An ancient military manual, rediscovered

AP 9.210 

ANONYMOUS

On Orbicius’ Book of Tactics 

Behold the book that births heroic deeds:
Hadrian had me with him in his wars,
In olden days. I fell into disuse;
The aeons passed; I neared oblivion.
But under our lord Anastasius,
The strong in battle, I came back to light,
That I might aid him in his marshalling.
For I can teach the arts of bloody war:
I know the way to help you beat the men
Who ring the western sea, and Persians too,
And Saracens whose doom is now secure,
And charging cavalry of frenzied Huns;
Isaurians too, who lurk on lofty crags.
And I will bring them all beneath the rule
Of Anastasius, whom the ages fetched
To outshine even Trajan’s sceptred sway.

Urbicius (sic) dedicated a short military treatise to Anastasius I around the end of the fifth century; it still survives. He opens with a précis of part of Arrian’s Ars Tactica (AD 136/7). The elderly Hadrian could indeed have read Arrian, though too late to put his suggestions into practice; he died the following year. The Isaurians were Turkish mountain bandits who backed a rival claimant to the imperial throne; Anastasius wore them down in the 490s and fought Sassanid Persia to a standoff in the 510s, so maybe the manual worked.