Academic Exercises

by K. J. Parker

  I’m sorry, he said. There’s a coincidence, I said, so am I. He wasn’t quite sure how I meant that, so I said; Let’s not talk about bad stuff. Sit down and tell me something cheerful. So he sat down next to me on the bed and started talking—well, lecturing; like he was making a speech—about all the political stuff you’re doing. Shut up, Gorgias, I said.

  He was quiet for some time. Then he laughed, like a twig snapping. Sorry, he said. I guess that’s not what you want to hear. Doesn’t bother me, I replied, but it’s boring. All right, he said, and there was another silence. So, he said, what isn’t boring?

  I couldn’t help smiling. Is it true, I said, that you’re hanging round Eudocia’s kid sister?

  A sort of a gasp; then, Who told you that?

  Strato was here, I said. So it’s true, then.

  Emperors don’t hang around, he said gravely. They negotiate marriage contracts with dynastically and politically suitable candidates. And she isn’t, I said, and he clicked his tongue. Unfortunately not, he said. I’ll probably end up marrying some savage with a bone through her nose, to safeguard the northern frontier. Meanwhile, he added, I’m hanging round Pulcheria. Nice kid, he added, but she reminds me of her sister.

  Then we talked a bit about the old days, and then he gave me the news about the rest of the gang (nothing Strato hadn’t already told me); then we started arguing about textual cruces in the Bessaid, of all the crazy things. I thought I’d win for sure, because the monks had just finished reading me Glycerius’ Commentaries; but no, Gorgias somehow managed to dredge all the relevant stuff up out of his memory, from ten years ago. I’m telling you, Phormio, it was a hell of a good debate. And Gorgias won, of course.

  Then, I really am sorry, he said suddenly; and I said, Forget it. You don’t really mean that, he said. True, I said. I can’t forget something just because I want to, in the same way I can’t fly. But I can forgive. Besides, I said, it doesn’t matter all that much.

  I think that upset him a bit, but I wasn’t too bothered about his fine sensibilities. All that stuff, I said, politics and morality and good and evil, it’s just nonsense we used to talk about in the Poverty when we were kids. But if you insist on being deadly serious, I want you to answer me some questions. Truthfully, I said. On the Book.

  Book?

  I grinned. Not the Precepts, stupid, I said. On our book. I don’t suppose you’ve got it with you.

  As a matter of fact, he said. (I don’t know if he was telling the truth. Could’ve been any book. It’s easy to lie to a blind man.) All right, he said, on the book. So?

  Question one, I said. Is it true that, all along, you wanted to be emperor?

  No, he said.

  On the book.

  Yes, he said. And then he added, in a rush, Because how else could I ever get anything done? Good things, like we’re doing now. Like the land reform proposals, or—

  Question two, I said. When we were kids, was the only reason you let me hang out with you because I had money to pay for the drinks?

  He laughed. No, of course not, he said. I’m not saying it didn’t help us like you, but no, it wasn’t that. It’s true, he went on, we were never as close to you as we were to each other. I tended to think of you as Phormio’s friend, rather than my friend, to begin with. But that changed, by second year.

  I nodded. Question three, I said. If Phormio had been emperor instead of me, or Strato, would you have done the same thing?

  Can’t answer that, he said. The situation could never have arisen.

  I let him get away with that. One lie out of three wasn’t bad.

  He stayed for two hours. Apparently, there’s going to be a sort of visiting rota, which is a bit patronising, but very welcome nonetheless. Next month, Aristaeus will come and see me, and Menestheus the month after that; and Gorgias promised me faithfully you’ll all come and visit on my birthday. I’m not holding my breath, but it’d be nice. In fact, it’d be the best thing.

  My friends the monks read me the Gazette each week, Phormio, and I know how to interpret all those official announcements. I know that Gorgias has more or less given up trying to change anything. He’ll be the Emperor from now on. I think he’ll be a good one, so that’s all right. Better than me, anyhow. Anyway, what do I care? I’ve been let off all that.

  This is probably the best place I’ve ever been, and I’ve only been happier once. Please write, when you can spare the time.

  Rich Men’s Skins; A Social History Of Armour

  In ancient Greece, birthplace of democracy, the concept “too poor to fight” would have been universally understood. At some point around 650BC, the Greeks adopted a highly formalised form of warfare, the phalanx. Battles were all the same. The opposing armies, made up of affluent citizens in heavy armour, lined up opposite each other in wide formations five or so ranks deep. They charged, collided, pushed and shoved until one side gave way and ran. They were all armed with spears, but in the cramped conditions of the phalanx, they couldn’t really use them. The spear was held in one hand, overarm; it was over six feet long and weighed three or four pounds. Simply keeping control of the wretched thing, holding it over your head, while shoving and being crushed from both sides by four ranks of strong men must have been some achievement. Striking downwards hard enough to pierce the enemy’s breastplate, using only the arm muscles, must have been practically impossible.

  A phalanx battle was a scrum, pure and simple. The side that was bravest and best nourished, and which shoved hardest, won. The other side broke formation and ran—at which point there was room to use weapons, and the fugitives took losses. A wise general didn’t let his soldiers pursue too far, however. The phalanx was as simple and as basic as two stags locking antlers.

  By modern criteria, it was a wildly inefficient way of waging war. You need a wide, flat plain, and Greece is a country of mountains. It allows very little scope for brilliant, innovative strategy (which seems to have been avoided, if anything; phalanx warfare continued unchanged for nearly 300 years). It’s a lousy way of destroying the enemy. The Greeks seemed to take a perverse pride in making it as inefficient as possible; the overhead spear hold, for example—nearly all other spear and pike formations in history held the spear at or below shoulder height, forming a lethal hedge. Archers, the logical choice in a mountainous country, were regarded as cowardly and unfair, and missile weapons were banned by both sides in the Great Lelantine War, the first ever arms limitation treaty.

  Or you could read these drawbacks as advantages. On the winning side, casualties were minimal. A phalanx battle usually produced a clear result, and the Greeks fought to decide specific issues—who owns this disputed stretch of pasture, who gets to extort money from that relatively weak city. Most of all, though, because you couldn’t survive in the scrum without heavy armour (you’d be crushed to death), warfare was the monopoly of those citizens who could afford the helmet, breastplate, greaves and shield. Paraphrase that; the rich held the monopoly of force, which, in the fiercely aristocratic city states of ancient and classical Greece, was exactly how it should be.

  The Greek panoply, which historians call hoplite armour, was poorly designed for fighting in. The wraparound Corinthian helmet made it hard to see and practically impossible to hear, which ruled out complex manoeuvres. The tight, flanged neck and arm holes of the bell corselet made it difficult and excruciatingly painful to move your arms, bend down or run. What hoplite armour did do was provide a rigid tortoise-shell to protect you from being crushed, while discouraging tactical innovation and pricing the lower classes out of war1 .

  Hoplite armour was very expensive. There was no copper or tin in Greece worth mentioning, so the raw materials had to be imported. Helmet, breastplate-and-backplate and greaves were all exceptionally complex shapes to beat out of sheet bronze, requiring a level of skill in the mystical art of raising2 that only a few hundred people in the 21st century can emulate. The division between rich-enough-to-serve and too-poor-to-fight was enshrined in
law. In Athens, for example, there were rigidly defined property qualifications. If your land produced less than a specified quantity of grain, wine and oil per year, you couldn’t vote and you couldn’t fight3.

  Consider, by contrast, the Romans; and a remarkable man by the name of Marius. Before his dictatorship, the Roman Republican armies were made up of men rich enough to afford armour, as in Greece. Marius changed all that. He allowed the poor to join up, paid them adequately, provided them with a pension when they retired and issued them with publicly-owned equipment. A generation later, an off-relation of his by the name of Julius Caesar used the Marian army to stage a coup d’etat; his successor, Augustus Caesar, became the first Roman emperor. Under the Empire, the Roman army was supplied by a vast and sophisticated network of arms factories, and industry as we know it was born; mass production of standardised patterns using interchangeable parts. Those factories remained in existence and in production for most of the 1,400 year lifespan of the Empire, and taught the world a lesson in industrialisation it would never forget.

  Marius wasn’t, of course, the first man to enlist the proletariat into military service. The pharaohs had been doing that 3,000 years before he was born. The world-changing revolution that Marius and his successors brought about was to elevate the poor to the status of heavy infantry; armour-wearers, the soldiers who actually mattered in battle, who decided who would win. It was, arguably, the moment when the State was born; when armed force (on which all political power ultimately depends) first came directly under the control of a government owning and issuing military equipment, rather than relying on the private owners of that equipment doing what was asked of them. In Greece, even warships were privately owned. The Greek army was simply an alternative form of the citizen assembly, which voted for a war, elected a general and marched off to fight. When you look at it from that perspective, no wonder Greek warfare was stylized, fossilized, inefficient and as safe as it could be made to be without depriving it of any meaning.

  Roman armour was designed with mass production and ease of maintenance and repair very much in mind. It was also superbly efficient and practical. What we think of as typical Roman body armour—lorica segmentata, though they never called it that—consisted of overlapping hoops of iron plate, articulated on leather straps to give the wearer the maximum practical level of mobility consistent with protection. It didn’t actually last very long (about 200 years; a mere interlude in the history of the Empire), mostly because the fastenings that held it together were prone to breakage, and because it only protected the torso. Before and after the lorica segmentata there was mail; a Celtic invention, enthusiastically adopted by Rome, formed of between ten and fifty thousand iron rings linked together, each ring being closed with a weld or a rivet. Or there was scale, possibly the earliest form of body armour, directly inspired by the scales of fish; small overlapping metal plates laced or riveted to a cloth or leather backing. Later on, when the Roman empire entered its Byzantine phase, it borrowed the concept of lamellar armour from the East. Lamellar is scale, but each small metal plate is pierced with holes top, bottom and sides, and attached by laces to the plates above, below and on either side of it, forming an armour that is both rigid and flexible.

  Mail, scale and lamellar are all ideal for the large professional army. They can be made, assembled and maintained by unskilled labour, quite possibly the soldiers themselves. They don’t need large pieces of sheet metal, a vital consideration at a time when sheet was made by men with hammers beating red-hot ingots flat. Mail, worn over heavy padding to provide cushioning, will turn most cuts and some thrusts, though it’s not a lot of use against arrows. It’s heavy (though you quickly get used to the weight) but so flexible that it hardly impedes movement at all. Scale offers much more protection, isn’t much heavier than mail, is more prone to go wrong (laces or rivets come loose) and constricts your movements a bit more; there’s also the constant, insufferable clinking. Neither mail nor scale protects you all that much from getting crushed, though the padding invariably worn under it would have helped a bit. Lamellar, on the other hand, is semi-rigid. Because of the way the plates overlap, much of your body is protected by two thicknesses of armour, and the lacing acts as a sort of suspension, absorbing shock like the springs of a car. It’s very heavy, but the weight is efficiently distributed, so after a while you don’t notice it too much. Lamellar was the armour of the Byzantine empire and the Islamic world for most of the Middle Ages, and was worn by the samurai of Japan until they ceased to be relevant in the 19th century 4.

  So there are two philosophies of armour, exclusive and inclusive; both pursuing social as well as purely military agendas. The warrior tradition uses armour to promote the position and prestige of the noble individual, and price the common man out of warfare. The soldier tradition supplies armour to the low-class volunteer and the conscript to serve the interests of the state. The warrior wants his armour to be as fine, as well-made, and as expensive as possible. The soldier gets issued with an efficient, cheap and easy-to-make mass-produced pattern, which he can repair and maintain himself. The warriors were responsible for some of the finest examples of engineering and artistry produced in the pre-modern era. In the fifteenth century, there was a keen rivalry between the armourers of Milan and Germany for the custom of the incurably warlike, ridiculously rich European knight. It was a genuine arms race. Milan aimed for elegant functionality (everything we associate today with Italian design, in fact), whereas Germany focused on fluted decoration and the deflective qualities of angled surfaces. Along the way, both schools invented the new concept of research and development; of actively thinking about how to make their product better, rather than simply building it the way it had always been built. The rate of technological advance in 14th and 15th century armour was unprecedented in the history of technology, and not to be repeated until the Industrial Revolution. It was the dawn of deliberate invention, as opposed to happy serendipity. New ways of engineering joints, so that arms and legs could move naturally; designing angled surfaces, so that blows glanced off; heat treatment, to make steel tough and flexible; for the first time, makers of artefacts, spurred on by competition and funded by the bottomless purses of the rich, were thinking of ways to innovate, perfect, or at least sell more units through gimmickry. No other trade called for or rewarded such innovations. It took thousands of years for the pre-Industrial Revolution plough to evolve; it grew like a stalactite, mostly because none of the potential customers had the money to hire someone to design a better version. Helmets, on the other hand, improved dramatically in the comparatively tiny space of time between Crecy and the Wars of the Roses. Thanks to the armour-buying warrior, the age of the better mousetrap had begun5 .

  On the one hand, standardised, cost-effective mass production; on the other hand, technological innovation and the concept of advancement through design; between them, the two philosophies of armour played a substantial part in creating the phenomenon we know as industry. If you enjoy that sort of thing, you can picture armour-making as the trunk of a tree whose branches hang heavy with cars, machine tools and tumble-driers; the Tree of Progress, whose roots run deep and whose leaves are forever turning towards the sun. Maybe. The historical fact remains that the Roman Empire, whose technological advances were unmatched until the Industrial Revolution, didn’t do so well against the primitives and savages surrounding its borders. In the west, the empire fell—not in a blazing orgy of destruction, but a slow decline; the savages took over the Imperial institutions more or less intact, decided they were more hassle than they were worth, and let the grass grow over them. The nobly-born warriors of the empire’s Germanic successors preferred an older version of society, in which their supremacy was assured.

  The western empire fell because it was rotten inside, not because the Vandals and the Goths were better than the Romans at anything that mattered. Imperial professional soldiers, in mass-produced armour from government factories, could still beat them into a pulp—as
the eastern Roman general Belisarius proved, when the eastern emperor Justinian sent him to reconquer Italy, about a century after the Fall. True, Belisarius was a military genius on a par with Hannibal and Napoleon, but the ease with which he crushed the Vandals and the Goths, hopelessly outnumbered, ludicrously ill-supplied and in the face of unrelenting hostility and suspicion from his own government, suggests that Roman soldiers found barbarians as easy to defeat as they had five centuries earlier, when Caesar conquered Gaul. The speed with which Italy was lost again, once Belisarius had gone home, also points to the most important factor in war; the will to fight. It’s that, not superiority in arms, training and technique, that wins wars. From the overthrow of the palace kingdoms of the Near East in the 2nd millennium BC right down to Vietnam and Iraq, the message is painfully clear; if you don’t really want to fight, you can’t buy victory or even security simply by increasing your defence budget. The chariot-riding archers of the Hittites and the Minoans were wiped out so effectively by primitive but ferocious footsoldiers that their existence was forgotten about for nearly 3,000 years, until archaeologists dug up the ruins of their overthrown cities. Technologically, they were light-years ahead of the Sicilian and Sardinian pirates who trashed their mighty kingdoms; but the savages liked to fight and the city-dwellers had evolved beyond that sort of behaviour. Read Kipling’s ‘Arithmetic On The Frontier’6 and go figure.

  For this reason, rather than any deficiency in hardware, the soldiers of the Roman Empire lost and gave way to barbarian warriors, among whom only the leaders could afford to wear armour; almost exclusively mail. This begs the question of why the barbarians didn’t at least copy the superior Imperial patterns—scale and lamellar—even if they didn’t keep the captured factories running. As we’ve seen, scale and lamellar are better at keeping you from getting hurt; they’re a bit harder to make, since they call for the use of sheet iron, albeit in small pieces, but the barbarians were perfectly capable of making sheet metal for helmets, and any smith who can draw wire to make mail rings should be able to make small plates. The nomads of the eastern steppes, whose smiths worked by definition on small portable forges, had no trouble making quite sophisticated lamellar armour. The fact remains, though, that scale and lamellar don’t show up much in the west between the fall of Rome and the late 13th century; the exception being among the Vikings, whose art occasionally depicts a scale or lamellar wearer, a phenomenon I’d choose to explain by pointing out that the Byzantine emperor’s personal guard was traditionally recruited from Vikings, who went to Constantinople to win prestige and bring home wonderful treasures (and to the Vikings, luxury arms and armour were wonderful treasures indeed). My guess is that any scale or lamellar found in Scandinavia in the early middle ages was made in Constantinople and brought back by Guard veterans.