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ABSTRACT
This article considers the dynamic relationship between the soldier, the army, and the warzone, using contemporary philosophy and military theory to frame a reading of Roman sources. I will discuss how Roman literature reveals geographic space to be transformed by military activity, and likewise how this space and the soldier’s functioning in it synchronously makes the soldier’s body military, specifically Roman military. The aim is to utilize examples from ancient warfare to reflect on issues of de- and reterritorialization, in modern critical military studies. I will explore how the soldierly body both constructs and is constructed by the space in which it moves.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Compare Roselaar (Citation2016, 138): ‘The Roman army in the first century ce was responsible for a great deal of mobility in the Empire’, given that the army built roads.
2. On this approach in existing classical scholarship, see Sabin (Citation2000, 3–4), on first-hand accounts of battle: ‘It is obviously perilous to draw comparisons with the much better documented infantry clashes of the gunpowder era, since military technology has changed so much over the intervening centuries. However, the instincts and psychological pressures affecting massed formations of troops in close proximity to similar opposing formations are unlikely to have changed anything like as much over what is an insignificant interval in evolutionary terms’. See also Melchior (Citation2011).
3. It should be made clear at this point the difference between the commonly cited ‘military machine’, in the context of military practice, and the ‘war machine’ specific to Deleuze and Guattari’s philosophy (Citation2013; translated by Massumi; see also DeLanda Citation2010; 75). The latter is a complex political metaphor ‘which does not necessarily have war as its object’ (Deleuze and Guattari Citation2013, translated by Massumi, 484), and although it is in many ways pertinent to this discussion, Deleuze and Guattari’s ‘war machine’ is not what is being referred to here.
4. Foucault is here arguing for a constitutional departure, in the eighteenth century, from the ‘Roman’ imperial system of government.
5. Frontinus’ Strategemata, from the first century ad, survives only in fragments. It is mentioned in Aelian’s Tactics, a Greek work on the Hellenic military (second century ad), along with a much earlier text by Aeneas Tacticus on siege operations (fourth century bc).
6. The exception is the discovery of 300 documents at Vindolanda, a military camp at Hadrian’s wall, dated to the turn of the second century ad. These letters and military records, albeit fragmented, give a unique insight into daily life in the Roman camp (see Bowman Citation1994).
7. See also McCormack (Citation2017), on the ‘territorialising practices’ of US security strategies; Higate and Henry (Citation2010, 44); and Rech et al. (Citation2015, 50–1), on the relation between military activity and landscapes: ‘“Military landscapes” thus allow us to locate, place, and situate militaries and their activities, and to inquire as to the more-often-than-not deleterious effects of (sometimes anachronistic) military presences in landscapes’. Consider Pomeroy (Citation2003, 361): ‘Geography often turns out to be a state of mind rather than a collection of empirically verifiable facts’.
8. Consider also Trigg (Citation2017), on the embodiment of place and non-place. With reference to Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Perception, he writes: ‘spatiality is not a neutral backdrop, but an active field of force, defined by a global meaning’ (132).
9. See Polybius, Histories 1.1.5. As such, the Mediterranean therefore became what Erica Bexley might determine a ‘Romanocentric’ universe, a term she uses antithetically in her discussion of the political geography of Lucan’s Civil War (Citation2009, 460).
10. This meaning of land ownership correlates with the disparity between a definitive ‘nation state’ and an aggregate ‘territory’. Consider this description of the relatively new state of Afghanistan in the nineteenth century, ‘not a country but a territory. Its borders were a matter of opinion’ (Ansary Citation2012, 85). Moreover, the Roman state did not always set out to annex every patch of land over which they marched unhindered; rather, this practice depended on potential financial and defensive gains (see, for example, Livy, 36.17.13–16).
11. See Cicero’s On the Republic 3.35–7, translated by Sage: ‘Our people have gained dominion over the world by defending their allies …. And do we not see that dominion has been given to everything that is best for the greatest advantage of the weak? For what other reason does god rule men or the soul control the body, or rationality dominate desire, anger, and the other defective parts of the mind?’ See also Mattern (Citation2009, 127): ‘[the Romans] perceived foreign policy as a zero-sum game of honour in which one’s perceived ability to inflict violence was the essential, irreducible item on which everything depended’.
12. Carthage, like Numidia and the north-east coast of Africa, became Roman provinces, following the conclusion of the Punic wars in the mid-second century bc (Sage Citation2008, 270). However, as Kiernan writes (Citation2004, 28), ‘Despite the amazing regularity with which Rome went to war in this era, the policy to destroy Carthage was unusual. It was both decided in advance and pursued after the city’s surrender’.
13. Polybius was an Achaean, taken hostage by Roman invaders in 168 bc (Beard Citation2015, 186–7), then accepted into Roman society as a close friend of the general Scipio Aemilianus. He was physically present at the fall of Carthage in 146 bc, a harrowing example of Roman ‘defensive’ might (see Plutarch, Cato the Elder, 26–27, and Sallust, War of Catiline, 10.1–6, on the preceding Senatorial debates).
14. Further examples of Roman de- and reterritorialization include the siege of Munda in Spain, a climactic battle during Julius Caesar’s civil wars (45 bc), where the walls Caesar built around the town of Munda were formed of enemy corpses (Caesar, Spanish War, 32; Chrissanthos Citation2007, 239). See also Kiernan (Citation2004, 27); Appian, Roman History, 8.126, on the (ultimate) sacking of Carthage in 146 bc, in which at least 150,000 Carthaginians were killed.
15. See Lovano (Citation2013, 75), on Caesar’s commentaries: ‘Caesar’s feigned or conventional or honest respect for the warlike tribes as opposed to the more settled and peaceful tribes hits the reader from the start; this is the Roman attitude of the love of war as a virtue, not as a necessary evil, a theme that we find equally in the works of Tacitus and Sallust’.
16. For instance, the gruesome imagery of Polybius’ account of the Carthaginian wars inspired the Civil War’s infamous violence (Phang Citation2008, 43–4; see also Livy, 31.34.4).
17. A notorious example of this reterritorialization of citizen space is the proscriptions of Lucius Cornelius Sulla, which transformed the city of Rome into a killing spree. Following a civil war victory against Gaius Marius (88–82 bc), Sulla’s paranoia as dictator (82–79 bc) led him to eradicate all citizens who might oppose his rule, by posting lists of the condemned in the forum, for anyone to dispatch. Severed heads were piled in the forum, as elaborately recounted in Lucan (2.169–73), overcoding the space formerly for public gatherings as an exhibition of hysteria, with nearly 5000 victims in a matter of months. ‘Sulla wanted to break all records for variations on the theme of killing’ (Henderson Citation2003, 42), reterritorialising citizens as executioners, amplifying the mutative effects of civil conflict.
18. For discussion of the many facets of ‘globalization’ (or ‘Romanization’) in the Roman world, see Lutz and Lutz (Citation2015); also Pitts and Versluys (Citation2015).
19. The population according to a census taken by Augustus (14 ad), although this figure is disputable; see Nicolet (Citation1980, 17). See Phang (Citation2008, 114–15), on military abuse of citizens.
20. See Phang (Citation2008, 79), on the use of solely Latin and Greek in Roman posts, as the Romans were reluctant to learn foreign languages. See Bowman (Citation1994, 61), on the adoption of Roman names.
21. This impacted on the social and political status of the soldier. As remains the case today, certain citizen rights were denied or irrelevant to the military. ‘Technically, the citizen under arms appears to have had very similar rights to the civilian, but in fact the soldier was subject to a whole range of more severe penalties for misconduct, and his right of appeal, therefore his libertas [freedom], was limited’ (Alston Citation2010, 209). See also Brand (Citation1968). For the debate concerning twenty-first-century soldiers, see the work of Ross McGarry, especially McGarry (Citation2012).
22. Relatedly, see Partis-Jennings (Citation2017), on the debate concerning the performative nature of masculinity in warfare; also Morris (Citation1995).
23. ‘Roman’ arms were often copied from enemy troops, or formulated to combat them; see Diodorus Siculus, 23.2.1.
24. See also Lefebvre (Citation2009, translated by Nicholson-Smith, 40, original emphasis): ‘social practice presupposes the use of the body: the use of the hands, members and sensory organs, and the gestures of work as of activity unrelated to work. This is the realm of the perceived (the practical basis of the perception of the outside world, to put it in psychology’s terms)’.
25. The derivation of this word, esercito, is still used for ‘army’ in modern Italian.
26. See Scarry (Citation1985, 118) on theories which posit that ‘the rhythmic movement of marching in step with many men or of firing a gun by following a precise series of forty-two successive acts performed identically by all participants’ led to ‘the disappearance from the soldier’s body of the signs of a particular region or country’.
27. See Melchior (Citation2011, 218): ‘Mortars could not be lobbed into the Green Zone, suicide bombers did not walk into the market, and garbage piled on the street did not hide powerful explosives. The danger for a Roman soldier was largely circumscribed by his moments on the field of battle’.
28. Compare Higate and Henry (Citation2010, 34), on modern peacekeeping practices: ‘We are habituated into space, may fail to reflect on the staged or performed character of social life and are likely to perceive security at the level of the nonconscious, perhaps in an existential sense’.