Dana Dinu

There is a prehistory and a history of the relations between the Greek and Latin languages , with consequences persisting up to the present day. The flow of this influence is predominantly from Greek to Latin. Greek represented for Latin the absolute model of evolution which few could contest, in spite of the purists’ efforts to avoid or reduce borrowing from the first in order to stimulate the internal resources of their own language. Struggling to find a comfortable equilibrium between the nationalists’ hellenophobia and the pedants’ hellenomania , writers as well as political and social actors involved in the creation process of literary Latin succeeded to create one of the most performant instruments of communication which became in turn the model of all the modern languages. Due to the theoretic writings on Greek neologisms and the strongly viable lexical creations he brought about , Cicero’s contribution to upgrading the standards of the Latin language is remarkable. 0. The in...

This volume is the most recent work on the only practical military handbook of Classical Greek antiquity to have been preserved. The last decades have seen an increase and diversification in the research of Aineias’ work, due to the intensive use of the intratextual information available, making it today a valuable source of knowledge regarding the history and life of small Greek cities in the mid fourth century BC. In this context, the present volume was conceived to enhance this multitude of ‘secondary’ aspects rather than the central military theme. Aineias’ text acquires more reality through the figures and photographs that back up visually the explanations in some of the articles. The volume comprises, besides the introduction written by the two editors, the contributions of thirteen authors in fourteen articles, with Pretzler writing two of them. As we read in the introduction, this represents the end point of a project started in 2010, in the aftermath of a conference aiming at the multidisciplinary analysis of Aineias’ treatise. Although the approach, as well as the methods and the themes in focus are very much divergent, together these studies form a whole that displays a very clear plan. The first contribution, ‘The Other Aineias’, is by D. Whitehead, a long-standing contributor to the knowledge about and modern interpretation of Aineias’ handbook. His primary purpose is to discuss the name of the author and to restate his intention to preserve the Greek form of the name Aineias, which the volume’s editors adopt in the title of the volume. His article also brings into discussion whether the name Taktikós attributed to the author is justified considering the content and whether it is pivotal to the generic classification of the work. Whitehead also provides an overview of Aineias’ reception in antiquity. The next article by R. Lane Fox also has the author of the manual as its subject. It formulates three objectives in question form in the title: ‘Aineias the Author: Who, Where and When?’. ‘Who’ refers to the still disputed identity of the author of the treatise, given the existence of several persons with roots in Arcadia and bearing the name of Aineias of Stymphalos, although several researchers, Whitehead among them, consider Aineias Tacticus to be the same Aineias of Stymphalos mentioned by Xenophon in Hellenika 7.3.1–3. The question ‘where’ is not so much about the origins of the author, but more about the perimeter of his military activities, and cannot result in an accurate answer, because the information found in the text indicates a vast geographical area and describes Aineias as a ‘global Greek, from Arcadia to Pontus to Syracuse’. (p. 46). It also refers to the place where he wrote the manual, which is difficult to determine. The prescriptions in his manual do not apply to a specific city state, but to a ‘generic polis as an ideal type’ (p. 45). The answer to the question ‘when’ is more easily found through references to other events firmly determined in time, namely 354/3 BC (p. 44). In ‘Aineias Tacticus in His Intellectual Context’ D.G.J. Shipley sets out to explore first Aineias’ possible ethnic and political identities (pp. 50–6) and second his ‘Literary and Intellectual Context’ (pp. 57–64). The first conclusion is that Aineias displays a way of thinking and mentality specific to the Greek polis, but not to a particular one, and that he shows no preference for a specific type of political system. As to the second aspect of this chapter, after a comparative analysis of some fragments from Aineias and Xenophon, as well as from Aineias and Thucydides, Shipley comes to the conclusion that Aineias, aware that he is mapping ‘out a new field of written discourse’ (p. 64), THE CLASSICAL REVIEW 71

The intention of this article is to give a brief overview of how the military power was organised in Rome during the regal period. There is little information about the military organisation of the Romans between 753 and 509 BC. However, some written historical sources have enabled us to reconstruct some aspects of the military life in early Rome. The Indo-European studies and the comparative mythology of the Indo-European peoples also help to understand how the warrior function was valued in early Roman society. Like the other Indo-European peoples, the Romans structured their society in a system reflecting the ideology of the three functions represented, according to G. Dumézil, by the priests, warriors and herdsmen-cultivators. The same conception can be found at the theological level, within the triad Jupiter, Mars, Quirinus, the most important gods of Rome. Romulus, the founder of Rome, is the son of the god Mars, thereby consecrating the predominance of the warlike function wi...

The intention of this article is to present the oldest surviving work of military art of the Greek antiquity written in the mid-fourth century B.C. by of the author known today as Aeneas Tacticus. In 1609 Isaac Casaubon, its first editor, gave it the Latin title Commentarius de toleranda obsidione, How to Survive under Siege. Aeneas Tacticus was an experienced general on the battlefield, and had an equally solid theoretical training based on treatises of warfare which undoubtedly existed before his own, but were less fortunate and have not reached us. The study of this manual reveals that Aeneas Tacticus wrote or designed to write at least five books on military themes and information exists from other sources that he might have written three more books on the subject. Thus, all these works could have formed a Corpus Aeneanum, comparable in value to Clausewitz’s famous work On War. Aeneas’s work was highly appreciated and extremely useful for commanders and strategists of the Antiqu...