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1000 results for “Not_AI”
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Wonder what process exists to ensure that ‘Secret recordings’ are not AI deepfake?
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/may/01/secret-recording-ben-roberts-smith-defamation-appeal-nine-ntwnfb
#AusLaw #QldLaw -
2 companies that operate ~¼ of #ABC #affiliates nationwide, #Nexstar Media Group & #Sinclair Broadcasting, also said they would not air #Kimmel’s show.
#Disney took a step last Dec to avoid a confrontation w/ #Trump by paying $15M to settle his *defamation* lawsuit against #ABCNews & #GeorgeStephanopoulos. It also made moves to dismantle some of its #DEI practices, including removing references in its annual report to its Reimagine Tomorrow program aimed at “amplifying underrepresented voices.”
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2 companies that operate ~¼ of #ABC #affiliates nationwide, #Nexstar Media Group & #Sinclair Broadcasting, also said they would not air #Kimmel’s show.
#Disney took a step last Dec to avoid a confrontation w/ #Trump by paying $15M to settle his *defamation* lawsuit against #ABCNews & #GeorgeStephanopoulos. It also made moves to dismantle some of its #DEI practices, including removing references in its annual report to its Reimagine Tomorrow program aimed at “amplifying underrepresented voices.”
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2 companies that operate ~¼ of #ABC #affiliates nationwide, #Nexstar Media Group & #Sinclair Broadcasting, also said they would not air #Kimmel’s show.
#Disney took a step last Dec to avoid a confrontation w/ #Trump by paying $15M to settle his *defamation* lawsuit against #ABCNews & #GeorgeStephanopoulos. It also made moves to dismantle some of its #DEI practices, including removing references in its annual report to its Reimagine Tomorrow program aimed at “amplifying underrepresented voices.”
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2 companies that operate ~¼ of #ABC #affiliates nationwide, #Nexstar Media Group & #Sinclair Broadcasting, also said they would not air #Kimmel’s show.
#Disney took a step last Dec to avoid a confrontation w/ #Trump by paying $15M to settle his *defamation* lawsuit against #ABCNews & #GeorgeStephanopoulos. It also made moves to dismantle some of its #DEI practices, including removing references in its annual report to its Reimagine Tomorrow program aimed at “amplifying underrepresented voices.”
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If it works, it's not AI: a commercial look at AI startups (1977)
https://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/80558
#HackerNews #AI #Startups #CommercialAI #TechHistory #Innovation #1977 #HackerNews
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Deadliest Catch star Todd Meadows’ mum begs channel not to air son’s death footage
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An initial inquiry by military police had found that #AysenurEygi, 26, who had arrived in the #WestBank a few days earlier as a #volunteer, was hit by fire “which was not aimed at her, but aimed at the key instigator of the *riot*,” the #Israel Defense Forces said. It said that the shooting took place during a “violent riot” where #Palestinians had thrown rocks at Israeli security forces.
#Blinken said that the shooting was “not acceptable.” -
Created with Human Intelligence
I’ve had a small badge in the footer of [my main] blog for quite some time now. It says “Written by Human, not AI” and points to the “No AI and ML use clause” page.
But I completely missed, probably because I don’t use Instagram, the hashtag #HiBadge2024 and the many creators and designers who offered their […]https://www.didiermary.fr/likes/created-with-human-intelligence/
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Ya think? 🤦🏻♂️
The immediate threat to humanity’s future is coming from humans (#SiliconValley #TechnoFascist oligarchs, #VC’s and their #BigTech injection / distribution partners) NOT #AI
"AI threatens humanity’s future, 61% of Americans say: Reuters/Ipsos poll” | Reuters
https://www.reuters.com/technology/ai-threatens-humanitys-future-61-americans-say-reutersipsos-2023-05-17/#ML #BigData
#BigTech #Surveillance
#Artificialintelligence
#MachineLearning
#SurveiilanceCapitalsim
#AIEthics #EthicalAI
#Privacy #Democracy
#OpenAI #ChatGPT
#ElonMusk #PeterThiel
#TechnoFascism -
EU says plan to ensure critical raw materials supply is not aimed at China https://www.euractiv.com/section/economy-jobs/news/eu-says-plan-to-ensure-critical-raw-materials-supply-is-not-aimed-at-china/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon #China #criticalrawmaterials #derisking #DGTrade
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EU says plan to ensure critical raw materials supply is not aimed at China https://www.euractiv.com/section/economy-jobs/news/eu-says-plan-to-ensure-critical-raw-materials-supply-is-not-aimed-at-china/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=mastodon #China #criticalrawmaterials #derisking #DGTrade
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Basecoating the Hummel in sandy yellow, blasting more from above and high angles to keep some shadows. Also, I was again not aiming for a flat coat but to keep a bit of the shadows given by the black primer. If it looks off tomorrow, I may touch it up, otherwise I'll start on brown/green for the camouflage.
Tracks, being bare steel, got painted dark grey. I'll do the ground-clean steel later, and after that the diluted dirts. Or that's the plan, anyway 😋
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Tawny Platis on 65 years of female robotic voices in movies and TV
Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-RjM9bWLdtQ
PS: This video is most definitely not AI-generated. Check out the rest of her channel!
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@billjanssen Agreed.
Unfortunately for me (and us at #PARC) we love to be in the scientific cracks and do inter-disciplinary research. So we are constantly fighting this war of oh this is not #HCI, not #AI enough, this sorta looks like #AIPlanning but not, this is more transportation than #AI.
Thankfully, the journals are more creative.
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No, it's not AI, just photos of the saiga antelope, a hold out with roots in the ice age, living in the plains of Siberia, and sadly endangered now. I love these faces!
#Photos #photography #cuteanimals #endangeredspecies #exoticanimals #saiga #antelope #animalpics -
No, it's not AI, just photos of the saiga antelope, a hold out with roots in the ice age, living in the plains of Siberia, and sadly endangered now. I love these faces!
#Photos #photography #cuteanimals #endangeredspecies #exoticanimals #saiga #antelope #animalpics -
No, it's not AI, just photos of the saiga antelope, a hold out with roots in the ice age, living in the plains of Siberia, and sadly endangered now. I love these faces!
#Photos #photography #cuteanimals #endangeredspecies #exoticanimals #saiga #antelope #animalpics -
No, it's not AI, just photos of the saiga antelope, a hold out with roots in the ice age, living in the plains of Siberia, and sadly endangered now. I love these faces!
#Photos #photography #cuteanimals #endangeredspecies #exoticanimals #saiga #antelope #animalpics -
Actual screen grabs from https://www.llmtrader.io
Not mockups. Not Figma. Real system interfaces, captured pre-tokenization.
llmtrader.io treats LLMs as infrastructure.
Models reason over market structure and risk inside constrained systems.Not “AI predicts price.”
LLMs assist with hypotheses, trade justification, and post-mortems.Built in public. Real artifacts only.
Next up: #hvmeAI
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WARNING!!! // NOT AI ART!!!
#lsd #dodrugs #rgbwut #notaiart #aimakemeimmortal #psychedelic #abstract #abstractart #glitchlab
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WARNING!!! // NOT AI ART!!!
#lsd #dodrugs #rgbwut #notaiart #aimakemeimmortal #psychedelic #abstract #abstractart #glitchlab
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Ya think? 🤦🏻♂️
The immediate threat to humanity’s future is coming from humans (#SiliconValley #TechnoFascist oligarchs, #VC’s and their #BigTech injection / distribution partners) NOT #AI
"AI threatens humanity’s future, 61% of Americans say: Reuters/Ipsos poll” | Reuters
https://www.reuters.com/technology/ai-threatens-humanitys-future-61-americans-say-reutersipsos-2023-05-17/#ML #BigData
#BigTech #Surveillance
#Artificialintelligence
#MachineLearning
#SurveiilanceCapitalsim
#AIEthics #EthicalAI
#Privacy #Democracy
#OpenAI #ChatGPT
#ElonMusk #PeterThiel
#TechnoFascism -
Ya think? 🤦🏻♂️
The immediate threat to humanity’s future is coming from humans (#SiliconValley #TechnoFascist oligarchs, #VC’s and their #BigTech injection / distribution partners) NOT #AI
"AI threatens humanity’s future, 61% of Americans say: Reuters/Ipsos poll” | Reuters
https://www.reuters.com/technology/ai-threatens-humanitys-future-61-americans-say-reutersipsos-2023-05-17/#ML #BigData
#BigTech #Surveillance
#Artificialintelligence
#MachineLearning
#SurveiilanceCapitalsim
#AIEthics #EthicalAI
#Privacy #Democracy
#OpenAI #ChatGPT
#ElonMusk #PeterThiel
#TechnoFascism -
Ya think? 🤦🏻♂️
The immediate threat to humanity’s future is coming from humans (#SiliconValley #TechnoFascist oligarchs, #VC’s and their #BigTech injection / distribution partners) NOT #AI
"AI threatens humanity’s future, 61% of Americans say: Reuters/Ipsos poll” | Reuters
https://www.reuters.com/technology/ai-threatens-humanitys-future-61-americans-say-reutersipsos-2023-05-17/#ML #BigData
#BigTech #Surveillance
#Artificialintelligence
#MachineLearning
#SurveiilanceCapitalsim
#AIEthics #EthicalAI
#Privacy #Democracy
#OpenAI #ChatGPT
#ElonMusk #PeterThiel
#TechnoFascism -
Yes, I know that that the new girl in 100 Girlfriends is Nano "Eiai", not "AI". But if you think I'm ruining this audible pun, you're sorely mistaken... #Crunchyroll #Bibury #100Girlfriends #100人の彼女 #Season1 #anime #harem #comedy #parody #TBGN #SSHITAnime #SaturdayMorning
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Who or what do we blindly trust with our #health? 🤔
White Coats or Black Boxes?
Some thoughts on AI, medicine, human judgment, and how #AI could help us think more instead of less.
Reflections from a conversation with #healthcare leaders on trust, transparency, and who really benefits from AI in #medicine
I grew up in a world where you didn't question your doctor. You didn't ask about lab results. You didn't research your medications. "Doctor's orders" was gospel.
My grandmother never saw her own test results. She wouldn't have known what to do with them anyway.
We like to think we've evolved past that. But have we? Or have we just traded blind trust in white coats for blind trust in #algorithms?
That's the question that kept surfacing in my head after this Expert Panel Discussion I hosted with Sean Martin, CISSP and an extraordinary group of people:
Dr. Robert Pearl, M.D. (former CEO, The Permanente Medical Group, Inc.)
Robert Havasy (HIMSS)
John Sapp Jr (Texas Mutual Insurance Company)
Jim St. Clair (Altarum)
Robert Booker (HITRUST)
We gathered to discuss AI in healthcare. What emerged was something deeper: a reckoning with how we've always delegated medical decisions—and whether AI might actually force us to become smarter, more analytical, more inquisitive about our own health.
Here's my theory: AI doesn't have to make us dumber. It could make us think more, not less. But only if we choose to engage. Only if we demand transparency. Only if we resist trading one form of blind trust for another.
400,000 people die annually from misdiagnoses in America. That's not AI failure—that's human failure we've learned to accept.
The question isn't whether AI will transform healthcare. It already is.
The question is: Will we finally start asking questions?
About our doctors AND our algorithms?
Then tell me—what kind of trust are we building? Who benefits? Who bears the risk?
Let's keep exploring what it means to be human in this Hybrid Analog Digital Society.
Comment, share, and be merry! 🙂
Studio C60 / ITSPmagazine
#HealthcareAI #MedicalEthics #DigitalHealth #technology #cybersecurity #PatientEmpowerment #HealthTech #CriticalThinking #podcast
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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.