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Presumably the author of said "Land Battles in 5 C BC Greece"?
Your book is most interesting, but is causing no little controversy among afficionados, as I am sure you probably expected!! As you will have seen, I have made reference to your statistics already on page 1 of this thread in December.....
A hearty welcome to the forum, and I hope you contribute regularly. I am, and many others are, looking forward to "Land battles in 4 C BC Greece"....
"dulce et decorum est pro patria mori " - Horace
(It is a sweet and proper thing to die for ones country)
"No son-of-a-bitch ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country" - George C Scott as General George S. Patton
Paul McDonnell-Staff
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Yes, guilty as charged with regard to the aforementioned book. I did indeed expect considerable flack on many of the conclusions presented therein, which I consider a good thing. The concept was to push data as far as possible and not hold back for fear of being proven wrong. This meant that I was not only going to violate some long-held opinions, but also commit a fair number of errors (some perhaps gross) due to my ignorance of key data that would have moved my projections in a different direction. No matter how much you research, there's always something important that someone else knows and you don't. I therefore hoped that those with the proper knowledge and passion would begin correcting me so that we could all get a better idea about what was really taking place on ancient battlefields. Thus, please consider my book a collection of theories rather than laws, a place to start a discussion rather than seek resolution. In short, it's no more than a target for others to shoot at, with each hit helping me and others by teaching something important about Greek warfare. I will try to contribute as much as I can to the discussions on RAT (and on Ancient Warfare's site) and sincerely wish that I had had access to this wonderful kind of networked group-intelligence a decade or so ago when I began writing.
It\'s only by appreciating accurate accounts of real combat past and present that we can begin to approach the Greek hoplite\'s hard-won awareness of war\'s potential merits and ultimate limitations.
- Fred Eugene Ray (aka "Old Husker")
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Short for 'Cornhusker' (a common nickname for folks from my old home state of Nebraska here in the USA - silly, I know, but still better than the nickname it replaced: 'Bugeater'. I and most of my fellow Nebraskans always wondered about that 'Husker Du' thing - it got a lot of looks and laughs when it first appeared on store shelves back home. Thanks for your kind welcome to the site, I'm really looking forward to participating! - Fred
It\'s only by appreciating accurate accounts of real combat past and present that we can begin to approach the Greek hoplite\'s hard-won awareness of war\'s potential merits and ultimate limitations.
- Fred Eugene Ray (aka "Old Husker")
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