Roman Siege Warfare

1. Introduction

one inTRoDUCTion Roman warfare has drawn scholarly and popular attention for a very long time. This attention has usually been focused on major battles, despite the insurmountable difficulty of providing a comprehensible narrative of open-field battle. The siege, defined as much by the presence of a wall as a battle is by open country, has attracted far less attention. When a siege does become the object of study it is usually as a discrete historical occasion—rarely is the siege considered as a category of military event. This makes some sense in that a major siege is a site-specific performance and, often enough, the climactic operation of a famous war. Yet Roman siege warfare had its own structure, its own customs, and its own governing expectations, and the sources allow a diachronic and synoptic understanding of “the siege” much stronger and more secure than the oftpondered “Roman battle.” even when Roman sieges are the subject of sustained study they tend to be sorted by their use of the special techniques and technologies of siege warfare rather than examined for the way in which the entire siege conforms to or diverts from the typical narrative and operational plotlines. The idea here, then, is to rebalance the ledger by emphasizing the human elements—morale and motivation—rather than the engineering, and to recapture the sense of a siege as an event in progress which presents, at each stage, a range of possible attitudes, methods, and outcomes.1 “The 1. Thus this book does not discuss technology in detail, nor does it summarize what is known of each Roman siege, nor again assess the place of the siege in the larger practice of 2 • Roman Siege WaRfaRe Roman siege” is an event—or, rather, a sturdily constructed event category—that was witnessed, described, and recounted in particular ways that both reflect how the history really was experienced and produce a narrative centered on the commander, whose decisions guided the unrolling of the siege along a few well-traveled paths. THe Siege aPaRT ancient siege warfare should not be approached as a fortifications-related variation on a general practice of battle, but rather as a fundamentally different sort of combat. ancient combat was generally fluid, while the siege was sharply defined: in time, in space, and in operational terms. neither the operational identity of the combatants—who was attacking and who defending—nor the identity of the objective could change, and there could be no disputing the result: the town was taken or the siege was a failure. The pressure of these strictures formed a distinct mode of warfare, inaugurated when an army arrived before a walled town or city that had closed its gates against it, that was waged both in a different moral environment and with its own separate set of potential outcomes. While these were dictated by the circumstances of siege warfare and recognized, generally , throughout the classical world, in Roman hands the siege mode developed its own specifically Roman themes and rhythms, and much of the rest of this book is concerned with identifying them. Like the formal open-field battle, Roman siege warfare was conducted within a set of expectations based not on purely rational expectations of efficiency but instead on a blend of military practicality and cultural preference . Yet several situations unique to siege warfare caused a cultural shaping of military practice both more intense and more broadly accepted than those affecting other operations.2 The concentration of violent effort in space and the practical challenge posed by a high wall revealed the domRoman warfare. moreover, with the partial exception of chapters 7 and 8, it is a study of offensive siege warfare only. This is both because Rome was far more often besieger than besieged and because the progression of the siege was controlled, almost completely, by the besieging commander. 2. See Keegan (1993), especially chapter 1, for a general discussion of war and culture. See also Reddé (2003), 58–59, and Watson (1993b), 141, an occasionally perceptive comparative study, for the siege as “a near-formalistic kind of battle.” introduction • 3 inant influence not of Realien (things, facts, physical realities) but rather of cultural and psychological factors. This might seem counterintuitive: with the wall looming before us, we are likely to begin thinking like (or imagine that we are thinking like) military engineers. But whatever means were used to neutralize this paradigmatic...