Sources, Speculation, and Arrogance

SO, for the past few weeks, I have been monitoring one of several mailing lists dedicated to the subject of ancient warfare (the actual practice thereof, not the rules of the same name). If you have been involved in any sort of "mailing list" discussions about Romans, or Egyptians, or.. I don't know, the color of Corinthian Horse Blankets between 323 and 322 BC, then you've probably heard of the list I'll be talking about here. Hell, you might even be on the list, yourself.

Now, this particular mailing list is an interesting place, when it comes to the discussion of ancient warfare. There are many public lists on the topic, and they vary pretty much across the board in terms of quality, depth, what have you. But this is one of maybe two or three central hubs for this sort of thing in the English language. You really can't throw a rock without hitting somebody who's been involved with the development of a popular Ancient released, or somebody who's written an Osprey on an ancient topic, or a WRG guidebook, or whatever. The top names in "ancient hobbyists" are here. Joining them are hundreds, perhaps thousands, of enthusiasts, from modest armchair historians to self-proclaimed experts.

As a result, the egos on this particular list are massive and the hot air generated is pretty intense. Everybody has an opinion on something, and as a result, most of us have learned to monitor (or "lurk") the material on the list, rather than actually saying much of anything.The debates, the flaming, the verbose argumentation capable only when a man is secure in the knowledge of his anonymity via the magic shield which is the Internet, are the stuff of legend. The list has literally made or broken interests in the hobby.

Of course, not everybody on the list is an ego case. In fact, I'd say a good sixty to seventy five percent of them are pretty decent folks who have interesting things to say about a very interesting time in the history of humanity. They're always a pleasure to read, and occasionally, when one feels bold enough to post, to have a friendly discussion or spirited debate with.

But there are the remaining minority who make life difficult for everyone. So difficult, in fact, that the moderator has a special note in the subscription notice for this particular list, asking new members to be brave enough to post their own thoughts, questions, and comments. In other words, "we don't bite, so speak your mind".

There is, therefore, a very interesting cultural dichotomy on the list of which I speak. There are those who are always full of incredibly cool information, who can tell wonderful stories, who remind you every day why you got involved in the hobby; on the other hand, posters can also be harshly mocked, insulted, and picked apart by the "experts" who call this particular mailing list home. This can be particularly frustrating to those of us who study this material for a living.

Recently, a long discussion has erupted regarding the use of sources and speculation. It has been both amusing and frustrating to me. Amusing because I never tire of watching people pretend to know what they're talking about without any ramifications simply by listing a bunch of sources; frustrating because this type of attitude has so also entered the Social Sciences, to the point that it's more important to loudly proclaim your sources than to do any serious research in your field of choice.

One moment of frustration for me, personally, occurred a few weeks ago. A relatively new member of the discussion group marched boldly marched into the breech and asked a relatively straightforward theoretical question, one which required a bit of imagination and a fair share of speculation. He wanted thoughts on how a certain thing would have been accomplished on the ancient battlefield. What his question was, specifically, is not germane to this rant; the reaction, however, is. You see, there was only one response, as far as I can tell, and it occurred fairly quickly. The response read as follows,

"...that..(post)... calls for speculation. You will find that we do not look kindly upon speculation here."

Speculation is bad, you see, on this particular list, because it calls upon the members of the group to "contemplate" a hypothetical reality without a firm grounding in hard fact.
Perish the thought in science. Can you imagine what might happen if we allowed ourselves to get carried away with hypotheses?

If the rule is now that we "don't look kindly upon speculation", then we had better throw out just about everything that is known, or that we claim to know, about some of the key aspects of ancient warfare. Because, being that none of our Punic War veterans (bless the old codgers) are willing to talk about the war these days, we've had to make some rather dramatic speculatory statements in the past few centuries.

Let's take the example of basic Roman military equipment. Why? Because it's my goddamned blog.

We know a great deal about the Romans, but comparatively little about the equipment their soldiers carried. This is because, while we do have fragmentary references to things like drill, and commentaries on proper conduct during a siege, Roman authors didn't necessarily consider things important to wargamers (the color of a shield or tunic, the common use of lorica as compared to scale mail during the third century, etcetera) to be all that interesting as topics to write about. Every soldier knew what color his shield was, he knew which tunic was his, and he knew what kind of armor he was or was not wearing. So did most of the Romans who interacted with soldiers on a semi-regular basis. So why write about it, unless you were providing technical information for those who were actually making the stuff?

Doing so would be sort of like writing a description of what you see in a neighbor's living room during a dinner party. The neighor knows what he has in his living room. He lives with it every day, probably bought most of it. Why would he need you to tell him that his couch is green, or that he has a black and white television? What purpose would that serve? Writing about something like that would be pointless, unless you were writing a parody or playing some sort of weird game. (Or, maybe you're a stalker. But that's your own business, chum.)

As a result of this attitude, anyway, we have comparatively little written about such things. When we do have it, it's almost an afterthought, frequently written by a foreigner (like Polybius) writing about the Romans as an outsider looking in. There were probably some far more technical writings meant to instruct state armories, or to help in the production of state contracted tunics. Maybe there was a list of regulations for shield patterns and colors that pre-dates the Notitia Dignatum. Unfortunately, we have yet to find any such technical writings, and some doubt that they ever existed.

So, when we are trying to figure out things like the style of armor a Severan Army might have worn, or the preponderance of white tunics compared to red tunics in the Republic, we must rely largely upon what we have available. And what we have available, I should point out, is frequently confined to these fragmentary literary references, to the gradual accumulation of Archaeological evidence that we've acquired over the years. The gaps have to be filled in with educated guesswork, speculation by any other name.

It's hard to know anything for certain in light of a lack of concrete evidence. And even then, what we "know for sure" can suddenly and unavoidably be altered when new evidence challenges previous conclusions.

Current theory, for example, is that Republican Roman tunics were white off-white - this is really at odds with what everybody accepted as "fact" ten years ago, that they were red.
Suddenly, what "everybody knows" becomes a minority opinion very quickly. And even then, in the absence of an entire Cohort being found, frozen in carbonite, with their tunics intact, the debate will continue, with some pretty convincing arguments on both sides. The fact is that we just don't know for certain. And we may never know. We have to base 'what we know' on what we have available.

And sometimes, what we have available isn't sufficient to answer a question entirely.

When I write about Mithra, or Bacchus, or Isis, or whatever, I'm dealing with very fragmentary evidence. Unlike us, the Ancients took their oaths of secrecy very seriously, and so not much was written by contemporaries about mystery religions (with a couple very notable exceptions). Just about everything we know is taken from archaeological evidence, or from the literary attacks by contemporary Christian or Pagan sources hostile to the religion in question.

I put together these artifacts, these snide comments, and the experiences of associated religions or foreign worshippers of similar deities, and try to decode the history within. It's hard work, requiring extensive research, a good knowledge of the period, and some educated guessing.
At the end of the day, I'm forced to do something else. I'm forced to speculate.

I do the same thing when I paint Roman shields, when I try to find a fig that looks like Harold II as I imagine him at Hastings, when I create scenarios for the Seven Weeks War. I'm a wargamer and an archaeologist. I speculate for a living, and I speculate for fun.

This guy must really despise me.

To suggest that speculation is not acceptable, particularly in an Internet-based mailing list with no academic purpose beyond the pleasure of interest and enthusiasm, is an act of extreme arrogance. To suggest that it is wrong, or somehow flawed, to call for a bit of imagination when trying to put together information about a period in which the gaps are wide enough to fit a Saxon shieldwall, only harms our hobby. Just as much as it harms Archaeology or History when new ideas are rejected out of hand because they dare to challenge conventionally held wisdom.