Chapter 2 looks at the formation of a highly influential genre of modern war writing, the critical-military history that can be traced to the Welsh military officer Henry Lloyd and his History of the Late War in Germany (1766-90). Recent criticism has challenged traditional views of Lloyd as a merely neo-classical author with little relevance to modern conceptions of war. Building on this new research, this chapter shows how Lloyd’s approach to military history not only helped introduce concerns with the aesthetics of genius and sublimity into military thought, but that it also established a new way of conceptualising the historical conditions of war. By turning military thought away from traditions of memoir and maxims, Lloyd’s writing was critical for breaking down a neo-classical view of the commander as a figure of authority, command and action. As it transformed the history of war from a storehouse of examples to an object to be studied, it simultaneously reimagined the commander in relation to the quasi-natural ‘life’ of the army. A new, biopolitical conception of strategy emerges from Lloyd’s history as he attempts to comprehend the army as, in effect, an organism that lies outside the general’s complete control.

Was demythologization a response to the Third-Century Crisis? With the empire reeling from the combined pressures of civil war, barbarian invasion, plague, and economic depression, perhaps Rome’s elite were drawn to bucolic, seasonal, and philosophical scenes for the allegorical tranquility they offered, as a form of refuge from the turmoil of real life? This chapter interrogates this thesis, with far-reaching implications for how we understand similar arguments launched about other periods in world art.