‘Roman way of war' in the title of this chapter is a variant of ‘Western way of war', the theory first articulated by Victor Davis Hanson that has been the subject of much critique, and which I do not accept.1

In any case, it is questionable how much a ‘Roman way of war' might reflect something intrinsic to its culture or a Roman response to universal features of war. Even in reference to something as basic as weaponry, Rome's army changed dramatically over time.

Until the middle of the twentieth century scholars viewed the Roman army as not especially violent, but rather characterised by restraint. In a classic treatment, Theodor Mommsen lauded Roman discipline but said nothing about it being cruel or brutal.^[464] In 1914, Tenney Frank proposed that the Romans went to war reluctantly, the so-called ‘defensive imperialism' theory.^[465] At the beginning of World War II, H. H. Scullard, reviewing a privately published dissertation on Roman atrocities, significantly the first monograph written on the subject, concluded that ‘Roman military methods... judged by the standard of modern (or rather, surely, compara­tively modern) warfare, they were singularly cruel, but judged by contem­porary war usages they were surprisingly humane'.^[466]

The publication of William V. Harris's War and Imperialism in Republican Rome in 1979 dramatically changed the consensus on the nature of Roman warfare, and this work remains influential half a century later. 6 Harris posited a warlike Roman society, as reflected in its ideology and its institutions, and argues that this bellicose culture drove an above-average level of military violence and a belligerent imperialism.

In 2006 Arthur Eckstein's Mediterranean Anarchy, Interstate War, and the Rise of Rome challenged this view.^[470] While not denying Rome was warlike, Eckstein sees it embedded in a Mediterranean world of other equally mili­taristic states. In this perspective the Roman Empire was the result of rational decision making by its leaders, not of an innately martial culture. This nuanced revival of the ‘defensive imperialism' model has been making inroads, but there is no consensus on what might be termed the ‘culturalist- realist' debate among Roman historians.