Aelianus Tacticus

Aelianus Tacticus was a Greek military writer living at Rome and an author of miscellanies and works on animals. He is best known as the author of a treatise commonly known as Military Tactics, arranged in fifty-three chapters and concerned chiefly with Greek and Macedonian methods of war. The work deals especially with the organisation, ordering and manoeuvring of infantry, giving particular attention to the phalanx and to the formal arrangements by which soldiers are drawn up, wheeled, advanced and handled in the field.

The treatise was dedicated to the emperor Trajan, though some accounts give Hadrian, probably through confusion or misprint. Aelianus himself said that the work arose from a conversation with the emperor Nerva, and he claimed to have used many earlier authorities, particularly Polybius. His purpose was not to describe the Roman army of his own day, but to preserve and explain the older Greek and Macedonian system of tactics, especially as it had been treated by earlier military writers. For this reason, the work belongs as much to learned military antiquarianism as to practical soldiering.

Aelianus also planned a similar treatise on naval strategy, but this work has either been lost or was never written. The surviving treatise remained important because it gave later readers a compact and orderly account of ancient drill, formations and tactical terminology.

Aelianus had a considerable influence on Byzantine and Arab military science, where ancient Greek tactical learning continued to be studied, copied and adapted. In western Europe the work became better known after the first Latin translation appeared in 1487. The earliest printed Greek text appeared in 1532, and an English translation was made in 1616. He remains a recognised ancient authorities on tactics. His influence is especially felt among writers concerned with drill, formation, discipline and the revival of ordered infantry movement. A commander, scholar or military reformer who reads him is studying not battlefield anecdotes, but the geometry and discipline of an army: ranks, files, intervals, turns, advances, retreats, deployments and the controlled movement of bodies of men.