Following the success of Peter Connolly's Greece and Rome at War, next month Greenhill are to publish Battles of the Greek and Roman Worlds: A Chronological Compendium of 667 Battles to 31BC, from the Historians of the Ancient World by John Drogo Montagu. This is the best, most comprehensive single-volume reference book of classical battles, from the eighth century BC to 31BC, when Octavian defeated Antony and Cleopatra at the battle of Actium. John Drogo Montagu brings together and explains the accounts of the ancient historians and presents, in an exciting and vivid style, all of the land and sea battles of the Greek and Roman world. Dr Montagu here describes how he swapped medicine for military history in order to write this book. "Why would a medical man with a profound interest in electronics want to write a book on classical military history after a career in medical research? To answer this question I must go back 65 years to the day when, after attending two appalling English schools in Switzerland, I was sent aged 10 to a preparatory school in England. It was the best thing that ever happened to me. The teaching was superb. Best of all was the tuition in Latin and Greek. The master concerned was in the habit of interrupting our translation to digress into matters historical, mythological, cultural – in short any matter prompted by the translation. I remember his cri-de-coeur to the class 'Can't anyone tell me where Marathon is?' 'Marathon is here' he added as he advanced to a large wall map and rubbed his great paw over Euboea, Attica, and half of the Peloponnese. We always congratulated ourselves that we had succeeded in laying another red herring which would keep the 'Old Man' away from the work in hand. Nothing, of course, was further from the truth. It was these deliberate extracurricular digressions that taught us so much and instilled into me an enduring love of all things classical, in particular the military history. Boys love to hear the details of a good heroic scrap! A career in medical research left no time for indulgence in these pleasures, although I sometimes bought classical books which I had no hope of reading. It was only in retirement, when I wondered what I would do with the winter evenings, that the obvious answer struck me. Back to the stirring tales of antiquity, of course! First I read Caesar, then Herodotus, and then I got stuck into Thucydides. It was at this point that I realised that I ought to have been listing the battles with their references as I went along. Perhaps it is the mentality of the researcher that causes me to love lists of almost anything. Be that as it may, my Master List was born and grew. The next thought that erupted was the realisation that if I were to carry on this way, I would need to acquire or get my hands on an awful lot of books. There did not appear to be any single mini-encyclopaedic volume which covered my whole field of interest – the battles of ancient Greece and Rome. If there wasn't one, then DIY! My Master List was becoming the basis of a fully blown project, which might even be of use to others. As for myself, it has been well said that 'if you want to learn a subject, write a book about it'. It was not until the half-way mark, about five years later, that I actually dared to imagine that the project might one day reach fruition. And it was only then, at the earliest, that I presumed to dream of the possibility of publication in, perhaps, a further five years time. What had started as a personal retirement project was developing into an obsessional desire to leave behind me a contribution to the classical – not the medical – world! There is one important aspect of this work which deserves some mention: maps. It would be futile to list 600 place names and expect the reader to know all their whereabouts. This is, perhaps, the aspect of battles which is most likely to escape the readerfull attention. The ancient chronicles – and sometimes the modern text-books – give only verbal indications of place. Creating the maps gave me many hours of work and, due to the vagaries of my computer software, even more nightmares. But, for all that, the maps were enjoyable to make, as also were the battle plans. Of the latter, the ones that were the greatest challenge and fun were those that I had not seen depicted in any book. A work of this encyclopaedic nature is liable to another potential pitfall. It stems from human fallibility – mine. Each battle is entered in three places: text, table, and index. But it is all too easy to amend the spelling or date of a battle in two places and to overlook the third. Fortunately for me, the extraordinarily meticulous editing by Lionel Leventhal's team has saved me from being branded as the author of many such careless mistakes and inconsistencies." Among the 667 battles covered in the book are, on the Greek side, those which took place during the Ionian Revolt, the Persian Wars including the battles of Marathon and Thermopylae, the Peloponnesian Wars, the campaigns of Alexander the Great and the wars of Alexander's successors. The Romans saw action during the Gallic Invasions, the Samnite Wars, the Punic Wars including the battles of disaster at Cannae and the battle of Zama between Hannibal and Scipio Africanus, the Spanish Wars, the Macedonian Wars and the campaigns of Pompey the Great and Julius Caesar. John Drogo Montagu's wide-ranging sources include the works of Herodotus (known as the 'Father of History'), Xenophon, Polybius and Livy, and classical geographers and biographers. He also refers to modern research to shed light on confusing events, making this one of the most useful classical military history reference works available. Back to Greenhill Military Book News No. 96 Table of Contents Back to Greenhill Military Book News List of Issues Back to Master Magazine List © Copyright 1999 by Greenhill Books 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