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420 methods become more and more the creation, not of the epoch, but of uncontrolled individual captains, who in many cases discovered their genius very late and by accident. While in 300 there were Roman armies, in 100 there were the armies of Marius and Sulla and Cæsar; and Octavian's army, which was composed of Cæsar's veterans, led its general much more than it was led by him. But with this the methods of war, its means, and its aims assumed raw-natural and ferocious forms, very different from those prevailing before. Their duels were not eighteenth-century Trianon duels, encounters in knightly forms with fixed rules to determine when a man might declare himself exhausted, what maximum of force might be employed, and what conditions the chivalry permitted a victor to impose. They were ring-battles of infuriated men with fists and teeth, fought to the bodily collapse of one and exploited without reserve or restraint by the victor. The first great example of this "return to Nature" is afforded by the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic armies, which, instead of artificial manoeuvres with small bodies, practised the mass-onset without regard to losses and thereby shattered to atoms the refined strategy of the Rococo. To bring the whole muscular force of a nation on to the battle-fields by the universal-service system was an idea utterly alien to the age of Frederick the Great.

Similarly, in every Culture, the technique of war hesitatingly followed the advance of craftsmanship, until at the beginning of the Civilization it suddenly takes the lead, presses all mechanical possibilities of the time relentlessly into its service, and under pressure of military necessity even opens up new domains hitherto unexploited — but at the same time renders largely ineffectual the personal heroism of the thoroughbred, the ethos of the noble, and the subtle intellect of the Late Culture. In the Classical world, where the Polis made mass-armies essentially impossible — for relatively to the general smallness of Classical forms, tactical included, the numbers of Cannæ, Philippi, and Actium were enormous and exceptional — the second Tyrannis (Dionysius of Syracuse leading) introduced mechanical technique into warfare, and on a large scale.