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1000 results for “Not_AI”
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When you have visitors, do you put on clothes or do they undress?
I put clothes on because it is the standard thing to do. I do not aim to be creepy or make people uncomfortable.
Reposted from: https://ask.absturztau.be/@Siinamon/a/113088018149927292
#fragsturztaube -
Are you the captain or the newcomer? Lead the flock!
#fungame
#playandearn
#tapgame
#SMACKM
#gaming
#STEAM
#metaverse
#web3
#IndieGame
#games
#MMORPG
#Adventure
Not AI-generated -
Are you the captain or the newcomer? Lead the flock!
#fungame
#playandearn
#tapgame
#SMACKM
#gaming
#STEAM
#metaverse
#web3
#IndieGame
#games
#MMORPG
#Adventure
Not AI-generated -
Are you the captain or the newcomer? Lead the flock!
#fungame
#playandearn
#tapgame
#SMACKM
#gaming
#STEAM
#metaverse
#web3
#IndieGame
#games
#MMORPG
#Adventure
Not AI-generated -
Are you the captain or the newcomer? Lead the flock!
#fungame
#playandearn
#tapgame
#SMACKM
#gaming
#STEAM
#metaverse
#web3
#IndieGame
#games
#MMORPG
#Adventure
Not AI-generated -
Martin Luther King, Jr. - Thich Nhat Hanh 1966 joint statement:
“We believe that the Buddhists who have sacrificed themselves, like the martyrs of the civil rights movement, do not aim at the injury of the oppressors but only at changing their policies."
https://tricycle.org/article/martin-luther-king-thich-nhat-hanh/
#MLK #TNH #Dharma #BelovedCommunity #PlumVillage #Buddhism @dharma
1/7 -
Martin Luther King, Jr. - Thich Nhat Hanh 1966 joint statement:
“We believe that the Buddhists who have sacrificed themselves, like the martyrs of the civil rights movement, do not aim at the injury of the oppressors but only at changing their policies."
https://tricycle.org/article/martin-luther-king-thich-nhat-hanh/
#MLK #TNH #Dharma #BelovedCommunity #PlumVillage #Buddhism @dharma
1/7 -
https://invidious.fdn.fr/watch?v=PaVjQFMg7L0
Sorry Kyle, but the hole is deeper. What killed the kirky internet that we loved was not AI. That was just the last nail in the coffin. What actually caused it was sheer greed enabled by ineffective, corrupt and ignorant public officers who were either just complacent or downright accomplices.
Thankfully, some of it still lives in the #fediverse
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I think we all have the scars to prove we've been there, ya.
"<X> is the new hotness" rarely results in great design or implementation :) Microservices, containers, (not-) AI, framework-of-the-month, development-style-of-the-year... use 'em when they make sense, not because everyone else is using them.
As someone said, it was a mistake to teach rocks to do math.
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We fine-tune custom #LLMs for two main reasons:
- To conserve precious context tokens, and
- To introduce the #LLM to some new knowledge or skill that wasn't available for its generalist training set.Fine-tuning is not a solution for utilizing personal or confidential data! The fine-tuned models will leak this information.
So let's assume we aren't working with private data.
In general, because of transfer learning, it would in principle make more sense to incorporate the new knowledge into the base model corpus, because that tends to create better models. But still, even if the generalist model knows your data and the task, if you're going to put that generalist model into a component of your larger system where it will always perform the same task, it makes sense to fine-tune it for this task only rather than to feed the same prompt prefix to it for every inference round.
Now with data-centric #AI it might even be that the data you want to use doesn't meet the high quality standards large generalist models require. Perhaps in these cases it might make sense to let a chatbot rewrite your specialist corpus into a higher quality form, even if you're not aiming to incorporate your data into generalist corpuses.
There is a new use case emerging though, #RecursiveSelfImprovement. I believe we can do this in a synergistic generalist fashion as well, but curiously it's now something even smaller organizations can do for specialized tasks by fine-tuning.
Much like #alignment, it went from niche philosophical topic into standard engineering practices overnight.
Recursive self-improvement is done by #DataCentricAI principles where a fine-tuned task is trained by examples, but those examples are generated and filtered recursively by the LLM. In principle the model is fine-tuned in rounds, using e.g. #DPO. In a round, the model is first fine-tuned with the existing good data. Then it's asked to generate new variations for those examples. Then its asked to rank pairs of training data examples and the worse ones are filtered out. Then the resulting dataset now has more task examples but of better quality than before. This is again used for fine-tuning and the cycle starts again.
As this isn't human-imitative, the chatbots can exceed human parity.
It requires a bit of nuance though. There is not only one task this specialist bot is taught but a set:
1. Generate variations of tasks (including this task itself).
2. Rank pairs of task performances (including ranking task).
3. Perform the task proper. -
FROM THE MOUTH OF BABES! ELON'S LITTLE SON ACTUALLY SAID THESE THINGS TO TRUMP! ONE FOUR YEAR OLD TO THE OTHER. THIS IS NOT AI.
THIS IS ACTUAL WHITE HOUSE FOOTAGE! HILARIOUS! MUST WATCH THE CUTE KID! 🤣😂
#elonmuskkids #threads #Trump #reposteria #elonmusk #repost #share #Reposted #ShareThisPost #SharePost #ShareThisGOT TO SEE THIS AND SHARE.. HILARIOUS!
https://youtu.be/7IjjJGFCVfI?si=eD8pYEOkcKGwGg4h
Kid tells Trump to shut your mouth! -
FROM THE MOUTH OF BABES! ELON'S LITTLE SON ACTUALLY SAID THESE THINGS TO TRUMP! ONE FOUR YEAR OLD TO THE OTHER. THIS IS NOT AI.
THIS IS ACTUAL WHITE HOUSE FOOTAGE! HILARIOUS! MUST WATCH THE CUTE KID! 🤣😂
#elonmuskkids #threads #Trump #reposteria #elonmusk #repost #share #Reposted #ShareThisPost #SharePost #ShareThisGOT TO SEE THIS AND SHARE.. HILARIOUS!
https://youtu.be/7IjjJGFCVfI?si=eD8pYEOkcKGwGg4h
Kid tells Trump to shut your mouth! -
FROM THE MOUTH OF BABES! ELON'S LITTLE SON ACTUALLY SAID THESE THINGS TO TRUMP! ONE FOUR YEAR OLD TO THE OTHER. THIS IS NOT AI.
THIS IS ACTUAL WHITE HOUSE FOOTAGE! HILARIOUS! MUST WATCH THE CUTE KID! 🤣😂
#elonmuskkids #threads #Trump #reposteria #elonmusk #repost #share #Reposted #ShareThisPost #SharePost #ShareThisGOT TO SEE THIS AND SHARE.. HILARIOUS!
https://youtu.be/7IjjJGFCVfI?si=eD8pYEOkcKGwGg4h
Kid tells Trump to shut your mouth! -
FROM THE MOUTH OF BABES! ELON'S LITTLE SON ACTUALLY SAID THESE THINGS TO TRUMP! ONE FOUR YEAR OLD TO THE OTHER. THIS IS NOT AI.
THIS IS ACTUAL WHITE HOUSE FOOTAGE! HILARIOUS! MUST WATCH THE CUTE KID! 🤣😂
#elonmuskkids #threads #Trump #reposteria #elonmusk #repost #share #Reposted #ShareThisPost #SharePost #ShareThisGOT TO SEE THIS AND SHARE.. HILARIOUS!
https://youtu.be/7IjjJGFCVfI?si=eD8pYEOkcKGwGg4h
Kid tells Trump to shut your mouth! -
Glider flight controls. How does the control stick make the ailerons work? (And what about those flaperons?)
The video is in three sections. (Sorry about the abrupt jump cut edits.) First section shows the control stick moved side-to-side to move the ailerons. That motion is carried by various push-pull tubes and bellcranks...aft of the landing gear. In the second section of the video we see the lever for one wing goes up while the other goes down.
But I have flaperons, not ailerons. The third section shows the result of moving the flap lever...the same wing control levers now move up together, or down together.
The mechanical mixer allows two different control inputs (control stick sideways motion, and flap lever) to be combined into one final motion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flaperon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bellcrank
This completes what was started here:
https://universeodon.com/@KrajciTom/114846515361228698#AvGeek #Aviation #ElectricAircraft #ExperimentalAviation #Homebuilt #Glider #DIY #Control #Flaps #Flaperon
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Glider flight controls. How does the control stick make the ailerons work? (And what about those flaperons?)
The video is in three sections. (Sorry about the abrupt jump cut edits.) First section shows the control stick moved side-to-side to move the ailerons. That motion is carried by various push-pull tubes and bellcranks...aft of the landing gear. In the second section of the video we see the lever for one wing goes up while the other goes down.
But I have flaperons, not ailerons. The third section shows the result of moving the flap lever...the same wing control levers now move up together, or down together.
The mechanical mixer allows two different control inputs (control stick sideways motion, and flap lever) to be combined into one final motion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flaperon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bellcrank
This completes what was started here:
https://universeodon.com/@KrajciTom/114846515361228698#AvGeek #Aviation #ElectricAircraft #ExperimentalAviation #Homebuilt #Glider #DIY #Control #Flaps #Flaperon
-
Glider flight controls. How does the control stick make the ailerons work? (And what about those flaperons?)
The video is in three sections. (Sorry about the abrupt jump cut edits.) First section shows the control stick moved side-to-side to move the ailerons. That motion is carried by various push-pull tubes and bellcranks...aft of the landing gear. In the second section of the video we see the lever for one wing goes up while the other goes down.
But I have flaperons, not ailerons. The third section shows the result of moving the flap lever...the same wing control levers now move up together, or down together.
The mechanical mixer allows two different control inputs (control stick sideways motion, and flap lever) to be combined into one final motion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flaperon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bellcrank
This completes what was started here:
https://universeodon.com/@KrajciTom/114846515361228698#AvGeek #Aviation #ElectricAircraft #ExperimentalAviation #Homebuilt #Glider #DIY #Control #Flaps #Flaperon
-
Glider flight controls. How does the control stick make the ailerons work? (And what about those flaperons?)
The video is in three sections. (Sorry about the abrupt jump cut edits.) First section shows the control stick moved side-to-side to move the ailerons. That motion is carried by various push-pull tubes and bellcranks...aft of the landing gear. In the second section of the video we see the lever for one wing goes up while the other goes down.
But I have flaperons, not ailerons. The third section shows the result of moving the flap lever...the same wing control levers now move up together, or down together.
The mechanical mixer allows two different control inputs (control stick sideways motion, and flap lever) to be combined into one final motion.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flaperon
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bellcrank
This completes what was started here:
https://universeodon.com/@KrajciTom/114846515361228698#AvGeek #Aviation #ElectricAircraft #ExperimentalAviation #Homebuilt #Glider #DIY #Control #Flaps #Flaperon
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"I was rather shocked to see an officer fire a single #beanbag shotgun round into the crowd, pause, then fire another three rounds in rapid succession. Bean bag rounds should only be used on an individual engaged in a violent act – not aimed indiscriminately into a crowd." https://calmatters.org/commentary/2024/05/police-crowd-response-ucla-protests/
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"I was rather shocked to see an officer fire a single #beanbag shotgun round into the crowd, pause, then fire another three rounds in rapid succession. Bean bag rounds should only be used on an individual engaged in a violent act – not aimed indiscriminately into a crowd." https://calmatters.org/commentary/2024/05/police-crowd-response-ucla-protests/
-
"I was rather shocked to see an officer fire a single #beanbag shotgun round into the crowd, pause, then fire another three rounds in rapid succession. Bean bag rounds should only be used on an individual engaged in a violent act – not aimed indiscriminately into a crowd." https://calmatters.org/commentary/2024/05/police-crowd-response-ucla-protests/
-
"I was rather shocked to see an officer fire a single #beanbag shotgun round into the crowd, pause, then fire another three rounds in rapid succession. Bean bag rounds should only be used on an individual engaged in a violent act – not aimed indiscriminately into a crowd." https://calmatters.org/commentary/2024/05/police-crowd-response-ucla-protests/
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I made the mistake of starting to learn about GEMINI from its Frequently Asked Questions document.
It's not aimed at people like me, who already understand the benefits and tradeoffs of static content servers. So it drives lots of points home, repeatedly, that I already know.
It's apparently aimed at the same sort of monoculture Chrome+Apache Think for HTTP that parallels the old BIND Think and Sendmail Think that #qmail and #djbdns were up against years ago.
-
I made the mistake of starting to learn about GEMINI from its Frequently Asked Questions document.
It's not aimed at people like me, who already understand the benefits and tradeoffs of static content servers. So it drives lots of points home, repeatedly, that I already know.
It's apparently aimed at the same sort of monoculture Chrome+Apache Think for HTTP that parallels the old BIND Think and Sendmail Think that #qmail and #djbdns were up against years ago.
-
Some Thoughts on “Classical Greek Tactics: A Cultural History”
Even the most overwhelming project can be completed if you take it one stone at a time! Photo of the Cyclopean walls of Mycenae by Sharon Mollerus, Wikimedia Commons, with a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.Konijnendijk, Roel (2017) Classical Greek Tactics: A Cultural History. Mnemosyne, Supplements History and Archaeology of Classical Antiquity, Band 409 (Brill: Leiden)
Since the 1990s, there has been intense debate about early Greek warfare. Most people agreed that there was something wrong with the versions available in English, but it took time to agree on just what that wrongness was and whether it could be fixed with a few small changes or was more fundamental. This book is another Cyclopean stone in the walls of the current consensus.
Konijnendijk argues that the California School of writers on Greek warfare (John Kinloch Anderson, William K. Pritchett, and Victor Davis Hanson) were basically refining the ideas of Austrian, German, and English scholars before the First World War. The continentals were interested in a comparative history of warfare with the practices of the Prussian army at the top, the Roman army in the middle, and early Greek armies near the bottom, while the English scholars tried to explain why Greek warfare as described by the Prussians was so peculiar. For a long time it seemed like these early writers had solved the problem so little was written on the subject in English. When a new group of scholars in Cold War California became interested in warfare, they launched a flood of research in English which almost erased the original German context of their theories. In short, the ‘orthodoxy’ is really a set of received ideas from 19th century Europe which survived until a group of ‘scientific historians’ began to question them.
Konijnendijk also lays out some of the strangest ideas about Greek warfare published before 1990. Anyone who has read Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon can list story after story of Greeks chasing down their enemies, stabbing them in the back, burning them alive in sacred groves where they had taken refuge, and so on. Often they came back to find that on other parts of their field their allies had lost, or were startled by a counter-attack and routed themselves. Thucydides says that the Spartans did not like these reckless chases (Thuc. 5.73.4): a mob of excited, jostling, running Spartiates were just as vulnerable to a counter-attack as any other hoplites. Armies without enough light-armed troops or cavalry bitterly complained that when they won they could not hurt their enemy, but if they ever lost they would be wiped out (Xen. An. 3.1.2). But in many modern writers on ancient warfare we find something different:
- Rüstow and Köchly, History of the Greek Art of War from the Earliest Times until Pyrrhus (1852) p. 145 “If the hoplite line of one side gained the victory, broke the enemy line and drew the other arms with it in flight, the victorious phalanx was now poorly equipped to pursue the fleeing, unless it had cavalry and light-armed infantry for assistance. In fights of this period, the pursuit was invariably rather half-hearted. The lack of cavalry and long-ranged troops is, however, not the only ground for this. One wanted more than anything else to make an impression by means of the battle and the victory, one took control of the battlefield and thereby established one’s victory by setting up a tropaion of the captured arms …” https://archive.org/details/geschichtedesgr00ruesgoog/page/n172
- Whatley, “On the Possibility of Reconstructing Marathon” (1964 but written in the 1920s) p. 122: “There was no attempt to follow up a victory. The two sides went home with as little attempt to molest each other as do the rival teams after a modern football match.”
- Hanson, Western Way of War (1989), pp. 35, 36: “Long drawn-out pursuit was also rare; unlike Napoleon, the victors were not aiming for the complete destruction of an enemy army. Indeed, pursuit of fleeing hoplites was not even crucial: most victorious Greek armies saw no reason why they could not repeat their simple formula for success and gain further victories should the enemy regroup in a few days and mistakenly press their luck again.”
- Kurt Raaflaub, Archaic and Classical Greece,” in Kurt Raaflaub and Nathan Rosenstein, eds., War and Society in the Ancient and Medieval Worlds (Center for Hellenic Studies: Washington, DC, 1999) p. 133: “Since the goal was to defeat, not annihilate, the enemy, the fleeing losers usually were not pursued and casualties, though potentially serious, often were limited.”
Somehow the exception in the ancient sources became the norm in the moderns! I had forgotten about this because Peter Krentz debunked it in his great article “Fighting by the Rules: The Invention of the Hoplite Agôn” in 2002, and because its not one of the aspects of the California school which many people I know still believe, like many people still believe that hoplite gear was very heavy.
The book is very readable which is more than anyone can say about my German.
If I have one criticism it would be that this book is so tightly focused and text-centred that it excludes some things which could make its view even stronger. I have an article in press for a few years which argues that some of the brilliant scholars who refuted the California school unthinkingly reproduced its assumptions about what questions to ask and sources to rely on. Its one thing to ask whether hoplites fought in files two cubits wide or four cubits wide, another to ask whether we should look at Greek ethnic warfare or warfare in the Aegean region. (The article will appear has appeared in the proceedings of Melammu-Symposium 8).
The bibliography of about 380 items excludes some things, particularly works outside ‘academic’ classics and by presses that expect a book to sell thousands not hundreds of copies. This isn’t a monograph which addresses the archaeologists like Imma Killian-Dirlmeier, the writings of Peter Connolly, or the wargamers from the 1970s to the 2000s who looked at what academics had to offer in English, decided it was not helpful, and wrote their own books, some of them quite good. Looking at this wider context could have showed that the dominance of the text-focused Prussian school was not inevitable, and how these ideas spread before academics were writing books in English on them. But people writing a PhD in the UK are under strong pressure to complete it in three or four years, so they have to be ruthless about defining a research topic and not wasting time on anything else.
If you just want three books on early Greek warfare, I would still recommend Hans van Wees’ Greek Warfare: Myths and Realities, Josho Brouwers’ Henchmen of Ares, and Xenophon’s Anabasis. But if you want to read more widely, I would recommend this. I hope that the wider world interested in early Greek warfare learns to talk about the Prussian, English, and California schools, just like the world interested in Greek catapults knows about the 19th century Prussian and French scholars who built the first reconstructions.
If you can’t obtain the published version, the original dissertation is available as Konijnendijk, Roel (2015) Ideals and Pragmatism in Greek Military Thought, 490-338 BC. Doctoral thesis, University College London. http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1470175/ Scholars who want something to cite should check the printed version!
Don’t make me chase you down! Support this site with a donation on Patreon or paypal.me or even liberapay
Edit 2021-09-25: Converted to blocks, added link to published article from Melammu conferences.
Edit 2026-03-01: Cite Raaflaub
#ancient #bookReview #classicalGreek #hoplite -
Some Thoughts on “Classical Greek Tactics: A Cultural History”
Even the most overwhelming project can be completed if you take it one stone at a time! Photo of the Cyclopean walls of Mycenae by Sharon Mollerus, Wikimedia Commons, with a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.Konijnendijk, Roel (2017) Classical Greek Tactics: A Cultural History. Mnemosyne, Supplements History and Archaeology of Classical Antiquity, Band 409 (Brill: Leiden)
Since the 1990s, there has been intense debate about early Greek warfare. Most people agreed that there was something wrong with the versions available in English, but it took time to agree on just what that wrongness was and whether it could be fixed with a few small changes or was more fundamental. This book is another Cyclopean stone in the walls of the current consensus.
Konijnendijk argues that the California School of writers on Greek warfare (John Kinloch Anderson, William K. Pritchett, and Victor Davis Hanson) were basically refining the ideas of Austrian, German, and English scholars before the First World War. The continentals were interested in a comparative history of warfare with the practices of the Prussian army at the top, the Roman army in the middle, and early Greek armies near the bottom, while the English scholars tried to explain why Greek warfare as described by the Prussians was so peculiar. For a long time it seemed like these early writers had solved the problem so little was written on the subject in English. When a new group of scholars in Cold War California became interested in warfare, they launched a flood of research in English which almost erased the original German context of their theories. In short, the ‘orthodoxy’ is really a set of received ideas from 19th century Europe which survived until a group of ‘scientific historians’ began to question them.
Konijnendijk also lays out some of the strangest ideas about Greek warfare published before 1990. Anyone who has read Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon can list story after story of Greeks chasing down their enemies, stabbing them in the back, burning them alive in sacred groves where they had taken refuge, and so on. Often they came back to find that on other parts of their field their allies had lost, or were startled by a counter-attack and routed themselves. Thucydides says that the Spartans did not like these reckless chases (Thuc. 5.73.4): a mob of excited, jostling, running Spartiates were just as vulnerable to a counter-attack as any other hoplites. Armies without enough light-armed troops or cavalry bitterly complained that when they won they could not hurt their enemy, but if they ever lost they would be wiped out (Xen. An. 3.1.2). But in many modern writers on ancient warfare we find something different:
- Rüstow and Köchly, History of the Greek Art of War from the Earliest Times until Pyrrhus (1852) p. 145 “If the hoplite line of one side gained the victory, broke the enemy line and drew the other arms with it in flight, the victorious phalanx was now poorly equipped to pursue the fleeing, unless it had cavalry and light-armed infantry for assistance. In fights of this period, the pursuit was invariably rather half-hearted. The lack of cavalry and long-ranged troops is, however, not the only ground for this. One wanted more than anything else to make an impression by means of the battle and the victory, one took control of the battlefield and thereby established one’s victory by setting up a tropaion of the captured arms …” https://archive.org/details/geschichtedesgr00ruesgoog/page/n172
- Whatley, “On the Possibility of Reconstructing Marathon” (1964 but written in the 1920s) p. 122: “There was no attempt to follow up a victory. The two sides went home with as little attempt to molest each other as do the rival teams after a modern football match.”
- Hanson, Western Way of War (1989), pp. 35, 36: “Long drawn-out pursuit was also rare; unlike Napoleon, the victors were not aiming for the complete destruction of an enemy army. Indeed, pursuit of fleeing hoplites was not even crucial: most victorious Greek armies saw no reason why they could not repeat their simple formula for success and gain further victories should the enemy regroup in a few days and mistakenly press their luck again.”
Somehow the exception in the ancient sources became the norm in the moderns! I had forgotten about this because Peter Krentz debunked it in his great article “Fighting by the Rules: The Invention of the Hoplite Agôn” in 2002, and because its not one of the aspects of the California school which many people I know still believe, like many people still believe that hoplite gear was very heavy.
The book is very readable which is more than anyone can say about my German.
If I have one criticism it would be that this book is so tightly focused and text-centred that it excludes some things which could make its view even stronger. I have an article in press for a few years which argues that some of the brilliant scholars who refuted the California school unthinkingly reproduced its assumptions about what questions to ask and sources to rely on. Its one thing to ask whether hoplites fought in files two cubits wide or four cubits wide, another to ask whether we should look at Greek ethnic warfare or warfare in the Aegean region. (The article will appear has appeared in the proceedings of Melammu-Symposium 8).
The bibliography of about 380 items excludes some things, particularly works outside ‘academic’ classics and by presses that expect a book to sell thousands not hundreds of copies. This isn’t a monograph which addresses the archaeologists like Imma Killian-Dirlmeier, the writings of Peter Connolly, or the wargamers from the 1970s to the 2000s who looked at what academics had to offer in English, decided it was not helpful, and wrote their own books, some of them quite good. Looking at this wider context could have showed that the dominance of the text-focused Prussian school was not inevitable, and how these ideas spread before academics were writing books in English on them. But people writing a PhD in the UK are under strong pressure to complete it in three or four years, so they have to be ruthless about defining a research topic and not wasting time on anything else.
If you just want three books on early Greek warfare, I would still recommend Hans van Wees’ Greek Warfare: Myths and Realities, Josho Brouwers’ Henchmen of Ares, and Xenophon’s Anabasis. But if you want to read more widely, I would recommend this. I hope that the wider world interested in early Greek warfare learns to talk about the Prussian, English, and California schools, just like the world interested in Greek catapults knows about the 19th century Prussian and French scholars who built the first reconstructions.
If you can’t obtain the published version, the original dissertation is available as Konijnendijk, Roel (2015) Ideals and Pragmatism in Greek Military Thought, 490-338 BC. Doctoral thesis, University College London. http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1470175/ Scholars who want something to cite should check the printed version!
Don’t make me chase you down! Support this site with a donation on Patreon or paypal.me or even liberapay
Edit 2021-09-25: Converted to blocks, added link to published article from Melammu conferences.
-
Some Thoughts on “Classical Greek Tactics: A Cultural History”
Even the most overwhelming project can be completed if you take it one stone at a time! Photo of the Cyclopean walls of Mycenae by Sharon Mollerus, Wikimedia Commons, with a Creative Commons Attribution 2.0 Generic license.Konijnendijk, Roel (2017) Classical Greek Tactics: A Cultural History. Mnemosyne, Supplements History and Archaeology of Classical Antiquity, Band 409 (Brill: Leiden)
Since the 1990s, there has been intense debate about early Greek warfare. Most people agreed that there was something wrong with the versions available in English, but it took time to agree on just what that wrongness was and whether it could be fixed with a few small changes or was more fundamental. This book is another Cyclopean stone in the walls of the current consensus.
Konijnendijk argues that the California School of writers on Greek warfare (John Kinloch Anderson, William K. Pritchett, and Victor Davis Hanson) were basically refining the ideas of Austrian, German, and English scholars before the First World War. The continentals were interested in a comparative history of warfare with the practices of the Prussian army at the top, the Roman army in the middle, and early Greek armies near the bottom, while the English scholars tried to explain why Greek warfare as described by the Prussians was so peculiar. For a long time it seemed like these early writers had solved the problem so little was written on the subject in English. When a new group of scholars in Cold War California became interested in warfare, they launched a flood of research in English which almost erased the original German context of their theories. In short, the ‘orthodoxy’ is really a set of received ideas from 19th century Europe which survived until a group of ‘scientific historians’ began to question them.
Konijnendijk also lays out some of the strangest ideas about Greek warfare published before 1990. Anyone who has read Herodotus, Thucydides, and Xenophon can list story after story of Greeks chasing down their enemies, stabbing them in the back, burning them alive in sacred groves where they had taken refuge, and so on. Often they came back to find that on other parts of their field their allies had lost, or were startled by a counter-attack and routed themselves. Thucydides says that the Spartans did not like these reckless chases (Thuc. 5.73.4): a mob of excited, jostling, running Spartiates were just as vulnerable to a counter-attack as any other hoplites. Armies without enough light-armed troops or cavalry bitterly complained that when they won they could not hurt their enemy, but if they ever lost they would be wiped out (Xen. An. 3.1.2). But in many modern writers on ancient warfare we find something different:
- Rüstow and Köchly, History of the Greek Art of War from the Earliest Times until Pyrrhus (1852) p. 145 “If the hoplite line of one side gained the victory, broke the enemy line and drew the other arms with it in flight, the victorious phalanx was now poorly equipped to pursue the fleeing, unless it had cavalry and light-armed infantry for assistance. In fights of this period, the pursuit was invariably rather half-hearted. The lack of cavalry and long-ranged troops is, however, not the only ground for this. One wanted more than anything else to make an impression by means of the battle and the victory, one took control of the battlefield and thereby established one’s victory by setting up a tropaion of the captured arms …” https://archive.org/details/geschichtedesgr00ruesgoog/page/n172
- Whatley, “On the Possibility of Reconstructing Marathon” (1964 but written in the 1920s) p. 122: “There was no attempt to follow up a victory. The two sides went home with as little attempt to molest each other as do the rival teams after a modern football match.”
- Hanson, Western Way of War (1989), pp. 35, 36: “Long drawn-out pursuit was also rare; unlike Napoleon, the victors were not aiming for the complete destruction of an enemy army. Indeed, pursuit of fleeing hoplites was not even crucial: most victorious Greek armies saw no reason why they could not repeat their simple formula for success and gain further victories should the enemy regroup in a few days and mistakenly press their luck again.”
Somehow the exception in the ancient sources became the norm in the moderns! I had forgotten about this because Peter Krentz debunked it in his great article “Fighting by the Rules: The Invention of the Hoplite Agôn” in 2002, and because its not one of the aspects of the California school which many people I know still believe, like many people still believe that hoplite gear was very heavy.
The book is very readable which is more than anyone can say about my German.
If I have one criticism it would be that this book is so tightly focused and text-centred that it excludes some things which could make its view even stronger. I have an article in press for a few years which argues that some of the brilliant scholars who refuted the California school unthinkingly reproduced its assumptions about what questions to ask and sources to rely on. Its one thing to ask whether hoplites fought in files two cubits wide or four cubits wide, another to ask whether we should look at Greek ethnic warfare or warfare in the Aegean region. (The article will appear has appeared in the proceedings of Melammu-Symposium 8).
The bibliography of about 380 items excludes some things, particularly works outside ‘academic’ classics and by presses that expect a book to sell thousands not hundreds of copies. This isn’t a monograph which addresses the archaeologists like Imma Killian-Dirlmeier, the writings of Peter Connolly, or the wargamers from the 1970s to the 2000s who looked at what academics had to offer in English, decided it was not helpful, and wrote their own books, some of them quite good. Looking at this wider context could have showed that the dominance of the text-focused Prussian school was not inevitable, and how these ideas spread before academics were writing books in English on them. But people writing a PhD in the UK are under strong pressure to complete it in three or four years, so they have to be ruthless about defining a research topic and not wasting time on anything else.
If you just want three books on early Greek warfare, I would still recommend Hans van Wees’ Greek Warfare: Myths and Realities, Josho Brouwers’ Henchmen of Ares, and Xenophon’s Anabasis. But if you want to read more widely, I would recommend this. I hope that the wider world interested in early Greek warfare learns to talk about the Prussian, English, and California schools, just like the world interested in Greek catapults knows about the 19th century Prussian and French scholars who built the first reconstructions.
If you can’t obtain the published version, the original dissertation is available as Konijnendijk, Roel (2015) Ideals and Pragmatism in Greek Military Thought, 490-338 BC. Doctoral thesis, University College London. http://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/1470175/ Scholars who want something to cite should check the printed version!
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Edit 2021-09-25: Converted to blocks, added link to published article from Melammu conferences.
