Scipio took the war to Africa, rather than destroying Hannibal in Italy as his enemies wanted. His temporary base was Sicily; at Syracuse, he incurred criticism by adopting Greek clothes and lifestyle. Leaving Hannibal behind was a gamble, compounded by the mere forty warships which accompanied him. Livy reports his ceremonial departure: liquid sacrifices poured from shipboard; the gods rewarded him with a favourable omen. In Africa, he won a dishonourable success, taking advantage of a truce. But it needed victory at Great Plains (203) before Carthage recalled Hannibal. Scipio’s battle tactics are analysed. Livy reports Hannibal’s departure contrariwise from Scipio’s, including bad omen on arrival. The two parleyed through interpreters. At Zama, Scipio defeated Hannibal comprehensively; tactics are analysed, including the decisive role of the Numidian Masinissa’s cavalry, Rome’s weakest arm. Hannibal persuaded his countrymen to accept the heavy peace terms, including annual indemnity, and territorial gains for Masinissa.

Thanks to the career of Alexander the Great, Macedonia has become synonymous with military innovation and territorial conquest. The question of how he was able to accomplish this has been explored in detail by generations of scholars, and an exhaustive list of works explore this topic, by scholars including Heckel, Hatzopoulo, Karunanithy, Sekunda, Heckel, Bosworth, Engels and Fuller. This chapter outlines key elements of Alexander’s army and tactics to develop a discussion about some of the fundamental shifts he brought onto the battlefield and how they reflect aspects of Macedonian identity.

The Mongol military centered on armies of decimally organized mobile horse archers. This system provided the Mongols with both a rationally organized military and a means of incorporating defeated enemies, as soldiers now belonged to units of a thousand rather than retaining old tribal identities. As the Mongol Empire expanded, new groups joined their ranks and the Mongols found new ways of accommodating them into their war machine without fundamentally disrupting their own ways of war. The Mongols also realized that regional needs sometimes dictated the use of other forces. Siege engineers, infantry, heavy cavalry, and naval forces all found use within the Mongol military. The Mongols showed flexibility not only in using personnel and military units, but also in adopting technologies, including gunpowder. After the dissolution of the United Mongol Empire, Mongol armies primarily fought each other in internecine wars. It became increasingly difficult to share training, technology, and personnel.

Thucydides served as elected general (strategos) for Athens, and it is likely that he had (perhaps extensive) personal experience of warfare. His work is therefore an important guide both to the practicalities of warfare in 5th-century BCE Greece and to the wider function(s) that war played in politics and society. This chapter analyses what the History tells us about the ‘art of war’ in this period, discussing the use of land troops (light-armed soldiers and cavalry as well as hoplites) and naval forces. It discusses military strategy and tactics, the nature of combat and the consequences of warfare, for non-combatants as well as soldiers.

The British Army took part in numerous operations, ranging from small expeditions to the West Indies, Africa and along the European littoral to major operations in Portugal, Spain and Belgium. Initial struggles with these responsibilities, together with those of imperial policing and maintaining order in Ireland would oblige the Army to implement extensive reforms, particularly in tactics and unit organisation, even while the system of purchase for officers remained intact. While British infantry produced mixed results in the field during the French Revolutionary Wars, in time it became noteworthy for its musketry and remarkable doggedness in battle. Chronically understrength and notoriously difficult to control, the cavalry tended to play only a minor part on campaign, while shortages of artillery and engineers plagued the Army throughout this period. Albeit comparatively small, in creating an Iberian foothold which soon developed into a major theatre of operations, the instrument forged in the battles and sieges of the Peninsula and southern France helped drain Napoleon’s resources over a substantial period and established the high standard of battlefield performance which was to reach its apogee on the field of Waterloo, from which would emerge one of history’s greatest commanders – the Duke of Wellington.

The culmination of the Battle of Balaklava, the Charge of the Light Brigade occurred over fifteen minutes of tragic and action-packed drama during October 1854. In the Crimean moment and beyond, the occasion has epitomized the war’s tragedy and blunder. Its persistence in national memory derives especially from the poem that immortalized it: Tennyson’s “Charge of the Light Brigade.” Celebrating the Chargers as the paragons of duty, Tennyson’s verses gave them a corporate identity across their lifetimes, as they sought glory and fended off poverty. Long after the Victorian era, patriotic Britons clung to the Charge, using it as a tool for military recruiting, taking pride in its relics, and finding consolation in its lessons. Its persistence notwithstanding, the Charge had a changing meaning: the duty that it epitomized became an antiquated value in the twentieth century, as antiwar crusades, comic parodies, and even epic films suggest. Moreover, Tennyson’s verses were no static monument: their complexity has allowed, time and again, for the event’s reworking so that it does not anymore suggest glorious duty as much as it symbolizes heroic failure.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century nomads held considerable power in Iran and the Ottoman Empire. In Ottoman lands, westernizing reforms in landholding and local administration undermined tribal power and led to increasing sedentarization. In Iran, tribes and nomads remained central to the military, and retained power through World War I. In both states, the government controlled nomads by incorporating tribal leadership into government structure. New concepts of nationalism portrayed nomads as backwards and alien. World War I and the Constitutional Revolution of Iran brought an upsurge of nomad activity, but from the 1930s the Mandate powers, the Turkish Republic, and the Pahlavi dynasty of Iran worked actively to suppress nomadism. Even more important was the revolution in transportation and weaponry. The steamship, telegraph and railway replaced many caravan routes, destroying the market for camels. The machine gun and airplane made cavalry obsolete, while the truck ended the usefulness of caravans and the need for nomad guards over trade routes. Thus, nomads lost much of their usefulness to the state.

This chapter is the first of two chapters examining the identities created at the Great Panathenaia. It asks what identities were created for Athenian men. For these men, the processes were particularly complex, and they had to take part in a variety of different aspects of the festival. The more often a man participated, the more complex his identities became. A man could also have further identities as a member of specific subgroups of Athenian men: as a member of the cavalry, as benefactor of the city, as a member of a genos, a (Kleisthenic) deme and a (Kleisthenic) tribe. Different aspects of a man’s overall identity would have been salient at different moments in the festival and depended on how exactly any individual man participated. Especially in the games during the classical and Hellenistic periods, the definition of what it meant to be an Athenian male mapped quite closely on to a very political and Aristotelian understanding of citizenship. Consequently, the identities of Athenian men were particularly sensitive to political change in the city, and they quickly reflected developments in other areas of the city’s life.

According to a variety of ancient sources (texts, inscriptions, archaeology, visual arts), animals were a common sight in the city of Athens. Their behaviors, characteristics, and relationships to humans revolve around the thematic categories of everyday life, mythology and religion, and performance and competition.

If Xenophon employs Socrates’ conversations with elite Athenians as a vehicle for communicating with his reading audience concerning their responsibilities within the democracy, he adopts a more direct approach to this in his Hipparchicus and his Poroi, where he addresses his readers in his own voice as an expert who can help them succeed in specific leadership roles. Xenophon’s advice in Hipparchicus concerns how a cavalry commander can best carry out this important elected office. His ideal cavalry commander is an astute political actor who carefully and self-consciously manages his relations with individuals, the Council, and the public at large; and while he seeks to carry out his duties in keeping with existing democratic institutions and rules, he also works to modify these when this will benefit the city. The chapter then turns to the Poroi, written soon after Athens’ disastrous Social War (357–355 BC) in which Xenophon outlines an ambitious program of financial reform for the city and in so doing models for his elite reader how a public speaker could go about persuading the Athenian Assembly to embrace changes to improve the situation of Athenians at home and abroad.

Ritual violence in the form of regulated types of close combat had been widespread in western Africa, even on the battlefield. The arrival of Europeans along the coast and an invading Moroccan army equipped with firearms in the sixteenth century challenged more ritualised approaches to combat in many areas of western Africa. In the savannah regions however, ritualised close combat in the form of martial contests remained important as military training that continued to be effective on the battlefield. In western Sudan, competitions of wrestling, equestrian acrobatics and fencing prepared elite males for battlefield combat, which was dominated by cavalry heroics. In the savannah regions of Angola, fighters performed danced combats to pay tribute to rulers, to develop combat skills crucial for the battlefield and to exercise their king’s leopard-like power over life and death on the battlefield. Elements of these ritual violence traditions were carried to the Americas where enslaved Africans and their descendants armed themselves with these practices even under slavery.