Military Education: Models from Antiquity

La guerre! C’est une chose trop grave pour la confier à des militaires.

(War! It’s too serious a matter to entrust to the military.)

—attributed to Georges Clemenceau

The Greek city-states, in the centuries before the Macedonian conquest of 338 B.C., and the Roman Republic, from its founding (traditionally, 509 B.C.) to the assassination of Julius Caesar (44 B.C.), both hold a special place in the Western imagination. They are the distant ancestors of the West and its civic tradition. Democracy, elections, oratory, and the idea of freedom itself all come from Greece and Rome. Yet, in one way, we are very different from the ancients. They put military training at the heart of their educational system. We have increasingly marginalized military education. Americans have gone from colonial militias to Minute Men to citizen-soldiers to, in some cases, ROTC-free college