Walter Emil Kaegi, Jr.

Some Thoughts on Byzantine Military Strategy

© Hellenic College Press, Brookline, Massachusetts, 1983

 

Page 19

These well-known facts create many problems for anyone attempting to evaluate the content, originality, value, and accuracy of Byzantine strategic writings. The question is: How much derives not from the Byzantine period but from the writers of much earlier centuries -- a problem which is common in the interpretation of Byzantine texts, which Professor C. Mango pointed out so well in his Inaugural Lecture on "Byzantine Literature as a Distorting Mirror?"

The Greek strategists, in particular Aeneas Tacticus, Asklepiodotos, Onasander, Arrian, and Aelian, were not distinguished by their intellectual brilliance; as military thinkers they were greatly inferior to the Greek generals of antiquity. They have, however, left a record of formations, stratagems, maxims, and injunctions which they did not, for the most part, invent, but were compiling, organizing and recording for their readers. Yet their corpus of strategic writings provided for Byzantine strategists many things: not merely the format and subjects for the education of a general, and not merely antiquarian descriptions of hoplites and phalanxes, which had become anachronistic long before the Byzantine Empire (yet note the remarks of Dr. Everett Wheeler about the possible usefulness of the phalanx in the Flavian periodj. [27]

[27. Everett Lynn Wheeler, "Flavius Arrianus: A Political and Military Biography," Ph.D. diss. Duke Univ., 1977.]

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