The Other Side of Victory: War Losses in the Ancient World

In the summer of 200 BC Seleucid and Ptolemaic armies fought at the foot of Mount Hermon. The battle of Panion turned out to be the most decisive in any of the six Syrian Wars. This was the first major military defeat for the Ptolemies since their loss of Cyprus in 306 BC, and it was catastrophic, especially to the Macedonian phalanx. In the 3rd century, the Ptolemies had cultivated the “Macedonians” as a war-winning infantry class, a major component of the military-settler agricultural system, and a political hedge against the court aristocracy.

Demosthenes was chosen, so he tells us (Dem. de Cor. 285), for the unenviable task of delivering the funeral oration for the Athenians who died at the battle of Chaeronea in 338 BCE. The task was even more difficult because the soldiers, whose death he needed to praise, had died fighting a losing battle, a battle he had vigorously advocated for. The funeral oration transmitted in the Demosthenic corpus, 60, fits this situation, although its genuineness has been questioned since antiquity.

The capture of the emperor Valerian by the Persians in Syria in 260 is an iconic defeat in the history of the Roman Empire. Other Roman leaders had lost battles, entire armies, and even their lives on the eastern frontier, but Valerian’s survival as living Persian trophy was unprecedented. Valerian was a celebrity of defeat whose fate demanded interpretation by later historians to connect him with their societies.