Att vinna kriget utanför slagfältet i antikens Grekland och Rom - Generalerna berättar

Sammanfattning: ”How to win the war outside of the battlefield in ancient Greece and Rome – the generals explain” The purpose of this thesis is to shed some light on the topic of psychological warfare in two ancient, war-describing texts: The History of the Peloponnesian War, written by Thucydides, and The Commentaries on the Gallic War, written by Julius Caesar. The main reason behind this lays in modern approach to warfare, where psychological strategies are common on the international warfare stage. The lack of comprehensive academic work on that specific, important component of warfare in the Classical antiquity triggered the idea behind this research. The logical result of that primarily purpose is to compare the results from these two texts: what are the similarities, and what are the differences in these texts? The conclusion of this thesis is that psychological warfare is greatly used, in both Thucydides’ and Caesar’s texts. The similiraties lies in the chosen methods, classified in 5 different themes. Generally speaking, these 5 themes can be divided into 2 target-groups: those where the target is primarily the enemy’s military force and those where the enemy as a whole is the target (i.e. the civil populations as well). The first 2 methods are military dissuasion and intelligence operations. The methods used on the enemy’s population as a whole are executions, exhaustion by plunder, siege and scorched-earth policy, and diplomatic communications. The main differences lie in the scope of use of each chosen method, as well as the chronological use of these, in each of these 2 wars. This thesis discusses several hypotheses behind these differences and argues that the 2 main reasons behind these significant differences lies in the ideological, as well as the cultural nature of warfare in the Greek Classical era, in comparison to the Late Republican Roman era.