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Lost Battles: Reconstructing the Great Clashes of the Ancient World
From the author's introduction: " Ancient battles seize the modern imagination. Far from being forgotten, they have become a significant aspect of popular culture, prompting a continuing stream of books, feature films, television programs and board and computer games... there is a certain escapist satisfaction in looking back to an era when conflicts between entire states turned on clear-cut pitched battles between formed armies, lasting just a few hours and spanning just a few miles of ground. These battles were still unspeakably traumatic and grisly affairs for those involved at Cannae, Hannibal's men butchered around two and a half times as many Romans (out of a much smaller overall population) as there were British soldiers killed on the notorious first day of the Somme. However, as with the great clashes of the Napoleonic era, time has dulled our preoccupation with such awful human consequences, and we tend to focus instead on the inspired generalship of commanders like Alexander and Caesar and on the intriguing tactical interactions of units such as massed pikemen and war elephants within the very different military context of pre-gunpowder warfare. Lost Battles "takes a new and innovative approach to the battles of antiquity. Using his experience with conflict simulation, Philip Sabin draws together ancient evidence and modern scholarship to construct a generic, grand tactical model of the battles as a whole. This model unites a mathematical framework, to capture the movement and combat of the opposing armies, with human decisions to shape the tactics of the antagonists. Sabin then develops detailed scenarios for 36 individual battles such as Marathon and Cannae, and uses the comparative structure offered by the generic model to help cast light on which particular interpretations of the ancient sources on issues such as army size fit in best with the general patterns observed elsewhere. Readers can use the model to experiment for themselves by re-fighting engagements of their choice, tweaking the scenarios to accord with their own judgment of the evidence, trying out different tactics from those used historically, and seeing how the battle then plays out. "Lost Battles "thus offers a unique dynamic insight into ancient warfare, combining academic rigor with the interest and accessibility of simulation gaming. This book includes access to a downloadable computer simulation where the reader can view the author's simulations as well create their own.
298 pages, Hardcover
First published January 31, 2008
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166 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 11 of 11 reviews
March 5, 2017
Great! Having played a lot of simulation games, military and non-military, as a teenager and adult, I believe this is one of the best ways to really understand a past, present, or potential future situation that presents problems with an eye to finding workable solutions. It's one of the most interesting, too. Playing a simulation is a lot more work than reading a book or watching a documentary, but that's part of the point. We learn best by doing. A lot of things look simpler than they are until one tries to do them oneself (that's why we parents tend to look smarter and smarter to our children once they start their own adult lives.) This way of studying situations also enriches the experience when you do read those books and watch the documentaries, although at the risk of finding yourself putting a book down or changing the channel and muttering, "That would never work/that's not how that happened."
May 4, 2017
This is a very important work. Sabin is bravely exposing himself to criticism by trying something incredibly innovative: using strategic modeling (and in particular, wargaming) in combination with the ancient sources and consideration of modern scholarship to develop a framework by which we can judge the veracity of ancient accounts of battles. It's a flawed model, and I have a lot of criticisms of it (for example: GMT Games' Great Battles of History series, which isn't even an academic historical study, has a better comparative model for weapon lethality and the effects of armor, or the impact of terrain and maneuver on unit cohesion), but the fact that he's attempting this at all is brave, and smart and exactly the kind of innovation the field needs.
I love that Sabin is thinking about ancient warfare differently. There's a real paucity of source material in the field, and that is never likely to be fully rectified. In the absence of additional data, we have to get smarter and more creative about what we do with the data we already have if this field is going to move forward. Even as you find fault with Sabin's model (and you will), you must acknowledge that this is a groundbreaking work, and that it starts a conversation that's badly needed.
Gamers, of course, will love it, as the inner-mechanics of the design are laid bare, to include all the assumptions and generalizations necessary to make it work. Not a book for a casual reader. Sabin's prose style is thick as the coffee in the Chief's Mess.
I love that Sabin is thinking about ancient warfare differently. There's a real paucity of source material in the field, and that is never likely to be fully rectified. In the absence of additional data, we have to get smarter and more creative about what we do with the data we already have if this field is going to move forward. Even as you find fault with Sabin's model (and you will), you must acknowledge that this is a groundbreaking work, and that it starts a conversation that's badly needed.
Gamers, of course, will love it, as the inner-mechanics of the design are laid bare, to include all the assumptions and generalizations necessary to make it work. Not a book for a casual reader. Sabin's prose style is thick as the coffee in the Chief's Mess.
November 16, 2013
This book is an attempt to do something I've never seen done before. The author sets out to analyze a series of ancient battles (Greek vs Greek, Macedonian vs. Persian, Rome vs. Carthage, Rome vs. Parthian, and Rome vs. Macedonia). That in itself is nothing new, there are dozens of attempts to do that, but the approach Sabin uses takes discussing old battles to a new level.
Throughout the book Sabin demonstrates the difficulty of analysing ancient battles. The ancient sources can be of questionable reliability, often serving as propaganda pieces or morality screeds rather than news reports; and they often contradict each other. Even the reliable ones tend not to focus on the sorts of details that modern historians obsess about. Archaeology is even less helpful. Battlefields are much more ephemeral than cities and the sites of ancient battles (aside from a handful of mass graves) are almost entirely lost. Over the centuries rivers have changed course, shorelines have changed shape, entire cities mentioned as landmarks in the ancient sources have disappeared and have yet to be found.
Sabin then sets about creating an entirely new approach of gleaning insight on these battles, wargaming. There's nothing new about wargames per se, there are a number of wargames that feature ancient battles. But Sabins goal here is to create a model that actually allows ancient battles to be analyzed and studied from a different perspective, not just to design a playable game.
The first part of the book is thus dedicated to walking the reader step by step how he built his model. He makes several key design decisions early on that impact the entire approach:
1) Since terrain cannot be known with precision, there are no first hand maps of the actual battlefields it would be a mistake to design a game where terrain needs to be too detailed. While ancient sources may describe a hill or a river being on a flank if the model makes movement too granular it would require mapping terrain to far greater precision than we actually know. Therefor the model takes place on a 4x5 grid (rather than a map of thousands of hexes or a table top). Terrain can thus be represented and its impact modeled without needing to map every bend in the river in an unrealistic way.
2) Actual unit equipment and armorment seems to have had a much lower impact on the outcome of battles than most wargames assume. Since weapons and armor (or art depicting weapons and armor) are often the only artifacts that survived for us to study, its natural that modern thinking about ancient militaries should focus on such equipment. But in the main, Sabin found that when the ancient authors offered commentary on what decided the battle, it was almost never based on better equipment. Some trends did repeat often enough to be worth modeling, however. The game makes distinction between cavalry and infantry, and between light (skirmish) and heavy (close order) infantry. It then calls out just a couple of actual unit types for greater distinction with special rules. Roman Legionaires and Greek Hoplites/phalanxes are distinguished as are scythed chariots (which Sabin concluded were entirely ineffective) and elephants. But other factors that are important to so many other wargames are absent entirely. For instance, there's no distinction between spear vs sword troops, nor are archer / missile troops called out seperately. This last seemed especially unusual to me, but it was well explained that at the scale of the map (the 4x5 grid where each space represents 400 to 1000 meters of frontage) there is no accounting for "range". And additionally, much of the "fighting" was not done via continuous melee but by sporadic impulses of fighting and withdrawing, advancing and posturing.
3) The key driver in ancient battles that fits with all available sources according to Sabin's model is thus troop quality (important for morale) and command ability. Sabin takes the interesting approach of making all units more or less equal in strength (or very close). The difference between high quality troops and low then, is in the numbers that each unit represents. A single heavy infantry unit might represent a few hundred skilled veterans or a few thousand conscripted levies. Thus a veteran army will be modelled with a larger number of unit counters for the same number of men as a less skilled army. Since each unit counter can take 2 hits before it is broken, the larger number of unit counters means veteran armies can not only sustain more casualties, but also can be more flexible in their maneuver. Superior armies are awarded with more commands that can be issued in a given turn and generals can provide a certain number of free commands and other benefits.
4) One of the most important assumptions built into the model is the notion that battles were mutual endeavors. In the ancient world it was almost impossible to force an opponent to fight. As examples the second and third Macedonian war were both won by very decisive Roman victories on the battlefield. However, both took nearly three years of maneuver and campaigning before Rome could bring the Macedonians to battle. Sabin takes as a core assumption then that a defending army would not offer battle if the odds were overwhelmingly against it. It would only "agree" to confront the enemy to the extent the general / army leadership thought there was a reasonable chance of winning. This assumption is the key driver that makes all of the battle analyses work. The subject of how many men each army had and how good those men are is a topic of considerable debate among scholars many of whom have their pet theories...some even going so far as throwing out all ancient sources and trying to recreate "probable" numbers from what the scholar believed was plausible. The biggest insight Sabins approach offers is a way to judge which of these conflicting possibilities is most likely. Or if not "most likely" at least to throw out some that can be shown to be highly unlikely. He does this by taking the competing claims of army composition and rating them in his wargame model, to result in a total strength score for the army. He draws upon ancient sources praising a particular unit as playing a key roll, or criticizing them for fleeing early...or simply not being worth mentioning them at all to help judge the quality of the units in question. But the key is that any combination of numbers and quality that would give the overwhelming advantage to one side is not likely to be accurate; because, the other otherside would simply have refused to fight under those circumstances. And since we know the battle did take place the armies must have been at least relatively close enough that the weaker side had at least some expectation of being able to win. With that rubric as a guide Sabin plugs different possibilities in until he gets a combination that gives one army an advantage but not too great of one.
One weakness of this system not addressed in the book is the possibility of outliers. Sabins study relies on the actual historical outcome of the battle being the most likely (or at least one of the most probable results). Thus, he judges the accuracy of his model by how readily it can recreate the actual course of the battle as it was reported to have occured. But if the actual historical outcome was really the result of one side "getting really bad rolls" and the other side "rolling really well" than this can skew a model designed to assume that battle was an average outcome. However, since over 40 seperate battles were analyzed to build up the assumptions, it seems reasonable that this effect has been mitigated.
The second part of the book is a battle by battle account. Each chapter starts with a page or two of context around the campaign. Then each battle in chronological order is given a couple of paragraphs discussing what the ancient sources say and what leading scholars have said, followed by a brief discussion of how that is modeled into the game. At the end of each battle is the scenario that lists the order of battl e and the quality of the troops and commander with maps illustrating the abstracted layout of the battle field and the deployment of the armies.
These are particularly interesting as it can be seen how various break throughs and collapses discussed in the sources can be readily modeled in the game by players making the same decisions as the historical general. And this is one of Sabin's key litmus tests. The ability to see how a battle might play out differently if the general had deployed his troops differently or ordered a charge or a flank at a different time. One thing he calls out often is when he feels a losing general did about as well as he could have when, after trying a number of different approaches, it was hard to see how his deployment or strategy could be improved upon.
The last part of the book is a rules summary taking the rules discussed in the first part and summarizing them for reference. These rules were also published as a full boxed wargame (with book included) complete with map tiles and unit counters. The rules included in the boxed game incorporate some errata and are much easier to follow and reference than the format in the book.
In the end, however, while the book and analysis are fascinating the game leave something to be desired. I think it does what it set out to do astoundingly well. That is as a tool for analysing battles, as an intellectual exercise, it gives the student of history the ability to postulate various what ifs and see how things might have been different. It provides a mechanism for comparing one scholars view of what troops were present and how they were deployed with anothers and by "fighting it out" see which was more likely to follow the reported historical course of the battle.
However as a game played for fun, it is not a very elegant design. Despite the heavy simplifications and abstractions (a mere 4x5 grid to maneuver on and only a few different types of troops) it is a very exception laden game. There are certain rules that don't make any sense whatsoever and are thus totally nonintuitive to keep track of in play. They make no sense, that is if you just read the rules without the book. The first part of the book explains in detail why that rule exists after which it can be clearly seen to be a good rule. But often its because there's a certain thing that a more granular game could model (such as the tendency for cavalry to depart in pursuit of a routed foe, or for hoplites to drift to the right while marching) that simply can't be directly modeled at the level of abstraction in this game as so have to be handled by a rather heavy handed rule. I think those rules work just fine for a scholarly simulation...but they make for a very tedious, cumbersome, and less playable game.
I definitely recommend the book for students of ancient battles, especially those who also enjoy wargaming, as it is a fascinating read and definitly added to my understanding of period warfare. But as the game is out of print and only available by paying through the nose for it, I can't recommend it as something you'll actually want to play.
Throughout the book Sabin demonstrates the difficulty of analysing ancient battles. The ancient sources can be of questionable reliability, often serving as propaganda pieces or morality screeds rather than news reports; and they often contradict each other. Even the reliable ones tend not to focus on the sorts of details that modern historians obsess about. Archaeology is even less helpful. Battlefields are much more ephemeral than cities and the sites of ancient battles (aside from a handful of mass graves) are almost entirely lost. Over the centuries rivers have changed course, shorelines have changed shape, entire cities mentioned as landmarks in the ancient sources have disappeared and have yet to be found.
Sabin then sets about creating an entirely new approach of gleaning insight on these battles, wargaming. There's nothing new about wargames per se, there are a number of wargames that feature ancient battles. But Sabins goal here is to create a model that actually allows ancient battles to be analyzed and studied from a different perspective, not just to design a playable game.
The first part of the book is thus dedicated to walking the reader step by step how he built his model. He makes several key design decisions early on that impact the entire approach:
1) Since terrain cannot be known with precision, there are no first hand maps of the actual battlefields it would be a mistake to design a game where terrain needs to be too detailed. While ancient sources may describe a hill or a river being on a flank if the model makes movement too granular it would require mapping terrain to far greater precision than we actually know. Therefor the model takes place on a 4x5 grid (rather than a map of thousands of hexes or a table top). Terrain can thus be represented and its impact modeled without needing to map every bend in the river in an unrealistic way.
2) Actual unit equipment and armorment seems to have had a much lower impact on the outcome of battles than most wargames assume. Since weapons and armor (or art depicting weapons and armor) are often the only artifacts that survived for us to study, its natural that modern thinking about ancient militaries should focus on such equipment. But in the main, Sabin found that when the ancient authors offered commentary on what decided the battle, it was almost never based on better equipment. Some trends did repeat often enough to be worth modeling, however. The game makes distinction between cavalry and infantry, and between light (skirmish) and heavy (close order) infantry. It then calls out just a couple of actual unit types for greater distinction with special rules. Roman Legionaires and Greek Hoplites/phalanxes are distinguished as are scythed chariots (which Sabin concluded were entirely ineffective) and elephants. But other factors that are important to so many other wargames are absent entirely. For instance, there's no distinction between spear vs sword troops, nor are archer / missile troops called out seperately. This last seemed especially unusual to me, but it was well explained that at the scale of the map (the 4x5 grid where each space represents 400 to 1000 meters of frontage) there is no accounting for "range". And additionally, much of the "fighting" was not done via continuous melee but by sporadic impulses of fighting and withdrawing, advancing and posturing.
3) The key driver in ancient battles that fits with all available sources according to Sabin's model is thus troop quality (important for morale) and command ability. Sabin takes the interesting approach of making all units more or less equal in strength (or very close). The difference between high quality troops and low then, is in the numbers that each unit represents. A single heavy infantry unit might represent a few hundred skilled veterans or a few thousand conscripted levies. Thus a veteran army will be modelled with a larger number of unit counters for the same number of men as a less skilled army. Since each unit counter can take 2 hits before it is broken, the larger number of unit counters means veteran armies can not only sustain more casualties, but also can be more flexible in their maneuver. Superior armies are awarded with more commands that can be issued in a given turn and generals can provide a certain number of free commands and other benefits.
4) One of the most important assumptions built into the model is the notion that battles were mutual endeavors. In the ancient world it was almost impossible to force an opponent to fight. As examples the second and third Macedonian war were both won by very decisive Roman victories on the battlefield. However, both took nearly three years of maneuver and campaigning before Rome could bring the Macedonians to battle. Sabin takes as a core assumption then that a defending army would not offer battle if the odds were overwhelmingly against it. It would only "agree" to confront the enemy to the extent the general / army leadership thought there was a reasonable chance of winning. This assumption is the key driver that makes all of the battle analyses work. The subject of how many men each army had and how good those men are is a topic of considerable debate among scholars many of whom have their pet theories...some even going so far as throwing out all ancient sources and trying to recreate "probable" numbers from what the scholar believed was plausible. The biggest insight Sabins approach offers is a way to judge which of these conflicting possibilities is most likely. Or if not "most likely" at least to throw out some that can be shown to be highly unlikely. He does this by taking the competing claims of army composition and rating them in his wargame model, to result in a total strength score for the army. He draws upon ancient sources praising a particular unit as playing a key roll, or criticizing them for fleeing early...or simply not being worth mentioning them at all to help judge the quality of the units in question. But the key is that any combination of numbers and quality that would give the overwhelming advantage to one side is not likely to be accurate; because, the other otherside would simply have refused to fight under those circumstances. And since we know the battle did take place the armies must have been at least relatively close enough that the weaker side had at least some expectation of being able to win. With that rubric as a guide Sabin plugs different possibilities in until he gets a combination that gives one army an advantage but not too great of one.
One weakness of this system not addressed in the book is the possibility of outliers. Sabins study relies on the actual historical outcome of the battle being the most likely (or at least one of the most probable results). Thus, he judges the accuracy of his model by how readily it can recreate the actual course of the battle as it was reported to have occured. But if the actual historical outcome was really the result of one side "getting really bad rolls" and the other side "rolling really well" than this can skew a model designed to assume that battle was an average outcome. However, since over 40 seperate battles were analyzed to build up the assumptions, it seems reasonable that this effect has been mitigated.
The second part of the book is a battle by battle account. Each chapter starts with a page or two of context around the campaign. Then each battle in chronological order is given a couple of paragraphs discussing what the ancient sources say and what leading scholars have said, followed by a brief discussion of how that is modeled into the game. At the end of each battle is the scenario that lists the order of battl e and the quality of the troops and commander with maps illustrating the abstracted layout of the battle field and the deployment of the armies.
These are particularly interesting as it can be seen how various break throughs and collapses discussed in the sources can be readily modeled in the game by players making the same decisions as the historical general. And this is one of Sabin's key litmus tests. The ability to see how a battle might play out differently if the general had deployed his troops differently or ordered a charge or a flank at a different time. One thing he calls out often is when he feels a losing general did about as well as he could have when, after trying a number of different approaches, it was hard to see how his deployment or strategy could be improved upon.
The last part of the book is a rules summary taking the rules discussed in the first part and summarizing them for reference. These rules were also published as a full boxed wargame (with book included) complete with map tiles and unit counters. The rules included in the boxed game incorporate some errata and are much easier to follow and reference than the format in the book.
In the end, however, while the book and analysis are fascinating the game leave something to be desired. I think it does what it set out to do astoundingly well. That is as a tool for analysing battles, as an intellectual exercise, it gives the student of history the ability to postulate various what ifs and see how things might have been different. It provides a mechanism for comparing one scholars view of what troops were present and how they were deployed with anothers and by "fighting it out" see which was more likely to follow the reported historical course of the battle.
However as a game played for fun, it is not a very elegant design. Despite the heavy simplifications and abstractions (a mere 4x5 grid to maneuver on and only a few different types of troops) it is a very exception laden game. There are certain rules that don't make any sense whatsoever and are thus totally nonintuitive to keep track of in play. They make no sense, that is if you just read the rules without the book. The first part of the book explains in detail why that rule exists after which it can be clearly seen to be a good rule. But often its because there's a certain thing that a more granular game could model (such as the tendency for cavalry to depart in pursuit of a routed foe, or for hoplites to drift to the right while marching) that simply can't be directly modeled at the level of abstraction in this game as so have to be handled by a rather heavy handed rule. I think those rules work just fine for a scholarly simulation...but they make for a very tedious, cumbersome, and less playable game.
I definitely recommend the book for students of ancient battles, especially those who also enjoy wargaming, as it is a fascinating read and definitly added to my understanding of period warfare. But as the game is out of print and only available by paying through the nose for it, I can't recommend it as something you'll actually want to play.
June 11, 2016
This book is not the sort of book one would expect from looking at its title, and that is not necessarily a bad thing. As a frequent reader of ancient history [1], a fair amount of it being ancient military history, I expected that this book would include a wide variety of clashes and how they would be reconstructed with textual or archaeological discoveries in recent years. In stark contrast to this, the book's contents are rather narrowly focused on Greco-Roman history, and the only battles with non-Western ancient military powers are those who are fighting either the Greeks or Romans. Nor are the battles included any more ancient than the beginning of the Persian Wars, which means that there are no examples of ancient battles in China at all or battles of the Levant like Meddigo or Qadesh or Qarqar. This is admittedly a disappointment, as it would not have been difficult to provide an accurate title for a book like this, which would have been: Contentious Battles: Modeling The Great Clashes Of The Greco-Roman World. At least then the readers would have realized that these battles were not lost, but merely that the truth about them had been lost in the fog of centuries of conflict by historians over sources, some of them mere summaries of other, now lost, sources, and that the scope of the battles was limited to explorations of the Western Way of War, with special attention given to the importance of human factors like unit cohesion, leadership, and the power of veteran heavy infantry.
The contents of this book are striking and very worth reading, even if they were not what I expected when starting the book. The first part of the book introduces the computational model that the author uses in order to test out various theories of the size and composition of armies based on their historical performance, by using a turn-based structure and checking it against historical performance. This includes a discussion of the sources for ancient Greek and Roman history (the author is particularly fond of Polybius, it should be noted), comments on the armies and the types of soldiers that they were composed of (heavy and light infantry and cavalry, along with special units like Roman legions and African and Indian elephants), their movement and how it can be modeled, as well as fighting, the importance of generals in command, and a case study of the battle of Cannae to show the model in operation. The second part of the book consists of an examination of the battles, divided by period: Athens and Sparta, the Age of Xenophon, Alexander the Great, the Successors, Carthage and Rome, Hannibal and Scipio, Rome Moves East, and Julius Caesar. After this there is a conclusion about the importance of human factors and the worth of dynamic modeling in helping to settle armchair debates about ancient battles, along with various appendices about the rules, using the models, a dictionary of the battles included in the book, and a glossary of terms.
For those who enjoy the modeling of battles on the computer and the possibility of testing various assumptions to see if one can mimic the course of battles as they are described by ancient historians, and for those who want to have at least some basic knowledge of the conditions of a variety of battles, some of them well known (Platea, Issus, Cannae, Zama, Pharsalus, for example) and some of them exceedingly obscure (Paraitacene, Sentinum, Ilipa, and Bibracte, for example), this book will have much to offer. Despite the fact that readers can quibble about the fact that the reconstruction spoken of is in a virtual sense and not a literal one, and the fact that the scope of the battles chosen is perhaps more narrow than a truly global perspective would provide, the book is a worthwhile one nonetheless. Of particular importance for military historians and students of game theory and computer modeling is the fact that a fairly straightforward set of assumptions can provide a robust test of assumptions of unit size given the known skill of leaders and the accounts of the battle within history, including the length of battles and the generals involved. Vitally important among those assumptions is the relative worthlessness of large amounts of levy troops and the reality that armies in the ancient world did not give battle under ordinary circumstances unless they believed they had a chance of victory, which places constraints on the difference between fighting power of the two sides, and also that armies often faced tactical dilemmas that involved risk and uncertainty and trade-offs, all of which makes the battles of ancient history worth studying today, even with the vast difference in technology between those times and our own, for contemporary warfare also consists of tactical dilemmas and the importance of unit cohesion, training, and moral courage.
[1] See, for example:
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
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https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
The contents of this book are striking and very worth reading, even if they were not what I expected when starting the book. The first part of the book introduces the computational model that the author uses in order to test out various theories of the size and composition of armies based on their historical performance, by using a turn-based structure and checking it against historical performance. This includes a discussion of the sources for ancient Greek and Roman history (the author is particularly fond of Polybius, it should be noted), comments on the armies and the types of soldiers that they were composed of (heavy and light infantry and cavalry, along with special units like Roman legions and African and Indian elephants), their movement and how it can be modeled, as well as fighting, the importance of generals in command, and a case study of the battle of Cannae to show the model in operation. The second part of the book consists of an examination of the battles, divided by period: Athens and Sparta, the Age of Xenophon, Alexander the Great, the Successors, Carthage and Rome, Hannibal and Scipio, Rome Moves East, and Julius Caesar. After this there is a conclusion about the importance of human factors and the worth of dynamic modeling in helping to settle armchair debates about ancient battles, along with various appendices about the rules, using the models, a dictionary of the battles included in the book, and a glossary of terms.
For those who enjoy the modeling of battles on the computer and the possibility of testing various assumptions to see if one can mimic the course of battles as they are described by ancient historians, and for those who want to have at least some basic knowledge of the conditions of a variety of battles, some of them well known (Platea, Issus, Cannae, Zama, Pharsalus, for example) and some of them exceedingly obscure (Paraitacene, Sentinum, Ilipa, and Bibracte, for example), this book will have much to offer. Despite the fact that readers can quibble about the fact that the reconstruction spoken of is in a virtual sense and not a literal one, and the fact that the scope of the battles chosen is perhaps more narrow than a truly global perspective would provide, the book is a worthwhile one nonetheless. Of particular importance for military historians and students of game theory and computer modeling is the fact that a fairly straightforward set of assumptions can provide a robust test of assumptions of unit size given the known skill of leaders and the accounts of the battle within history, including the length of battles and the generals involved. Vitally important among those assumptions is the relative worthlessness of large amounts of levy troops and the reality that armies in the ancient world did not give battle under ordinary circumstances unless they believed they had a chance of victory, which places constraints on the difference between fighting power of the two sides, and also that armies often faced tactical dilemmas that involved risk and uncertainty and trade-offs, all of which makes the battles of ancient history worth studying today, even with the vast difference in technology between those times and our own, for contemporary warfare also consists of tactical dilemmas and the importance of unit cohesion, training, and moral courage.
[1] See, for example:
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress...
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July 8, 2025
This book is basically about using a turn based strategy video game/game board based system to the simulation of ancien battles by using historical sources, historians intepretations and a bit of archeology to best apply to the model. Each time the historical battlefield (terrain) is recriated on the computer while trying to remain as historically accurate as possible with how the terrain was at the time (as if for example the floodings or others natural catastrophes changed it from then to now) and try to emulate based on the primary sources and historians interpretation how the units behaved and really actually could have realisticly used the terrain.
As the author himself states this model can only be very subjective but it is nonetheless a serious scholarly work which anyone intested on historical warfare should read.
As the author himself states this model can only be very subjective but it is nonetheless a serious scholarly work which anyone intested on historical warfare should read.
January 29, 2024
I've played a few wargames in my time, both of the digital variety and of the 'analogue' kind (I prefer the latter).
I've never come across what is, essentially, such a comprehensive collection of design notes before.
Which is pretty much what this is, with Philip Sabin providing rationale for any of the rules used in his game (or 'model', as he calls it).
I've never come across what is, essentially, such a comprehensive collection of design notes before.
Which is pretty much what this is, with Philip Sabin providing rationale for any of the rules used in his game (or 'model', as he calls it).
October 27, 2020
If you love the mathematical, step-by-step analysis of battles, this is the book for you! Unfortunately, that is not my favorite part of history or one I particularly enjoy so this book was a chore to finish for me.
July 5, 2012
Sabin's idea is that one unexplored way of studying ancient battles, about which almost nothing is known other than relatively sparse and unreliable historical commentary, is via war games. His approach is to assume that the major set-piece battles in the Mediterranean area from 500BCE to about 50BCE are roughly comparable with a sufficiently broad brush. As a result, the same set of rules can be applied to all of the battles with suitable scaling factors to adjust for battle sizes. Sabin makes a good case that his assumptions and the resulting set of rules that he provides are valid, as does the overall structure; if he is wildly wrong about some aspect of one battle, then other battles will be perturbed in obvious ways.
Sabin then presents a number of scenarios, describing battles throughout the Mediterranean and the 500-year period. These scenarios both allow others to re-fight the battles with alternate tactics or different resources and provide insight into open questions on each battle, such as the number of various troops on either side.
The one weakness I can see in that Sabin is careful to set up his scenarios such that the historical outcome is the most likely; the historical victors have advantages that may or may not represent the reality of the situation. As Sabin points out, if one side has an obvious advantage, the other side is free (in these battles) to withdraw and refuse to fight.
The book is well-written, the case well-argued, and I, who knew more about war-games than ancient battles (or, I used to), learned a good deal about an interesting chunk of history.
Sabin then presents a number of scenarios, describing battles throughout the Mediterranean and the 500-year period. These scenarios both allow others to re-fight the battles with alternate tactics or different resources and provide insight into open questions on each battle, such as the number of various troops on either side.
The one weakness I can see in that Sabin is careful to set up his scenarios such that the historical outcome is the most likely; the historical victors have advantages that may or may not represent the reality of the situation. As Sabin points out, if one side has an obvious advantage, the other side is free (in these battles) to withdraw and refuse to fight.
The book is well-written, the case well-argued, and I, who knew more about war-games than ancient battles (or, I used to), learned a good deal about an interesting chunk of history.
February 15, 2010
An interesting book that uses wargaming to help reconstruct ancient battles and test various theories as to with what and how they were fought. Includes the rules to the game used in the book. Worth reading for anyone with an interest in ancient battles and doubly so for anyone also interested in games.
August 3, 2011
Un livre idéal pour les joueurs d'histoire comme pour des béotiens en quête de compréhension du déroulement des batailles antiques. C'est le pendant ludique de la démarche des reconstitutions de Hanson pour les hoplites.
January 7, 2013
Better for newbies to ancient warfare than grognards, interesting discussion of classic battles
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