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J. E. LENDON. Soldiers and Ghosts: A History of Battle in Classical Antiquity. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2005. xii + 468 pp. 10 maps. 31 black-and-white figs. Cloth, $35.
Necessity, just as a craft, always causes innovations to prevail, and although for a city at peace fixed norms are best, there is need of much contrivance for those compelled by multiple circumstances to proceed.
-Thucydides 1.73.3
War, culture, and change from Homer to Vegetius represent the focus of this work, presaged by the author's study of Caesarian battle narrative (ClAnt 18 [1999]: 273-329) and an interpretive review of some recent works (CJ 99 [2004]: 441-49). The reviewer must confess that his own work inspired much of this book's conceptual and factual content (e.g., 318, 401, 403, 411-12, 414, 415, 426, 432, 434-35) and that he provided Delphic responses (per epistulas electronicas) to a diligent inquirer, although he did not see individual chapters before publication and declined to read a final version of the manuscript. The author's own fertile imagination and vivid style animate these pages. Nestor could only advise Achilles.
The work has its own historiographical ghosts. A cultural approach to war is now au courant, as a result of the clash of cultures in the so-called "War on Terror" (e.g., V. D. Hanson, Carnage and Culture [2001]) and Shannon French, The Code of the Warrior [2003], both missing from Lendon's bibliography) and as a reaction to the much imitated but seriously flawed "face-of-battle" approach to military history (e.g., John Lynn, Battle: A History of Combat and Culture [2003]; cf. E.L. Wheeler, JRA 11 [1998]: 644-51 and Electrum 5 [2001]: 169-84 for the naïve foibles and excesses of "face-of-battle" studies). Lendon follows what is already a common theme of the cultural approach: culture, rather than technological progress and hardware, shapes the conduct of war.
Older specters also lurk in the shadows: Jean-Pierre Vernant's structural anthropological school, which discovered that war happens and has ritualized aspects, warrior codes of conduct, and even rules (e.g., Problèmes de la guerre en Grèce ancienne, 1968); and Hans Delbrück (whom Lendon finds "perverse," 394), the progenitor of studying war within the total context of its time and society in his Geschichte der Kriegskunst im Rahmen der politischen Geschichte (4...