It is certainly no accident that literature and war were closely bound in Western culture right from the outset. The Iliad (c. eighth century BC) first forged this very strong bond that was destined not only to make war a motif or theme within texts, but as we will see below, also gave knowledge about war its own textual and rhetorical tradition. The tradi-tion of the art of war was in fact a literary tradition: the transmission of knowledge concerning all as-pects of war was entrusted to writing and, as such, did not necessarily reflect or attempt to reproduce the reality of the battlefield. For this reason, an anal-ysis of thinking on war as an ethical and technical phenomenon must constantly be combined with an assessment of the literary nature of its transmis-sion, not matter how unusual that may seem today. We can look at war, and at the knowledge which it generates, as a balance between theory and practice, i.e. between a set of abstract rules and technical lo-gistic applications, but also between an eternally valid historical exemplum, which is repeated im-mutably and cyclically, and a unique unrepeatable event to which tradition assigned the name fortuna, almost as if the disturbing elements of the unfore-seen, the unrepeatable and what was unfolding could be written off through this definition.1 Al-though ancient historiographers, from Thucydides to Polybius, Caesar and Ammianus Marcellinus, at times described the gap between the capacity to foresee – informed by a practical knowledge of the facts of war (techne / ars) – and the eruption of the unforeseen (tyche / casus),2 the Renaissance was un-doubtedly the age in which this conceptual tension was developed so fully as to become emblematic of it. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that the ‘art of war’ in the strict sense of the term, i.e. the lit-erary genre of the military treatise, fully developed

in this period and not earlier. Over and above the theoretical aspects of the issue, which we have just outlined, it must be said that a vast output of mili-tary treatises make even more explicit a widespread interest in matters of war already found in other genres, especially epic chivalric poetry.3 In a major study, Frédérique Verrier reconstructs the history of ‘military humanism’, seen as a counter-tendency or alternative system of values to the previously dominant chivalric code, by then the long-standing legacy of a mediaeval culture no longer felt to be relevant. The new configuration of military activity had a prominent role in popularising the cult of Classical Antiquity. Ancient generals became eth-ical and strategic models almost to be used to resist material-type changes – for example, the introduc-tion of gunpowder and firearms – which, wholly in keeping with the development of technical and scientific thought, were transforming the appear-ance and the structure of battles, albeit in reality much slower than has often been claimed. As Ver-rier points out, the emphasis on human factors in relation to technical factors and the changed so-cial standing of the soldier, no longer a descendant from noble houses but still equally valorous, high-lighted the exemplary dialectic of virtù and fortuna, widely found not only in chivalric poetry, but also in historiography, biography, correspondences and, of course, military treatises.4 Humanism perme-ated Italian military culture and the ancient models were used as an arm against codes of conduct fash-ionable in the Middle Ages and embodied by the high-ranking knight, who was now contrasted by the figure of the soldier. This was the result of a process of intellectualisation which had taken place through the recourse to exempla provided by the Classical texts. Moreover, unlike the other con-

. Machines of warfare, in Vitruvius, Architettura, edited by Giovanni Giocondo, Venice 1511, Book x, fols 107v-108r(Vicenza, Biblioteca cisa Andrea Palladio)

flect on war in the West, but also Vitruvius (first century BC) the author of De architectura. Book x of this a remarkably popular work in the Renaissance is dedicated to the problems of military mechanics and Daniele Barbaro’s Italian translation and com-mentary of the treatise appeared in 1556 with il-lustrations by Palladio. There are all sorts of other writers, mainly only known to the specialist today, who were also very popular in the Middle Ages and Renaissance, such as Onasander (first century AD), the author of Strategikos, in which he provides a de-scription of the physical and ethical qualities of an ideal commander, and Polyaenus (second century AD). Both authors were translated into the vernac-ular in Venice and published by Giolito.8 A number of works on polemology were also handed down and they undoubtedly contributed to a systematic approach to knowledge about war, which was only formalised later. If we wish to retrace the line of ancient authors on warfare, we would obviously have to start from the man who, for us, was the first, or one of the first, in the series, Aelian (Aeneas Tacticus, fourth century BC). All that has survived of his vast output is what traditionally has argu-ably wrongly been called Poliorketika, which does not actually deal with poliorketika, i.e. siegecraft, but ways of resisting a siege inside a city.9 Around the same time Xenophon wrote Hipparchikos (‘The Cavalry General’), which contains instructions for generals on various aspects of leading an army. Aelian and Xenophon lived in a cultural climate dominated by the Sophists, who wished to organise knowledge in an encyclopaedic approach begin-ning from a precise presupposition: every form of knowledge and every art, like every virtue, can be acquired through study and practice, and this was even true of valour and courage, the primary

temporary Romance literatures, mediaeval Italian poetry did not produce chivalric poems.5 In fact war was only adopted as a literary theme from Hu-manism onwards, when the soldier became a man of letters, and arms were combined in a proverbial and inseparable combination with letters due to the gradual adoption of ancient literary models. Pallad-io’s illustrations of Caesar and Polybius, to which this book is devoted, must be seen in the context of Renaissance Humanism and the rediscovery of the ancients but also of the individual. As Guido Beltramini comments, Palladio’s illustrations viv-idly narrate the battles, making them dramatic and theatrical (this was arguably through the influence of Giangiorgio Trissino who, in L’Italia liberata da’ Goti, made ‘visible’ some of Aelian’s military pre-cepts), thus freeing the illustration from the arid pen work which was a constant feature in diagrams included in the sixteenth-century works on the art of war.6

But who were the authors and which ancient texts were most popular and ‘rewritten’ in Renaissance works on the art of war? Before answering this question, we must clear up a possible misunder-standing. Although in Antiquity war provided an inexhaustible source of subject matter for literature right from Homer, we cannot really speak of the ‘art of war’ as a literary genre for Greek and Roman Antiquity, even though historical studies created a corpus of military writers or tacticians a posteriori, presenting them as part of a consolidated unitary tradition. As Giusto Traina points out, often au-thors who could hardly exactly be called tacticians exercised a great influence on the construction of the Western art of war.7 We thus have the ancient historiographers, Thucydides, Polybius or Caesar, without whose works it would be impossible to re-

how paradoxical it may seem – no institution de-voted to the professional training of generals, who may have resorted to some ‘teach yourself ’ writings which, according to Brian Campbell, given their eminently literary nature, could hardly have been taken seriously as an effective aid for battles or in preparing for them.15 In fact it is difficult to speak of a ‘Roman art of war’, since it was constructed a posteriori by a tradition which saw Roman generals and their glorious military campaigns as the model for all future wars. On one hand, the literature of the Roman de re militari, not only in its surviving form but even as documented through references to lost works, is surprisingly tenuous. In six centuries of history we can only find five works. And this is solely thanks to Vegetius, who cites them as sources. Moreover, these few works do not even seem to be related to each other and belong to various fields, from military law to encyclopaedism, castrameta-tion and military mechanics.16 On the other hand, the main contributions to the creation of a Roman model of war came from historians, especially Poly-bius, Caesar and Livy. Ancient military knowledge thus developed in close correlation to historical or historiographic enquiry, from which the ‘art of war’ drew its greatest strength: the descriptions of ex-empla, i.e. battles of the past, were the best source of knowledge to be referred to when addressing the subject of contemporary wars. The genre thus de-veloped in the age of the Renaissance on the basis of this elementary method, which brings together, on one hand, the relationship with the ancient world and history and, on the other, also the humanistic, literary and, in a certain sense, anti-technical aspect. But only apparently elementary, this method actu-ally conceals a great cultural complexity. Roman history was taken as a model but what is empha-

qualities of the warrior.10 Although at times called into question and even criticised by contemporary historians and philosophers, this vision continued to influence the process of transmitting knowledge about war in subsequent conceptual developments. In fact, the Sophists provided a theoretical foun-dation for war as techne, which, as such, should be taught and learned.11 But then with the rise in the Hellenistic age of what today we might call a more scientific approach, the military arts, on the strength of this foundation, became a field of ex-ploration useful for mathematical and mechanical research. Indeed some scientists of the age devoted themselves to these subjects, e.g. Philo of Byzan-tium (third century BC), Athenaeus Mechanicus (possibly first century BC) and, especially, Hero of Alexandria, who lived in the first century AD and was a leading figure in Hellenistic science. His books include Belopooika and Cheirobalistra, which provide detailed descriptions of some catapulting machines.12 Some of Hero’s works, especially Pneu-matike, were taken up again at the end of the 16th century, and influenced the hydraulic science of the time through applications in the construction and installations of gardens.13 The same tradition was referred to by an author of who lived in the second century BC: Apollodorus of Damascus, who de-voted his work on siegecraft (Poliorketika) to the Emperor Hadrian. The text was handed down in the same corpus which included writings by Ath-enaeus Mechanicus, Hero of Alexandria and Biton. An illustrated manuscript of these texts was taken to Venice in the late fifteenth century by the Hu-manist Giovanni Aurispa and is now in Paris.14

If we move to Rome, which in the span of a few centuries extended its empire from the Mediterra-nean to Europe and the East, we find – no matter

reception of the ‘ancient art of war’ were Aelian and Vegetius. In their books they had both formulated models of writing de re militari, which were des-tined to become paradigms for Western thinking on war. They provided the basis for the discourse, in the terms described at the beginning of this essay, giving the art of war a key position in culture and removing it from the dominion of chance and the unforeseen, and therefore of ineffable actions which could not be truly coded in rules. Aelian wrote his Tactica theoria in the first decade of the second century AD, and probably dedicated it to Trajan. This was theory, an exemplary abstract ex-position, based on a wide-ranging, perfect knowl-edge of the Greek-Roman literary tradition, with no historical references, practical details or descrip-tions of battles or specific places. Aelian describes an ideal army based on universal abstract param-eters, applicable to all possible wars, and he admits in the preface that he had no first-hand experience of the battlefield. His aim was rather to treat mili-tary matters as a Greek theoretician and to provide a clear and stylistically elegant survey, accompanied by some diagrams, which have survived in a codex of 1330, now in the Biblioteca Marciana, Venice.19 These features are what made his book a bible for the culture of Western war, a manual for military schools and also a solid reference work for those proposing reforms. Especially on the grounds of its typical process of abstraction, Aelian’s book im-mediately became the ideal type of military text.20 Indeed it was already heavily borrowed from by Ar-rian in his Techne taktike, written under the rule of Hadrian in the thirties of the second century AD, and then became the favourite model of the Byzantine military tradition, represented mainly by the emperors Mauritius, author of Strategikon

sised is its more strictly humanistic and literary as-pect or, so to speak, its ‘anti-technical’ approach to the art of war in the terms so excellently analysed by Verrier. One of the approaches most referred to in the ancient tactical tradition is in fact that of the strategemata, i.e. collections of exemplary deeds or exempla, which are closely connected to histo-riographic works. The author of a treatise on civil engineering and administration, entitled De aquae-ductu urbis Romae, and a now lost De re militari, Frontinus contributed four books of Stratagemata, probably written after his experience in Britain and Germany in the eighties of the first century AD. He organises material gathered from other histo-riographic works according to the criterion of its applicability by the commander: what he must do before preparing to engage in battle (Book i), the various elements to keep in mind during the course of the battle (Book ii), problems concerning sieges (Book iii), and the moral qualities possessed by the ideal commander (Book iv, possibly spurious). Frontinus’ Strategemata was translated and printed twice in Venice in the sixteenth century (by Alvise de Torti in 1543 and Bolognino Zaltiero in 1574). The eight books of Polyaenus’ Strategemata, on the other hand, were dedicated to the emperors Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus during the campaign they led against the Parthians in 162 BC. Polyaenus’ stratagems adopt a different approach to those of Frontinus, i.e. they are not narrated by type but ac-cording to historical and geographical criteria, from the Greeks to the Macedonians, Siculi, Carthagin-ians, Barbarians and Romans.17 A translation of Polyaenus was printed, again in Venice, in 1551 by Giolito de Ferrari, a worthy Venetian publisher of translations of ancient historians and tacticians.18 But the two real protagonists in the Renaissance

. Deployment of the Roman legion, in Giovanni Franco, Gl’ordini della militia romana, Venice , Plate (Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana)

. A Roman legion on the march, in Giovanni Franco, Gl’ordini della militia romana, Venice , Plate (Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana)

work. The four books of the Epitoma rei militaris, literally a ‘Compendium of military art’ sets out to offer a concrete practical solution to the situation of decay and abandonment afflicting the armies and their organisation in the late ancient world. But what measures does Vegetius call for to imple-ment a military reform? Nothing other than re-ex-huming the rules of past, when Rome rose to rule the world. As we stressed, in this case Vegetius does not wish to be a historian and even less a political interpreter of contemporary military misfortunes. His point of view is specifically military and his subject matter is always within the confines of the discipline: recruitment and formation of the army, construction of encampments and practical drills in the first book; formations and working of the legion according to the antiqua consuetudo in the second; military campaigns and combat techniques on land in the third; fortifications and naval war-fare in the fourth. There are some allusions to his-torical events, but they are so random that scholars rarely fully agree in identifying them. Although there are also some technical-type descriptions in the treatment, the work is undoubtedly focused on the commander (dux) and his role, and is certainly not concerned with instructing soldiers in specific practices.25 Vegetius writes:

So the general who has bestowed on him the insignia of great power, and to whose loyalty and strength are entrusted the wealth of landowners, the protection of cities, the lives of soldiers and the glory of the State, should be anxious for the welfare not just of his en-tire army, but for each and every common soldier also (3, 10, 4).26

It is worth dwelling briefly on Vegetius’ arguments

(sixth century) and Leo vi (ninth tenth century), whose Tactica was translated into Italian by Filippo Pigafetta in Venice in 1586. Aelian, together with Vegetius, was the basis of the Heeresreform, the re-form of the armies introduced by the princes of Or-ange at the end of the sixteenth century in Holland, which included the creation of the first Kriegsschule in Europe at Siegen in 1617.21 The editio princeps, which contained diagrams and other images, was printed in Venice in 1552 by Francesco Robortello, who worked on two manuscripts, one now in the Biblioteca Marciana (Codex Venetus Marcianus 516), and the other, now lost but which was also in the Marciana at the time.22 But, arguably, to an even greater extent than Ae-lian, Vegetius demonstrates more clearly the com-pletely literary nature of the ‘art of war’. Little is known about Vegetius. Most historians believe he was active under Theodosius the Great, i.e. in the late fourth century, but recently a date in the fifth century has been suggested.23 Besides the his-torical or philological dispute, the issue of the date is made more interesting by the fact that Vegetius dedicated his work to an emperor, whom he ad-dressed directly, but without mentioning his name. It might be thought that, by omitting some details which would have given his work precise historical connotations, he wished to make his message more universal than would have been the case for a work more closely associated with a specific historical pe-riod. Like Aelian, and all other writers on the sub-ject in all ages, Vegetius was not a professional sol-dier. Neither did he have any first-hand knowledge of the battlefield but is thought to have been a high functionary at court (the manuscripts refer to him as illustris vir comes).24 But this is less significant for our purposes than his intentions in the writing the

. Hannibal crosses the Rhone; figure of Book in Francesco Patrizi,De paralleli militari, Rome (Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana) legend (p. ): A: River Rhone / B: Hannibal’s army about to cross it / C: Barbarians beyond the river to prevent the crossing / D: Hanno with part of the army / E: Island where Hanno stopped / F: Rafts made by Hanno / G: Hanno crosses the river upstream from the island / H: Fortified place where he rested / I: Hanno moves against the Barbarians beyond the river / K: Vessels on which Hannibal ferried the cavalry, with the swimming horses pulled by the stern / L: Boats on which the infantry crossed, downstream from the vessels [with the cavalry]/ M: Barbarians attack the said cavalry / N: Smoke raised by Hanno as a signal / O: Hannibal with all his men ready to cross / P: Hanno attacks the Barbarians’ tents, setting fire to them / Q: With the other part, he attacks the Gauls from the rear / R: Part of the Gauls which rush to help the tents / S: Gauls save themselves by fleeing / T: Hannibal orders the rest to cross, and sets up tents on the bank.

. Hannibal’s elephants crossing; figure of Book in Francesco Patrizi,De paralleli militari, Rome (Venice, Biblioteca Nazionale Marciana) legend (p. ): A: Two rafts, fifty feet wide, tied together and pushed into the river / B: The other two, two hundred feet long, at the bank, tied to trunks / C: The third two, much larger / D: Row boats which tow the two largest ones / E: Soil which covers them all / F: Elephants which cross in the first ones and then in the last ones / G: Two elephants, carried to the other side / H: Other elephants which fall into the river but manage to arrive all the same.

in his book. As we will see, they exercised an enor-mous influence on the Western art of war, espe-cially during the Renaissance. His aim was to re-introduce to the contemporary military system the ancient rules applied in Rome during the first stage of the empire. This project was to be implemented through writing, which acquires a key role in the process of transmitting knowledge about war. Even the title (Epitoma) is a reminder of the very close re-lationship the author wishes to have with the past, and especially with ancient sources. Critics have previously dealt at length with the reconstruction of these sources and their role within the individual books in the compendium, but what interests us here is above all the method followed by Vegetius in the process of assembling his material. In fact he does not re-elaborate the various deeds separately but presents them together in a synchronic way, annulling time differences to give them the value of rules, whose validity is only due to the fact that they had come from a written – today we would say literary – tradition. The arguments are mainly based on moralistic-type thinking. The art of war had fallen into decay and was no longer used be-cause of the oblivion during a long period of peace, when soldiers were no longer recruited and not enough attention was paid to training armies and their technical preparation. Vegetius comments:

However, a sense of security born of long peace has diverted mankind partly to the enjoyment of private leisure, partly to civilian careers. Thus attention to military training obviously was at first discharged rather neglectfully, then omitted, until finally consigned long since to oblivion (1, 28, 6-7).

This situation of neglected military structures, however, was not new. Indeed it even is found every

now and then in the glorious history of Rome. But the Romans, when they were aware of this down-turn, re-established the order of the past through diligent recourse to sources. The results were then translated into practice by the generals themselves:

These skills were formerly maintained in use, as well as in books, but once they were abandoned it was a long time before anyone needed them, because with the flourishing of peacetime pursuits the imperatives of war were far removed. But lest it be thought impossible for an art to be revived whose use has been lost, let us be instructed by precedents. Among the ancients, military science often fell into oblivion, but at first it was recov-ered from books, and later consolidated by the authority of generals (3, 10, 17-18).

In this passage Vegetius summarises the argument underlying his book and thus points to the justifica-tion for his work as a writer. If action is to happen, it requires a model from the past (exemplum), justi-fied by success and destined to repeat its prescrip-tive power in the future. Mainly found in the histo-riographic tradition, exempla thus become rules for action in the present with universal technical and strategic criteria. History ceases to be the subject of mere contemplation and intellectual research to be-come a benchmark, which must be attained by any-one aiming for success. In the Epitoma the repeti-tion and reproduction of the conditions of the past become a subject for technical thinking, confirmed by present action, which is carried out through ars (technical skill) and exercitatio (practice):

For we see no other explanation of the conquest of the world by the Roman people than their drill-at-arms, camp-discipline and military expertise (1, 1, 2).

The logic is circular. The author begins from writing, substantiates actions with exempla, which have also come from a world of books, only to re-turn inexorably to writing. Although the founda-tion of victory does actually lie in ars and exerci-tatio, the premises are equally important and they are supplied by the Epitoma, whose aim is to es-tablish criteria that can always be used: ‘For brave deeds belong to a single age; what is written for the benefit of the State is eternal’ (2, 3, 7).Behind this claim we can clearly glimpse how tech-nical thinking on war is steeped in literary structures, not only at what we might call the superficial level of the expressive power or style, but also its core of knowledge. Vegetius inherits, justifies and sets up the system of profound interaction between ‘literary’ past and present action, which becomes the axiom of the art of war for the future. In the Epitoma we find the language establishing continuity between the written word and the technical action, which will never cease to influence the way of thinking about war in the West. This is why Vegetius’ book must be considered as the first true ‘art of war’, whereby we mean not so much a set of rules and instructions as a literary genre, with its own style, structure and way of ar-guing, which was to be continually used throughout the ages.27 This is not the place to go into the book’s wide reception in the Middle Ages.28 It will be more useful for our purposes to look at how Vegetius’ model worked within the Renaissance art of war, i.e. the lit-erary and cultural context from which Palladio’s work of commenting and illustrating began. As mentioned above, the literary genre of the art of war was a typical product of the humanistic and Renaissance age, as can be easily demonstrated by the striking number of treatises produced in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century Italy, very many of which were printed in Venice.29

The ancient military tradition, especially as handed down by Greek and Roman historians and tacti-cians, continued to be the reference model for the treatises: see, for example, De re militari by Roberto Valturio (Verona 1472), Vallo by Gianbattista Della Valle (printed in Naples and 1521 and then reprinted several times in Venice) or Milizia terrestre e marit-tima (published posthumously in Venice in 1599 with a thematic division in four books similar to that of Vegetius’ Epitoma) by Mario Savorgnan, an exemplary figure of ‘military humanism’, since he combined a great knowledge of the classics and the profession of arms. In Veneto circles, we must also mention a book by Valerio Chiericati, which remained in manuscript form; it was of key importance to Palladio, who cites his work.30 Then of course we have Machiavelli’s Arte della guerra and Francesco Patrizi’s Paralleli mili-tari and, to end what is inevitably a very simplified list, De militia Romana libri quinque (1595) by the neo-Stoic philosopher Justus Lipsius and the Kriegs-buch (c. 1600) by Johann der Mittlere von Nassau-Siegen, a founding father of the military reform of the princes of Orange. One fact in particular should not come as a surprise. All of these books and many others written at the same time, like their ancient predecessors, called for a reform of the military struc-tures of their respective ages. In response to the need for a practical transformation of the army, despite the various technical innovations introduced over the centuries and different social, political, economic and cultural contexts, all of these works univocally sug-gest resorting to the ancient predecessors as a solu-tion. So what we have observed in Vegetius’ work, we can also read in the Byzantine tradition or in Machi-avelli, although the latter’s work undoubtedly has a greater philosophical and theoretical complexity, in addition to an unrivalled stylistic and formal depth.

selves. For an error in my writings may easily be corrected

without harming anybody, but an error in their practice

may ruin a whole state.32

The work is introduced as a forum of theoretical discourse on war and its causes, which goes well beyond a description of the practical skills of the professional soldier. As in Vegetius, in Machiavelli we find the formulation of that tension between word and action on which the discursive essence of the genre of the art of war is based. The last remark in the passage just quoted seems to reiterate what can be read in the Epitoma:

Secondly, in other matters, as Cato says, mistakes can be corrected afterwards, errors in war do not admit of amendment, because the penalty follows immediately upon the slip (1, 13, 6-7).

The idea of a cyclical past re-exhumed from the ancient books, whose repeatability leaves no room to chance, is the theme of another work which in-fluenced Palladio.33 At the end of his life, the Neo-platonist philosopher Francesco Patrizi da Cherso wrote two books of Paralleli militari, published in Rome in 1594 and 1595. In these works he theorises, under the influence, moreover, of Machiavelli’s thinking, the epistemological continuity between the art of war and the other arts, all of which can be evinced from books.34 Like Aelian, Vegetius and Machiavelli before him, Patrizi is of the opinion that the man of letters is in a better position than the man of arms to describe the art of war, since he can return to the ancient rules of the Classical authors and interpret them in the most accurate way.35 Like his predecessors, he declares that in matters of war, as in the other arts, theory is superior to practice,

In fact Machiavelli, unlike Vegetius, or his own more direct predecessors, explicitly sets out to give the subject a new form. He does not aim to write a treatise containing a well-ordered series of rules and precepts, but resorts to the dialogue form, more suited to showing the complexity of the discourse on war, and associates the themes with the philosophical tradition of the ancient dialogue, whose greatest ex-ponents were Plato in Greece and Cicero in Rome. The Dialogo dell’arte della guerra, published in Flor-ence in 1521, one of Machiavelli’s greatest works, is the best-known ‘art of war’, celebrated by his contempo-raries and by future generations, also through the un-derground of damnatio memoriae, after its author was placed on the Index.31 In the book Machiavelli stages a meeting between some noblemen and scholars in the Orti Oricellari in Florence. The leading player in the dialogue, the great condottiero Fabrizio Colonna, argues for a radical return to the model of the ancient Roman army as the only way of putting an end to the current crisis afflicting armies. The thematic core of the whole dialogue is already announced in the preface to the work, in which there is a dedication to Lorenzo Strozzi:

Since I am of the opinion, therefore, from what I have

both seen and read, that it would be not impossible to re-

vive the discipline of our ancestors and, in some measure,

to retrieve our lost virtù, I have written the following

treatise concerning the art of war, as much for the im-

provement of others desiring to imitate the ancients in

warlike exploits, as for my own private satisfaction, and

for avoiding the imputation of spending my leisure in

idleness. Although treating an art which I never professed

may perhaps seem a presumptuous undertaking, I cannot

help thinking myself more excusable than some other

people who have taken its actual exercise upon them-

the two sides was further accentuated by the intro-duction of firearms, which led to the restructuring of the army, with an emphasis on the role of the infantry to the detriment of the traditional cavalry, which had been one of the most typical features of mediaeval courtly culture. Moreover, this also speeded up the process of the democratisation of the army. As Verrier stresses, the reversal of roles of the cavalry and infantry and the promotion of the artillery are very closely connected phenomena. Firearms were considered ignoble and diabolical by the aristocrats, who did not wish to dismount from their horses and fight like ordinary foot sol-diers, which they would have perceived as debasing and humiliating.40 But the ancient models were not only found in the aristocratic ideology of war. They also informed the new democratic vision, which was more responsive to technical innovations. The Greek and Roman classics on war were thus the basis of the widespread renewal of armies in the late sixteenth century, described with the controversial term ‘the military revolution’.41 In the seventeenth century the Greek ‘countermarch’, as described by Aelian, would again provide a noble forerunner for new tactical systems stemming from the use of firearms.42 But the ancient classics on war were not only used to ennoble and give cultural legitimacy to the expansion of the new arms and the related tactics. Above all they offered them a language and a discursive style, thus ensuring they would be part of contemporary cultural debate. Despite some technological innovations having changed the sur-face, from the mythical world of the Iliad to the introduction of firearms, Clausewitz and the age of nuclear weapons, discourse on war has demon-strated it possess a surprising continuity and an an-cient heart made of books rather than arms.

thus linking up with the Platonic and Neoplatonic tradition. At one point in his work, he claims that each success in war is always preceded and prepared by reading a book. Referring to the most celebrated general of Antiquity, he says: ‘And Eunapius was proven to be right, Alexander the Great would not have been great, had Xenophon not been great’.36 Patrizi also tells an anecdote to support his argu-ment which actually features Palladio:

The Vicentine Andrea Palladio, an architect by profession, and Valerio Chiericato who had never seen war in our day, but books by Aelian, and Leo and Caesar, were able to amaze those present. They saw the first disembark the crew and soldiers from a galley in marvellously good order. And then the second had 500 infantrymen do all of Aelian’s mili-tary drills in great order and with ease. And I was one of the spectators. And yet they had never been to war, nor were they furnished with great letters.37

This anecdote describing the surprising versatility of the ancient knowledge of war seems to be a re-sponse – as Alfredo Perifano notes – to the famous novella by Matteo Bandello (i-xl), recounting how Machiavelli, the great theoretician of military art, was actually incapable of deploying troops.38

Patrizi, who lived at the end of the 16th century, emblematically represents the tensions found in military thinking and writing in his own age. On one hand, we have the advocates of the perennial exemplary value of the ancient tradition, of its repeatability, and in some ways of its a-historical nature, and on the other, the engineers and tech-nicians, bearers and representatives of a new kind of knowledge, impatient with the dictates of the men of letters and inspired by the latest scientific discoveries.39 In the military field, the gap between

17 For an extensive treatment of this author, see M.T. Schettino,Introduzione a Polieno, Pisa 1999.18 Cf. Hale, Renaissance War Studies, pp. 440 ff.19 Cf. Hale, ‘A Humanistic Visual Aid…’, p. 282.20 Cf. Loreto, ‘Il Generale e la Biblioteca…’, p. 573.21 On the role of the ancient tradition in the princes of Orange re-form, see the classic monograph by W. Hahlweg, Die Heeresreform der Oranier und die Antike. Studien zur Geschichte des Kriegswesens der Niederlande, Deutschlands, Frankreichs, Englands, Italiens, Spaniens und der Schweiz vom Jahre 1589 bis zum Dreißigjährigen Kriege, Osna-brück 1987.22 Cf. A. M. Devine, ‘Aelian’s Manual of Hellenistic Military Tac-tics. A New Translation from the Greek with an Introduction’, in The Ancient World, 14, 1989, pp. 31-64. On Palladio’s approach to the diagrams in Aelian and to Trissino’s text, see Beltramini, ‘Palladio e l’architettura della battaglia…’.23 Cf. most recently M. B. Charles, Vegetius in Context. Establishing the Date of the Epitoma Rei Militaris, Stuttgart 2006.24 Cf. M. D. Reeve, Vegetius: Epitoma rei militaris (Oxford Classical Texts), Oxford 2004, pp. vi-viii.25 Cf. Lenoir, ‘La littérature de re militari’, pp. 95 ff.26 The translation of Vegetius’s text here and passim is from N. P. Milner, Vegetius’ Epitome of Military Science, Liverpool . 27 So far I have taken up some considerations from the introductory essay to a recent Italian edition of Vegetius (Formisano, Vegezio…).28 See the monograph by P. Richardot, Végèce et la culture militaire au Moyen Age, Paris 1998.29 For this works, see Hale’s classic studies in Renaissance War Studies, and Verrier, Les armes de Minerve. See also F. L. Taylor, The Art of War in Italy, 1494-1529, Westport, ct 1973.30 Cf. Beltramini, ‘Palladio e l’architettura della battaglia…’, p. 224.31 On the critical fortunes and reception of Arte della guerra, see the essays in G. Procacci, Machiavelli nella cultura europea dell’età mod-erna, Rome-Bari 1995 and especially S. Anglo, Machiavelli. The First Century. Studies in Enthusiasm, Hostility and Irrelevance, Oxford 2005, who identifies trends in the reception of the Arte della guerra which are independent from Machiavelli’s other works (pp. 17-41, 477-513, 517-572).32 Preface, in N. Machiavelli, The Art of War, edited by N. Wood, Indianapolis , p. .33 Cf. Beltramini, Palladio e l’architettura della battaglia…, p. 224.34 On Patrizi’s thought and work, see the classic study by C. Vasoli, Francesco Patrizi da Cherso, Rome 1989.35 Cf. Verrier, Les armes de Minerve, p. 106.36 Cf. A. Perifano, ‘Penser la guerre au xvie siècle. Science, art ou pratique?’, in Les guerres d’Italie. Histoire, pratiques, représentations, conference proceedings (Paris, 9-11 December 1999), edited by D. Boillet, Paris 2002, p. 240.37 Cf. Perifano, ‘Penser la guerre au xvie siècle…’, p. 243.38 Perifano, ‘Penser la guerre au xvie siècle…39 See P. Rossi, I filosofi e le macchine 1400-1700, Milan 1971.40 Verrier, Les armes de Minerve, p. 17.41 The term ‘military revolution’ was coined by M. Roberts (The Mili-tary Revolution: 1560-1660, Belfast 1955). He refers in particular to four factors of change (the adaptation of tactics to changes in the army following the introduction of firearms; the new strategic organisa-tion; the growing numbers of soldiers in armies; greater political in-fluence on the formation and maintenance of armies). The concept

1 Koselleck mentions that ‘chance (Zufall), from the temporal point of view, is a pure category of the present’, see ‘Der Zufall als Mo-tivationsrest in der Geschichtsschreibung’, in R. Koselleck, Vergan-gene Zukunft. Zur Semantik geschichtlicher Zeiten, Frankfurt am Main 1979, pp. 158 ff. Chance cannot be defined either by resorting to the future horizon of expectations nor seeking past models of it, which would thus cease to be chance. Chance basically remains an a-historic category, if history is considered to be a concatenation of interde-pendent events.2 Cf. S. Said and M. Trédé, ‘Art de la guerre et experience chez Thu-cydide’, in Classica et Mediaevalia, 34, 1985, pp. 65-85.3 Cf., for example, C. P. Brand, ‘The Poetry of War in the Italian Ren-aissance’, in J. R. Mulryne and M. Shewring, War, Literature and the Arts in Sixteenth-Century Europe, London 1989, pp. 81-100 and L. Bol-zoni, ‘“O maledetto, o abominoso ordigno”: la rappresentazione della guerra nel poema epico-cavalleresco’, in W. Barberis, Storia d’Italia. Annali 18. Guerra e pace, Turin 2002, pp. 201-247.4 F. Verrier, Les armes de Minerve, Paris 1997, p. 32.5 Brand, ‘The Poetry of War in the Italian Renaissance’, p. 81.6 G. Beltramini, ‘Palladio e l’architettura della battaglia: le edizioni illustrate di Cesare e Polibio’, in Palladio 1508-2008. Il simposio del cinquecentenario, edited by F. Barbieri et al., Centro Internazionale di Studi di Architettura Andrea Palladio, Venice 2008, p. 220. On the role of diagrams in the art of war, see J.R. Hale, ‘A Humanistic Visual Aid. The Military Diagram in the Renaissance’, in Renaissance Studies, 2, 1988, pp. 280-298.7 G. Traina, ‘Polemologia’, in I. Mastrorosa and A. Zumbo, Letter-atura scientifica e tecnica di Grecia e Roma, Rome 2002, p. 427.8 Cf. J. R. Hale, Renaissance War Studies, London 1983, p. 439.9 Cf. M. Bettalli, Enea Tattico. La difesa di una città assediata, Pisa 1990; D. Whitehead, Aineias the Tactician. How to Survive Under Siege, Bristol 2001; M. Formisano, ‘Strategie di autorizzazione. Enea Tattico e la tradizione letteraria dell’arte della guerra’, in Euphrosyne, 37, 2009, pp. 349-361.10 Cf. A. W. H. Adkins, ‘Areté, Techne. Democracy and Sophists: Pro-tagoras 316b-328d’, in Journal of Hellenic Studies, 93, 1973, pp. 3-12.11 Cf. L. Loreto, ‘Il Generale e la Biblioteca. La Trattatistica militare greca da Democrito di Abdera ad Alessio i Comneno’, in Lo Spazio Letterario della Grecia Antica, edited by G. Cambiano, L. Canfora and D. Lanza, ii, Rome 1995, pp. 581 ff., p. 586.12 Cf. F. Franco Repellini, ‘Matematica, astronomia e meccanica’, in Lo Spazio Letterario della Grecia Antica, i, pp. 305-343; S. Cuomo, Technology and Culture in Greek and Roman Antiquity, Cambridge 2007.13 Cf. M. Valleriani, ‘From condensation to compression: How Ren-aissance Italian engineers approached Hero’s Pneumatics’, in Über-setzung und Transformation, edited by H. Böhme, Chr. Rapp and W. Rösler, Berlin 2007, pp. 333-354; M. Valleriani, ‘The transformation and reconstruction of Hero of Alexandria’s Pneumatics in the garden of Pratolino’, in Pratolino. Un Mito alle porte di Firenze - Pratolino. A Myth at the Gates of Florence, edited by L. Ulivieri and S. Merendoni, Venice 2009, pp. 155-181.14 Cf. G. Commare, ‘I codici della Poliorcetica’, in A. La Regina, L’arte dell’assedio di Apollodoro di Damasco, Milan 1999, p. 79.15 B. Campbell, ‘Teach Yourself How to Be a General’, in The Journal of Roman Studies, 77, 1987, pp. 13-29.16 Cf. M. Lenoir, ‘La littérature de re militari’, in Les littératures tech-niques dans l’Antiquité romaine. Statut, public et destination, tradition, edited by C. Nicolet, Geneva 1996, p. 83.

was widely drawn on, confirmed through other topics, and in recent decades, severely scrutinised. See at least G. Parker, The Military Revolution, New York 1996 and B. Hall, Weapons and Warfare in Ren-aissance Europe: Gunpowder, Technology, and Tactics, Baltimore 1997. J. R. Hale draws on the concept and analyses it from a specifically Venetian point of view (J. R. Hale, ‘Venezia e la “rivoluzione militare” europea’, in Crisi e rinnovamenti nell’autunno del Rinascimento a Ven-ezia, edited by V. Branca and C. Ossola, Florence 1991, pp. 85-103). 42 Cf. L. Loreto, ‘Krieg’, in Der Neue Pauly. Enzyklopädie der Antike. Altertum 6, edited by H. Cancik and H. Schneider, Stuttgart-Weimar 1999, pp. 1110-1118, especially 1113.