One of the common misperceptions about ancient armies was that ancient soldiers were all Super Buff and as a result, ancient military equipment was very heavy.

So how heavy was ancient military kit (not as heavy as you think!) - a thread! 1/ We need to make a key distinction here right at the start between a *combat* load (the weight of the equipment you'd carry into to a fight) and a *marching* load that a soldier would carry on the march.

Obviously, the latter is heavier, including lots of supplies and such. 2/

One thing I think is important about this sustained attack - Vance is *still* tweeting about it - on Haitians in Ohio, is that it puts the lie to everything a certain sort of immigration restrictionist said they wanted.

"Oh, we just want them to come here legally"

They did!! 1/ These folks in Springfield *are* here legally, under Temporary Protected Status.

"Oh, but they need to be working, not leeching off of social services."

They are! Local business leaders say they work harder than many long-time residents! 2/

I want to talk a bit about how historians go about understanding historical cultures and worldviews.

History, after all, is more than just dates and names, more than who did what to who when.

A good historian can, to a degree, inhabit the worldview of their subjects. But how?1/ The danger, of course, is importing our assumptions and values without realizing when trying to understand our historical subjects and what they might have been thinking.

This mistake is a pervasive problem in older (pre-1920s or so) scholarship and some modern enthusiasts. 2/

Sigh.

Ok, so for one, it is: ἢ τὰν ἢ ἐπὶ τᾶς
(Plut. Mor. 241f)*
"With this or on this."
Because Plutarch wrote in Greek and not in Latin.

His Latin isn't even a precise translation, as Plutarch leaves out the world shield (though that is the sense). 1/ Funnily enough, a Latin author - Valerius Maximus (first cent. AD) - does mention this saying, but phrases it differently, ""monebantur ut aut vivi cum armis in conspectum earum venirent aut mortui in armis referrentur." (Val. Max. 2.7e.2) 2/

So @_Dragases_ has provided some good additions to this list (I'll link his thread at the end) but I wanted to as well.

The issue with this list is that it is all emperors and generals - you will come away knowing a lot of events, but little of Roman society or culture. 1/

https://twitter.com/mcgillmd921/status/1824195420593197454

First off, being a 'Romanophile' is not the right way to approach any sort of history.

As I've said before, I find the Romans endearing, but as a student or scholar of Roman history, your goal has to be to understand them.

Sometimes you will like what you see, sometimes not! 2/

Worldbuilding/history chatter: the Nights Watch from ASoIaF/GoT/HotD don't actually make a lot of sense.

The basic problem here isn't fantasy at all: how to keep a permanent security presence on a distant and potentially inhospitable border is an old problem. 1/ And because it is an old problem that recurs a lot, there are historical patterns for how it is solved.

The main problem is not how to generate the force, so much as how to keep it on the frontier (rather than either dissolving into the peasantry or marching on the capital). 2/

Been playing a bit of Total War: Pharaoh Dynasties, which is basically Total War: Late Bronze Age, covering the Aegean, Anatolia, the Levant, Egypt and Mesopotamia.

It's particularly interesting to see the fudges they have to make to fit bronze age warfare into total war. 1/ Because there are a lot of fudges here, for instance taking very rare, probably royal heavy armor (like the Dendra panoply) and imagining whole units of it, or pulling Assyrian cavalry forward a few centuries to fit into the game's time frame. 2/

One key that differentiates real historical inquiry from more superficial engagement with the past is learning not merely what was in the past but how we know.

Getting to know the sources and their blindspots.

So let's talk about the sources for the Macedonian Sarisa phalanx!1/

https://twitter.com/BretDevereaux/status/1817957987283062828

And I won't bury the lede here: the problem with our sources here is that while most folks are really interested in the phalanx of Philip II and Alexander III ('the Great'), our sources mostly didn't see that phalanx.

They mostly saw the Hellenistic phalanx. 2/

These sorts of accounts are everywhere these days, but what is shocking to me is not just the ideological bent they have, but how poor their grasp of the ancient world is.

They're selling an antiquity riddled with errors.

So, a non-exhaustive list of errors in this thread: 1/ Let's start with chronology: 500 years? No.

Philip II can introduce the Macedonian phalanx no earlier than the start of his reign in 359, the Romans stomp all over it from 200 to 168 and it is basically gone by c. 50 BC.

300 != 500. 2/

There are a lot of problems with this. but I want to highlight the claim that this system lasted "almost 1,000 years" which speaks to how the Middle Ages are extended & essentialized.

The core features of this system emerge in the 8th/ 9th cent. and are mostly gone by the 16th.

https://twitter.com/thinkingwest/status/1810654053895979278

More broadly over course, this simplistic vision of 'feudalism' would be insufficient for even an introductory undergraduate survey, equating vassalage (relations between aristocrats) with manorialism (the economic system involving peasants).

Increasingly feeling like I need to do a Roman Britain version of the 'Why was Roman Egypt such a strange province?' because of how badly Roman Britain distorts the popular understanding of the Roman Empire, but also doing it honestly is gonna upset a bunch of British folks. Roman Britain is, of course, conquered by the Romans relatively late. It was also both 1) less urbanized when they took and 2) remains less urbanized than the rest of the empire. It was also pretty clearly poor by Romans standards.

Ptolemies stop creating military units with ethnic signifiers that don't actually signify either ethnic recruitment or culture-specific tactics or equipment challenge. A: "Ah yes, here is the Hipparchy of the Thessalians."
B: "Ah, so it is made up of Thessalians?"
A: "No. This dude's from Thrace!"
Thracian Guy: ::thick accent:: Χαιρε!
B: "Oh, so they fight like Thessalians?"
A: "Eh, probably not. They're just cavalry."
...sigh.

You know, I point to some good refutations of Carnage and Culture (2001) in this thread, but you know, let's go for it.

Here is a not-even-close-to-exhaustive list of serious defects w/ VDH's famous(ly damaging) book, which you shouldn't read (both this thread and the book). 1/

https://twitter.com/BretDevereaux/status/1803188148752523267

1) VDH asserts that the Greek way of war, fighting as close-order infantry with a relatively high degree of discipline, is unique to Greece and thus the West.

Both claims are easily refuted. For the first, the Greeks don't even have a monopoly on heavy infantry *in Europe.* 2/

Was playing a bit of Monster Hunter (Rise, in this case) and I remain astounded that - with how many games struggle to make contact weapons interesting - Monster Hunter has a dozen really distinct, interesting and fun to use weapons (and both the lance and gunlance!) I think my appreciation for what they've done was honestly heightened by playing Dragon's Dogma II - many of the classes/weapons in DD2 feel like hollow imitations of their matching types in MH, with similar movesets, but not quite as satisfying.

I can't help but feel like, at the root of most of our contemporary political problems, is a real loss of faith in our institutions: in experts, in courts, in government , etc. which isn't remotely warranted.

Our institutions are mostly good, actually. 1/ Don't get me wrong, our leaders make mistakes and the experts do get things wrong, albeit at a much lower rate than rando non-experts.

By way of example, the folks at the CDC may have mistepped on masks or school closures, but at no point did they tell you to ingest bleach. 2/

If we're talking history jobs, what you actually need to know is this:
- In 2008, hiring for history profs dropped by nearly half and never recovered.
- As a result, history departments are shrinking and history education in the USA suffers. 1/ - This is a result of political choices to defund history and the humanities generally, as we dis-invest from our universities and universities shift funds to administration, student life and STEM.
- History remains popular with students, but it is increasingly less available. 2/

I haven't read the book in question, but I think presenting, "Japan should have just built 16 more carriers" as a serious argument, by either Goldman or VDH, should just immediately discredit the speaker from being taken seriously on modern conflict. 1/

https://twitter.com/davidpgoldman/status/1790380771829563651

What would they even be made out of, twine? Not steel!

The Japanese steel industry in the 1930s and into the war did not have vast (or any) slack capacity!

Meanwhile, from 1920 to war's end, Japan commissioned just five battleships, with a total displacement of 245,000 tons.2/

Alright, there's not enough ancient warfare on my feed, so let's fix that.

Let's talk about how you raise a 'barbarian' army in places like pre-Roman Gaul and Spain!

After all, these non-state societies punched well above their weight in the 3rd and 2nd centuries BC! 1/ Most students pretty intuitively grasp how state societies raise armies, because we live in state societies, so we're familiar with mass conscription or paid professional soldiers as concepts.

But what if you don't have a centralized state in the first place? 2/

Now to make the other half of my Twitter angry, these campus protest crackdowns, often effectively preemptive, seem wrong and counterproductive.

In particular, I'm not seeing a lot of effort by many of these universities to show that the protests were destructive or threatening.

https://twitter.com/PetreRaleigh/status/1783520674205544638

Many of these are private universities, so declaring student-protestors are trespassing and kicking them off campus is legal, I guess, but pretty damn inconsistent with state university missions for things like free debate and open inquiry.

One observation from conferences (this latest SMH and others) is that if I compiled a petition signed by every person who tells me it is 'absurd' or 'inexplicable' or 'shameful' that I don't have a job yet, I could assemble a pretty impressive list. To my non-academic followers: no, it would not help. The median professor is quite assured of their ability to spot promising candidates (despite evidence to the contrary) and proud of it - more likely to be offended than impressed by the suggestion to 'let the field decide.'

Ok, this one is just going to break me if I don't tweet about it.

English 'disciple' comes from Latin 'discipulus' which means...wait for it...'learner.'

The English word is a direct transliteration from the very literal Latin translation. It means 'learners.'

https://twitter.com/naomirwolf/status/1780387005110555087

The etymology of discipulus is actually a bit unclear; older works assume it is disco ('to learn') + a diminutive root of puer ('boy') to mean 'schoolboy, learner.'

More recent work suggests older, dis+capio, a 'taker away' in the sense of 'the key takeaway is'...so 'learner.'