Amateur Historians

The problem, as I have tried to state it, is something like this: historical wargamers, as wargamers, read the historical texts in a certain way, which is not the way that most historians read them. Thus, a wargamer reading a secondary text, assuming that that text is not a wargaming text, is unlikely to find the answer to the questions they would like answered.

The upshot of this is that wargamers, not being, in general, professional historians, will read texts, and generate answers to their questions, which might raise the eyebrows, somewhat at least, of a trained historian. As a wargamer, I want to know, for example, the effective range of a Greek bow.  A historian is more likely to want to know the social class of an Athenian bow wielder. To some extent, at least, the two will rarely meet.

As an example, I am currently reading ‘Democracy: A Lifer’ by Paul Cartledge (Oxford: OUP, 2016).  Cartledge is a bona fide classical historian, and does know a fair bit about classical warfare, given that a number of his works relate to it. But battles are not his real interest. The focus in Democracy is, naturally, the rise of Greek democracy, particularly in Athens (because that is where a lot of the evidence comes from). As it happens, a fair bit of Athenian democracy was related to the rise of the hoplite class, at least initially, and then to the requirement of the Athenian Empire (Delian League) for manpower for the trireme fleet. The need for large numbers of free men to man the triremes led to political power being, in part, relocated to the poorest citizens. If they withdrew their labour, the state was imperilled.

One of the problems with the discussion of Greek democracy, of course, is that our sources (Thucydides and Xenophon, mostly) were not keen on the idea of the masses (even the masses of citizens) having any say in affairs. Thus their accounts of Athenian 9and other) democracies are rather biased against it. So too, roughly, with Aristotle. People who come from the educated elite tend to rather look down on the uneducated masses.

Be that as it may, the issue is that Cartledge is not particularly interested in the details of Athenian fleets or the machinations of campaigns, alliances and international politics, at least in this book. That is not to say it is not a good book (it is good book) but to admit that the focus is not where most wargamers would want it to be.

That said, of course, most of the historical texts do not focus on what wargamers are interested in. While there is a reasonable amount of information around on some of the bigger battles, it is often not cast in a form the wargamer needs to answer their questions. As I noted before, a wargamer really wants answers in the form of ‘there were X thousand hoplites, Y hundred cavalry and Z thousand light troops present’. While this does happen, it is rarely the focus of either original historian of secondary work author.

Wargamers, thus, are forced to make their own interpretations of historical texts, and it is here that the incautious can make mistakes. It is very easy to read an ancient text as if we were reading a newspaper report. We can and, I suspect, often do, simply flip through the pages until we find something interesting, like an order of battle or an account of a skirmish, and ignore the rest. After all, as a wargamer, we want the armies and the battles. Give us the numbers and array, and we will be happy.

Unfortunately, textual interpretation is rarely that easy. The author almost certainly has some sort of agenda. We also forget that history, as a subject for academic study, was a nineteenth century invention. Prior to that, it was relatively rare for someone to questions the sources accuracy or consider the inherent bias of the author. A naïve reading of the text is often nearly as bad as no reading at all.

For a made up example, it is possible that an ancient author, opposed to the idea of democracy, would inflate the size of ‘democratic’ armies over oligarchic ones, and accuse the former of being undisciplined and hence lucky to win a battle over the latter. This has little or nothing to do with history, and a lot to do with ideology. If we do not read the rest of the author, we might land up considering that democratic armies were fairly useless but, as democratic, simply big enough to win.

We therefore land up, if we read a text with sufficient suspicion, presenting ourselves with, perhaps a range of possibilities. Within these we have to make decisions about army size, quality of generals, discipline, training and so on. The text might present us with a ball park, but only our interpretation can decide where within the field the historical army was to be found.

As another example, if you read Tacitus (and I hope you do) one of the things that frequently happens is that a Roman army on the frontier becomes lax and ill-disciplined because the general is more interested in a life of luxury or political scheming. A new general is sent out and makes the soldiers do dawn marches and plenty of battle practice (which they love) and then leads them, in the next campaigning season, into a successful, victorious, battle. Everyone is happy. The soldiers get pay and loot, the general kudos and promotion and so on. But this happens again and again in Tacitus, leading us to suspect that other motives are afoot in the writing, more to do with the politicians and generals Tacitus liked and disliked than any real difference in the efficiency of the army.

The upshot of this is, of course, that textual interpretation is tricky. I do not mean that we should not do it, or that we should leave the interpretation to the experts and rely on those who have material we need (largely because they tend to be Dead White Males of a previous age and outlook), but that we need a sufficient dose of caution in our interpretation, a dash of suspicion before we try to reconstruct what might have been going on.