theme
The classical inquiry into the virtues distinctive to a soldier and a commander — courage, discipline, endurance, judgement under fire — and into the polity that produces them.
theme
Xenophon's central conviction that a commander leads by being what he asks of others — sharing the hardship, showing the courage, modelling the discipline — so that authority rests on demonstrated excellence rather than on rank or command.
theme
Xenophon's conviction that self-mastery — enkrateia, the control of one's own appetites, fear and impulse — is the foundation of every other virtue and the precondition of leading or governing anything beyond oneself.
theme
The hard discipline of holding a body of men together through disaster and the long way home — the theme of the Anabasis, where leadership is measured not by victory but by bringing the survivors out alive.
theme
The structural fault at the heart of Roman politics — an army strong enough to defend the empire was always strong enough to choose its rulers. From the Marian reforms to the third-century crisis, the relation between soldiers and sovereignty is the thread the platform reads through the whole imperial arc.
philosopher
Athenian soldier, historian and student of Socrates — author of the Anabasis, the Hellenica, the Cyropaedia and the Socratic works that sit alongside Plato's as our second main witness to Socrates.
philosopher
The one-eyed marshal who came closest of all the Successors to reuniting Alexander's empire — the most formidable of the Diadochi, whose bid for the whole was broken by a coalition of his rivals at the decisive battle of Ipsus.
philosopher
The Greek historian, philosopher and Roman governor of the second century CE whose Anabasis is the best surviving history of Alexander — and who preserved the teaching of the Stoic Epictetus for posterity. A bridge between Greek learning and Roman power.
philosopher
The ablest Spartan commander of the Peloponnesian War's first decade — bold, eloquent and humane where Sparta was usually slow and grim — who carried the war into Athens' northern empire and fell winning his greatest victory at Amphipolis.
philosopher
The dazzling, mercurial son of Antigonus — brilliant general, master of siege warfare, and study in the instability of fortune, whose spectacular rises and falls made him the Hellenistic age's great example of greatness without steadiness.
philosopher
The Theban general and statesman who broke the myth of Spartan invincibility at Leuctra through tactical genius — the military innovator whose methods Philip of Macedon learned and passed to Alexander, and whom antiquity ranked among its greatest men.
philosopher
The king who forged the army and the kingdom that Alexander would use to conquer the world — the military innovator and patient statesman who unified Macedon, mastered Greece, and planned the invasion of Persia he did not live to lead.
philosopher
The warrior-pharaoh who built the Egyptian empire to its greatest extent — a brilliant general of some seventeen campaigns whose victory at Megiddo and conquests in Syria and Nubia made New Kingdom Egypt the dominant power of the Near East.
book
Xenophon's first-person account of the March of the Ten Thousand — a Greek mercenary army's failed bid to put a pretender on the Persian throne and its long fighting retreat — and antiquity's most revealing inside view of the Achaemenid empire's interior, roads and limits.
book
Xenophon's history of Greek affairs from 411 BCE, taking up Thucydides' unfinished narrative and carrying it through the fall of Athens, the Spartan hegemony and its collapse — a participant's history of the Greek world's long unravelling.
book
Xenophon's manual for the Athenian cavalry commander — a practical treatise on the duties of the hipparch that doubles as a compact study of leadership, drawn from his own experience of command and his lifelong horsemanship.
book
Arrian's history of Alexander's campaigns — the best and most reliable surviving account, written in the second century CE on the lost memoirs of Alexander's own officers Ptolemy and Aristobulus, and the foundation of the sober historical Alexander.
theme
The decisive edge that new weapons, formations and methods of war confer — the Macedonian phalanx and combined-arms army that Philip forged and Alexander wielded, and the long contest of military adaptation it set in motion.
theme
How states lose wars they could have won — overreach, the abandonment of a sound strategy, the triumph of wishful thinking over hard calculation — read through the Athenian catastrophe in Sicily and the collapse of Periclean grand strategy.
comparison
Two soldier-authors writing their own campaigns in spare third- and first-person prose — Xenophon's march of survival and Caesar's war of conquest — and two enduring models of the general who is also the historian of his own command.
comparison
The two greatest Romans of their generation, allies turned rivals, whose civil war destroyed the Republic — the audacious populist against the establishment's golden general, and the contest that decided Rome's fate.
essay
An interpretive reading of the comparison of Alexander and Caesar — two conquerors of genius, the ambition each embodied, and the decisive difference between conquering a foreign empire and mastering one's own state.
essay
An interpretive reading of how the historical Alexander reaches us through Arrian — his source-criticism, his reliance on the eyewitness memoirs of Ptolemy and Aristobulus, and the wider problem of the Alexander tradition.
essay
An interpretive reading of Brasidas as a model of military and political leadership in the Peloponnesian War — energy, persuasion, good faith, and the personal example that detached Athens' allies and won the north.
essay
An interpretive reading of the link Xenophon draws between military command and self-command — enkrateia as the foundation of leadership under fire, drawn from the Anabasis and the Cyropaedia.
essay
An interpretive reading of how Philip II created the conditions of Alexander's success — the army, the unified kingdom, the mastery of Greece, and the Persian war already planned — and what the father-son partnership reveals.
essay
An interpretive reading of the Anabasis as the archetypal study of leadership under maximum adversity — discipline, morale, supply, the management of fear, and the leader who shares the hardship he commands.
essay
An interpretive reading of the causes of Alexander's success — the inherited army, his generalship and personal leadership, his speed and daring, and the boundless ambition that drove him to the edge of the known world.