bible, 131–3. Cf. Mattern, “Counterinsurgency and the Enemies of Rome,” 168 on bandits.

41. On leaders of slave revolts as “latrones” (bandits), see Grünewald, Bandits in the Roman Empire, 57–71.

42. Mattern, “Counterinsurgency and the Enemies of Rome,” 169, who warns again making analogies between ancient banditry and modern terrorism. For a complete discussion of the ancient terminology and the role bandits played as guerrilla leaders, see Grünewald, Bandits in the Roman Empire. Myth and Reality, passim.

43. Grünewald, Bandits in the Roman Empire, 55–6.

44. Tacitus, Agricola, 38.

45. In 139 BCE, Viriathus was killed in his sleep by three of his companions, Tartessian allies named Audax, Ditalcus and Minurus. These three men had been sent as emissaries to the Romans, but there they were bribed by Marcus Popillius Laenas into betraying their mission. The popular story of their fate has Roman general Servilius Caepio having them executed, declaring: “Rome does not pay traitors.”

46. Commented on by Mattern, “Counterinsurgency and the Enemies of Rome,” 179, 184, citing her paper presentation at a conference at the University of Michigan 21 November 2008, entitled: “Invasion: The Use and Abuse of Comparative History.” On the role of single individuals, see Goldsworthy, “Julius Caesar and the General as State,” 206–26.

47. Rich and Duvesteyn, RIHC, 369. See also Merom, How Democracies Lose Small Wars.

48. See the comments of Rich and Duvesteyn, RIHC, 364.

49. On more modern insurgencies in India, see Goswami, “Insurgencies in India, RIHC, 208–217 and Fidler and Ganguly, “Counterinsurgency in India,” 301–11.

50. Porter, Military Orientalism, passim. Hanson, Western Way of War, 1, xv, on the western “repugnance” for ambush. Sheldon, Ambush, Introduction.

51. van Creveld, The Changing Face of War, 226.

52. These illustrations are taken from the British Army Field Manual; Combined Arms Operations, Part 10, Counterinsurgency Operations.

53. Quoted in: Porch, Counterinsurgency, 319.

54. Mattern, “Counterinsurgency and the Enemies of Rome,” 164.

55. Gray, Modern Strategy, 293; and Strachan, Carl von Clausewitz on War, 2008.

56. Mattern observes of the Romans: “… innumerable major and minor uprisings are attested throughout the imperial period, and banditry was endemic in all periods and areas of the empire. There was never a time when the Roman army’s size could safely be reduced…” “Counterinsurgency and the Enemies of Rome,” 164.

57. See Pekáry, “Seditio. Unruhen und Revolten im römischen Reich von Augustus bis Commodus,” 133–50. This counts only the events that can be documented through the sources. It is safe to assume there might have been many more minor instances that did not make it into the record.

58. See the example of Dexippus, the scholar turned general, who mounted a successful guerrilla campaign against Gothic invaders in 267 CE. Millar, “Herennius Dexippus: The Greek World and the Third-century Invasions,” 12–9.

59. This is a concept well attested in Roman literature that speaks of wiping out entire tribes and people. Even though they lost to Arminius, they laid waste to much territory, slaughtered non-combatants and aimed at the annihilation of the Germans. Mattern, “Counterinsurgency and the Enemies of Rome,” 167.

60. Luttwak, “Dead End. Counterinsurgency Warfare in Military Malpractice.”

61. Mattern, “Counterinsurgency and the Enemies of Rome,” 167.

62. Ibid 157. See also Westington, Atrocities in Roman Warfare to 133 B.C.

63. Liddell Hart, Strategy. The Indirect Approach.

64. Florus 2.30.29. Or as von Clausewitz wrote: “the principle of resistance exists everywhere.” The Guerrilla Reader, 33. The degree and speed of Romanization in Germany beyond the Rhine has generated a great deal of debate. A warning against assuming too great a degree of Romanization, especially in the form of provincial organization, is given by Oldfather, “The Varus Episode,” 233–6; and Oldfather and Canter, The Defeat of Varus, 9–16.

65. Douglas Porch, Counterinsurgency, 318.

66. Luttwak, “Dead End: Counterinsurgency warfare as military malpractice.”

67. See, for example Caesar, BG 3.16.4 on the physical destruction of the Veneti.

68. Josephus, BJ 6.9.3., claimed that 1,100,000 people were killed during the siege, 97,000 were captured and enslaved and many others fled to areas around the Mediterranean. A significant portion of the deaths was due to illnesses and hunger brought about by the Romans.

69. Carl von Clausewitz, On War1.11, 1.23, 8.6. Y. Harkabi, The Bar Kokhba Syndrome Syndrome, 34–5.

70. Dio 69.14.1; Mattern, 167.

71. Porch, Insurgency, 320.

72. For a wide-ranging overview of the current state of academic analysis and debate on the subject, see Rich and Duyvesteyn, The Routledge Handbook of Insurgency and Counterinsurgency.

73. Ibid., 2.

74. Ibid., 360.

75. Cohen, “The Historical Mind and Military Strategy.”

76. This is especially true of neo-Conservative historians like Victor Davis Hanson, Niall Ferguson, Max Boot, and Robert D. Kaplan, among others, for whom history, military history in particular, seem to have a nostalgic, even inspirational, as well as utilitarian, value. Porch, Counterinsurgency, 333, holds them responsible for the triumph of COIN by their hyping of the benefits of imperialism, a belief in military power as “the chief emblem of national greatness.” To see these ideas foisted onto the ancient world, one only need look at: Brand, Killing for the Republic. Citizen Soldiers and the Roman Way of War.

77. Roth, Brill Epilogue, 362.

78. The comments of Gage, “Terrorism and the American Experience: A State of the Field,” 79–81, on terrorism are equally true of other fields covered in this study. Cf. Law, “Introduction” to Routledge History of Terrorism, 6–7.

79. Bruce, Brill, 4.