ABSTRACT
The eastern winds had hardly erased Alexander the Great’s footsteps from the sands of the Near East when his generals fell to quarreling among themselves. This “mixed” use of Macedonians, Greeks, natives, and cash- or land-based mercenaries allowed the Hellenistic monarchs to raise armies whose numbers would have been unthinkable among the city-states of Greece and in the Macedonian kingdom of Philip II. The primacy of the Hellenistic kingdoms within the Mediterranean lasted a long time. The Roman military system, even on the eve of the Second Punic War, seems to have been in the mainstream of the type of warfare that had characterized the Mediterranean for centuries. What made the Romans quite different from the Greeks and the Macedonians and any of their adversaries was also their more deliberate use of war as the lifeline of their social organism.
