From its very title, Brill’s Companion to Insurgency and Terrorism in the Ancient Mediterranean invites controversy. Setting out to test the validity and utility of applying modern military terminology to ancient evidence, this volume dares critics to charge it with gross anachronism. Yet its best chapters make a strong claim that, with cautious and considered application, the theoretical toolsets of insurgency, counterinsurgency, and terrorism provide useful ways to narrate and analyze conflict in the ancient world. This said, in contrast to modern, popular understandings of the term, the terrorism discussed in this volume is mostly perpetrated on behalf of states, not against them. The relative silence of ancient sources on non-state terrorism certainly justifies this focus, although co-editor Lee Brice’s technologically deterministic argument that non-state terrorism was all but impossible before the invention of gunpowder and mass media fails to convince.Of special interest is the article by Frank Russell: “Roman Counterinsurgency Policy and Practice in Judaea.”
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