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"Online Rent-a-Sage" Bret Devereaux
@BretDevereaux
Ancient & military historian specializing in the Roman economy and military. PhD @UNChistory. More impressive credential is that I have beaten Dark Souls.
May 28 • 13 tweets • 3 min read
A number of responses here are shocked, shocked! that I could say that Alexander was only great at killing, but if you challenge them to say what else he was great at...they mostly sputter.

So was Alexander great at things other than warfare and killing? 1/ Was he a great judge of people? Not really.

The best of his companions - Antipater, Parmenio, Eumenes, Antigonus, Craterus, Cleitus - were all handpicked...by Philip II, Alexander's father.

Alexander handpicked Harpalus, who stole the treasury, *twice.* 2/
May 23 • 25 tweets • 5 min read
So this is going to go over RHG's head, but it's a useful point to make: how does a classicist go about digging deep what a word *means* in a given context, or what it might mean? Even to dispute a dictionary?

It turns out that we have an established method for this! 1/ You do, of course, at a minimum, have to read the language in question, so step 1 - of which RHG appears incapable or unwilling - is to spend some years learning the language in question (Greek or Latin).

Because this is a task you can only do in the original text. 2/
May 23 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
There is an irony that I get accused of being 'woke' for defending the academic classics when the reason I am defending the academic classics is that I am conservative and I think the western tradition of wide-ranging open inquiry into the past is worth conserving. I thought it was conservative to insist that expertise was important and people should do things like learn old, dead languages.

Apparently learning ancient and/or dead languages and becoming proficient with classical philology is now woke.
Feb 19 • 25 tweets • 5 min read
Since we're talking about the scale of Spartan power, I think it is worth putting the scale of Sparta's reach in perspective.

Sparta, after all, was never a world power at all. It was never even the strongest state in the Mediterranean - more of a middling regional power. 1/ The affairs of mainland Greece naturally loom large for our sources who lived there, just as one imagines a history of the world written from Nigeria (as a regional power) would feature a somewhat different roster of major players than one written in D.C., Brussels or Beijing. 2/
Feb 18 • 17 tweets • 3 min read
There's a lot here that is off but I want to focus on the specific claim that 'Sparta was the preeminent power in Greece for 200 years' which is wrong in the amateurish 'only knows the popular things about history' kind of way I've come to expect from this fellow.

A 🧵 1/ This sort of chronological slippage in discussing Sparta is common - our sources encourage it because the Spartans themselves encouraged it, which is why historians read our sources critically, comparing them with other sources of evidence, like archaeology or other reports. 2/
Aug 5, 2025 • 13 tweets • 3 min read
This notion -the Romans had tiers of citizenship based on ethnicity- keeps coming up. I have no idea where from, but it is mostly wrong before 87 BC; entirely wrong afterwards.

Citizenship attached fully regardless of origin; Romans could be snobby bigots but their law was not. Prior to the Social War (91-87) the Romans did have a category of citizenship sine suffragio ('without votes') which had all the legal rights of citizenship except voting and office holding, usually extended to allied communities in Italy with their own local officials. 2/
Aug 4, 2025 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
This is simply and obviously wrong in easily demonstrable ways, from the expansiveness of Roman citizenship to the incorporation of Persian elites under Alexander and the Seleucids (however poorly) to obvious things like the numbers of Scots in key posts in the British Empire. One thing that white nationalists all seem to share is an absolutely astoundingly terrible grasp of history, unable to imagine the - again, quite obvious - fact that people in the past defined racial & ethnic boundaries differently than we do and that those boundaries were fluid.
Jul 28, 2025 • 10 tweets • 2 min read
So as @WalterScheidel himself has already pointed out, the figures are entirely hallucinated. They're just made up.

But also anyone even remotely familiar with the evidence would know that the evidence doesn't exist to even make such estimates. 1/ (Grok has also, unsurprisingly, parroted Musk's own catastrophic misunderstanding of the nature and purpose of Augustus' moral legislation - which was aimed at family's in Rome's tiny sub-2% elite, not at general population.

No surprise there.) 2/
Jul 18, 2025 • 8 tweets • 2 min read
This is correct. Women worked in nearly all households in nearly all periods of human history; sometimes that labor was gendered, frequently not.

The 1950s ideal household is an accident of the industrial revolution allowing regular people to live like rich people had. We're not quite to discussing labor in peasant households in my on-going series of pre-modern peasant lifestyles (keeping in mind peasants made up 90+% of the population pre-1750) but functionally all women worked, beginning very young and essentially never 'retiring.'
Jun 29, 2025 • 19 tweets • 4 min read
Worth answering 'on main' & cross-posting from The Good Place.

Victor Davis Hanson's work has been reappraised in 2 ways: the quality of his work substantially changed post-1998, but also the arguments of his early work experienced pushback, which he has largely not answered. 1/ Image Let's start with the early works, by which we mostly mean Warfare and Agriculture (1983; rev. 1998), Western Way of War (1989) and The Other Greeks (1995).

These, especially WWoW, made substantial impacts when they first appeared, set the 'orthodoxy' on hoplites in the 90s. 2/
Jun 23, 2025 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Seems bad!

For reference, my understanding is that the Iranian 'highly enriched' Uranium is about 60% u-235.

Little Boy (the Hiroshima bomb) used 64kg of 80% enriched uranium.

Modern 'weapons grade,' enrichment is generally about 90% u-235. ('Enrichment' here is sorting out fissile u-235 (about 0.7% of naturally occurring uranium) from stable u-238 (the other ~99.3%)).

So it sure seems like if you were going to attempt a first-strike against a uranium enrichment program, you'd want to know where the uranium was.
Jun 11, 2025 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
I disagree - there were 11 US Army colonels from Virginia in 1861 and only one of them betrayed his oath to the United States - but I wonder if @MattWalshBlog would be willing to extend his logic to someone in LA who shoots ICE agents to 'stand beside' his community in battle? Image To be clear:
1) As far as I know, no one in LA has tried to shoot at ICE - they're protestors, not rebels, no matter what the administration says and
2) No one should start shooting at ICE, obviously.

But I do want to highlight the hypocrisy here of who 'gets' to rebel.
Apr 9, 2025 • 6 tweets • 1 min read
There's an episode in Plutarch during the dictatorship of Julius Caesar, where Marcus Antonius (Antony) at a major Roman festival (the Lupercalia) offers Caesar a crown.

But the crowd isn't buying it: the cheer when Caesar refuses the crown. 1/ And Plutarch reports there was a bit of a pantomime, where Antony would offer the crown and the crowd would sulk, only the sycophants would cheer.

And then Caesar would refuse it, and the crowd would cheer loudly.

And again: offer and silence; refusal and cheers. 2/
Mar 16, 2025 • 9 tweets • 3 min read
It's astounding to watch him bluster because of how clear it is that he's emoting with missiles rather than engaging in strategy.

'I'm angry, so I'm gonna toss $2m missiles into $500 hovels until you stop" without any sense of if that will actually make someone stop. 1/ Now it is fair to also fault Biden for engaging in a water-treading 'solution' of escorts and smaller-scale strikes against missile sites, but Hegseth is running blindly into the very constraints that produced that approach.

It is the blindness that is remarkable.
2/
Feb 28, 2025 • 5 tweets • 1 min read
One of the things that made the Roman Republic's alliance system in Italy - upon which was built the lion's share of Rome's victories - so successful was that the Romans handled the system tactfully.

Part of the 'deal' of the system was 'we won't humiliate you.' 1/ The process of *becoming* a Roman 'ally' in the moment of conquest or submission, might involve humiliation (and a lot of violence), but after that, you were 'in the club' and Rome would tolerate no violence against you or humiliation of you. 2/
Feb 23, 2025 • 20 tweets • 4 min read
Some people seem a bit confused so let's talk: what Great Man Theory is, why I think Silver is wandering into it and why it doesn't work.

The key thing here is fundamentally it is two propositions that come as a 'package deal' - reject either and it isn't Great Man Theory. 1/ When folks react with confusion at the rejection of Great Man Theory by historians, it is generally because they think it is just the first proposition, which we might put as, "historical events are often shaped by the decisions of key, powerful leaders." 2/
Feb 21, 2025 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
Ah, great man theory.

There's a reason most remotely competent historians abandon this model of reasoning by the end of their first year of graduate study. Certainly history is sometimes influenced dramatically by highly capable people. Of course, hereditary monarchy being what it is, just as often key decisions are made by rulers who aren't very capable at all.

See, for instance, the July Crisis.
Jan 7, 2025 • 17 tweets • 4 min read
This was in response to the president-elect saying the use of military force to seize Panama or Greenland was on the table.

So let's talk briefly about why geopolitics and military force are not, in fact, analogous to poker. 1/ The first thing to understand is that war for modern states is always a net loss; *any* use of military force is losing, because warfare is so catastrophically expensive that no state can hope to gain enough to offset its costs.

So you are gambling over a *negative* pot. 2/
Dec 16, 2024 • 13 tweets • 3 min read
I'm sympathetic to arguments that academics need to do better communicating with the public, but @wesyang is not @DrAllyLouks ' colleague and universities are predicated on the reasonable notion that only those at the edge of human knowledge are qualified to assess work there. 1/ That's not a slight at @wesyang but merely a true thing. No one does everything.

I'm not qualified to assess someone's physics research - either to know if it is well done or to know if it advances the field.

Which is why we leave that decision to folks in the field! 2/
Dec 14, 2024 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
This week on the blog: closing thoughts on Gladiator II and how it treats the city of Rome, gladiators and the Severan dynasty.

In particular, we look at why the real, historical Caracalla is history's crushing rebuttal to this film's own themes.

acoup.blog/2024/12/13/col… In any case, the movie isn't *good* but what is surprising is that it mangles the Severans so badly that it doesn't seem to realize that the real Caracalla *is* the man-of-violence the film thinks Rome needs, but that actually turned out really badly in the event.
Nov 18, 2024 • 5 tweets • 2 min read
Kinda odd to ask a question and turn off replies, sort of defeats the purpose.

But its gone very badly and quite obviously so. As a move to weaken or deter Israel, a pretty miserable and counter-productive failure that got more Yemenis and Palestinians killed on the net. 1/ Red Sea shipping remains down by about 50%, which hasn't meaningfully deterred Israel, but did contribute (with a whole bunch of other things) to a political climate in which you have an incoming administration whose position is essentially a green-light for Gaza annexations. 2/