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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   31273 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of October 17, 2022

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Augury was very useful.

Surprise is extremely effective in warfare, and if the hour you're going to attack is based on augury, then your enemy has no way of predicting it.

If you attack based on an objective judgement of when the conditions are most favourable to your side, aka babby's first campaign, you will quickly find your movements anticipated and hard-countered by your opponent, who was able to predict your movements based on exactly the same objective signs.

Conversely if you attack because the chicken bone pointed towards the Death card, then your opponent will never see that one coming.

This only applies to situations where there are multiple valid ways or timings to proceed and augury can help you to randomly pick one. In other cases, augury might commit you to pointless or even disastrous decisions. Consider this example from the Anabasis (this is quite late in the book where the Greek army had already reached the Hellenized parts of modern northwestern Turkey):

Thereupon the generals sacrificed, in the presence of the Arcadian seer, Arexion; for Silanus the Ambraciot had chartered a vessel at Heraclea and made his escape ere this. Sacrificing with a view to departure, the victims proved unfavourable to them. Accordingly they waited that day. Certain people were bold enough to say that Xenophon, out of his desire to colonise the place, had persuaded the seer to say that the victims were unfavourable to departure. Consequently he proclaimed by herald next morning that any one who liked should be present at the sacrifice; or if he were a seer he was bidden to be present and help to inspect the victims. Then he sacrificed, and there were numbers present; but though the sacrifice on the question of departure was repeated as many as three times, the victims were persistently unfavourable. Thereat the soldiers were in high dudgeon, for the provisions they had brought with them had reached the lowest ebb, and there was no market to be had.

This scene also happened while at the exact midway point between two Greek cities in the territory of a hostile Anatolian tribe. A little while later a scouting party is attacked and almost wiped out by hostile cavalry that had time to arrive in the time the army sat around idle. It's only after the supply of sacrificial animals runs out and oxen pulling the wagons have to be used instead that finally the signs are favourable.

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