Q. Which DBM battle has the most published/extant material about it, and how much is primary/secondary etc material? I am not widely read in the classics, but does anything get better, or rather, more detailed than Caesar's Gallic War diary/resume and the battles therein? Agincourt gets a lot of press but it seems to be a basic set of details fleshed out by modern suppositions. A. Actually, Agincourt might be a good contender. There are several sources, some by eye-witnesses - though I'm not sure if any of them were combatants, as opposed to chaplains and heralds with a view from the baseline. More importantly, they come from both sides, which gives a perspective we lack in most battles. As for some of the other examples mentioned, Hastings falls foul of the problem that some of the main sources are noncontemporary and their reliability is debated - eg the Carmen de Haestingi Proelio, or whatever the exact title is. Xenophon is great for atmosphere and nuts-and-bolts detail on what he actually saw himself. But even when he was present he is not comprehensive - we don't have a very good account of Kounaxa, we have a very good account of what the Greeks did at Kounaxa - and when not a participant he tends to leave out tedious details like how big the opposing armies were ... Caesar is a superb writer of despatches, but I always have to ask myself how much of the devious bastard's version I can actually believe, He tends to be the sole source, and has a tendency to self-justification. An account from the Gallic side might be a lot different. Polybios' accounts are also superb, but again tend to be the only reasonably full version - other surviving accounts like Livy being based on him - so it's hard to list any of the battles he deals with as the best-documented, Of ancient battles, Issos or Gaugamela might be a candidate: more than one account (Arrian, Curtius, Diodoros, Plutarch, Polybios' rebuttal of Kallisthenes for Issos), they aren't all rehashes of one original source, and some of them are pretty good accounts. But I think you have to go into the middle ages to get sheer quantity of sources, let alone battles where we have a good perspective from both sides. One ancient exception is Kadesh, but I don't think the Hittite version is very full. Regards, Duncan Back to Dispatch August 2000 Table of Contents Back to Dispatch List of Issues Back to MagWeb Master Magazine List © Copyright 2000 by HMGS Mid-South This article appears in MagWeb (Magazine Web) on the Internet World Wide Web. Other military history articles and gaming articles are available at http://www.magweb.com