Deimos – Zeitschrift für Antike Militärgeschichte

Citizenship and Service: From Roman Auxiliaries to U.S. MIilitary Naturalization Programs

Christian Nana Andoh — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

This article compares ancient Rome and the United States to show that military service has not always been a way for everyone to become a citizen. In Rome, non-citizen auxiliary soldiers were integrated via a standardised legal agreement that conferred citizenship upon honourable discharge, formalised by the diploma militaris. This predictable system met the needs of the population and made it easier for provinces to slowly come together. The United States created a more flexible and episodic system in which military service by immigrants has sometimes sped up the process of becoming a citizen, from the Revolutionary War to the time after 9/11, often because there were not enough soldiers. The American system has been legally broken up and made harder to work with by immigration policy and the all-volunteer force, unlike Rome’s institutionalised approach. The article demonstrates that military service fosters integration most effectively when it is consistently transformed into legal recognition, emphasising the integrative efficacy of standardisation in Rome and the precariousness of service-based inclusion in the United States, all within the context of broader theories of empire, citizenship, and state capacity.

Aurelian and Cniva

Byron Waldron — Sun, 08 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

In 251 CE the ‘Scythian’/Gothic king Cniva defeated the emperor Decius in the battle of Abritus, and in 271 the emperor Aurelian defeated the Gothic leader Cannabas in a campaign north of the Danube. Dexippus and Jordanes supply the former name, and the Historia Augusta provides the latter. This article revisits the hypothesis that Cniva and Cannabas were one and the same person. It argues that the identification is plausible and may help to explain why Ammianus and the Historia Augusta attach special importance to Aurelian’s victory over the Goths.

The East Slope of the Acropolis as a Mnemotopos of Mythical and Historical Wars

Ioannis Mitsios — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0100

The Acropolis of Athens was indisputably the religious center of the city and played a pivotal role in shaping various aspects of Athenian identity. This study adopts a holistic approach —integrating literary, epigraphic, topographic and iconographic evidence, to examine the east slope of the Acropolis as a mnemotopos (place of memory) associated with war(s). The primary aim of my paper is to emphasize the significance of the east slope of the Acropolis as the topos and lieu de mémoire par excellence, both for mythical and historical wars.

Traumatized Heroes? Achilles, Odysseus and the Retrospective Diagnosis of ‘Combat Trauma’

Fernando Echeverría — Tue, 12 May 2026 00:00:00 +0200

In recent decades, the clinical term “trauma” has been applied to historical societies in the belief that the modern techniques of diagnosis in clinical psychology are able to identify this pathology in the past. In the study of the ancient world it has been used to interpret the psychological experiences of ancient combatants, approaching episodes and passages in the literary sources such as epiphanies or the sufferings of characters in drama in a modern light. The notion, however, has been questioned as an anachronistic colonization of the past, an example of “retrospective diagnosis” that ignores the experiences, motivations and explanations provided by the ancient sources. Since “trauma” was first applied to the ancient world through the analysis of the characters of Achilles and Odysseus in the Homeric poems, a thorough study of their personalities in their literary context, respecting the internal consistency of the Homeric narratives, can provide an avenue to reconsider the notion of trauma and its usefulness in the analysis of historical societies.