They dismissed from military service the soldiers who had served their full time except 8,000 who had asked to remain.  These they took back and divided between themselves and formed them in praetorian cohorts.

(Appian, Civil Wars, Bk V.3)

From the moment of its birth, in 44 B.C., the Praetorian Guard was shaped by a fundamental duality as to its nature and role. The volunteer soldiers of Julius’ Caesar’s veteran legionaries, who had fought at his side and under his command from Africa to Gallia and from Iberia to Thracia -his elite, most loyal troops, were divided by his two successors, Octavianus and Marcus Antonius, into two personal bodyguards whose mission it was to protect and defend their respective masters. After Marcus Antonius’ final defeat, in 31 B.C., Caesar’s nephew recombined his and Antonius’ guards in a standing force of nine cohorts stationed in and around Rome.  As long as Augustus lived, the Praetorians’ loyalty and devotion towards the Princeps -their patron, protector, and paymaster- was never in doubt.

In time, the Praetorian Guard evolved into “a powerful and influential branch of the government involved in public security, civil administration, and ultimately political intercession“; and the rise and fall -and death!- of many future emperors was due directly to the personal allegiances and interests of the Praetorian Prefects and the Guards under their command.  Yet the Guards never lost their original function of an elite fighting corps who accompanied some of Rome’s greatest emperor-generals in Dacia and Parthia (Trajan) and Germania (Marcus Aurelius) to assist not only in the conquest, but also in the pacification of new territories and their conversion into well-administered roman provinces. Elite fighting units of the largest empire the world had ever known, deployed to expand, protect and preserve Roman rule and Roman law – yet also Palace Guards constituting the last line of defense for their imperial benefactor – or principal tool of his downfall and replacement: the original duality which had shaped the Praetorian Guard from its moment of inception never truly disappeared – but became more pronounced and difficult to grasp with the passage of time. The key role, unsurprisingly, was played by the personal leadership skills and the ability to inspire respect, loyalty and devotion of each emperor; thus Augustus, Tiberius, Trajan and Marcus Aurelius had the total allegiance of the Guard and used it primarily in the field, to expand and consolidate the Roman Empire and maintain the pax romana; lesser emperors used it to protect themselves from their rivals – and often fell under the Guard’s swords as the Pretorians chose a new emperor more attuned to their needs and personal interests.

Roman imperial guard, bas-relief from the Julio-Claudian period.

Armed forces across the globe today have inherited this central duality of the ancient Roman Guards: they all become increasingly specialized either as elite units to be deployed at a moment’s notice in far-away theaters of war to defeat enemies and restore order, peace and civil concord, and thus to maintain and protect the existing  global order described, by both proponents and opponents as pax americana; or they remain staunchly loyal to national leaders and protect them and their ruling elites primarily against the threats of insurrection and revolt arising from their own citizens or political rivals. UN and NATO troops as well as Republican and Revolutionary Guards or People’s Armies can rightly claim to be true descendants of the Roman Praetorians who lived, fought and died over two millenia ago.

Michael Mann’s brilliant exposition of the networks of social power and his integration of political, economic, ideological AND military power into his analytical model of investigation of how states, societies and regimes across the world rise, develop and fall taught us again that we must focus on all four of these dimensions of power and the complex ways they interact and reshape each other in particular times and places; no one dimension can be understood in isolation from the other, nor can global processes be explained based on any one, totalizing variable.  For both historical and ideological reasons, the Eurocentric, liberal paradigm of post-modern governance too often ignores the military dimension of social power, rejecting it as a retrograde and unjustifiable tool of policy formation and implementation, and resorts to it reluctantly, begrudgingly, almost ashamedly.  Post-Modern Praetorians, the UN, NATO, EU and US troops deployed around the world seem, in general (but not always!), to have lost popular recognition as an acceptable tool of public policy and be seen, at best, as a necessary evil and, at worst, as tools of dominance, conquest, injustice and repression.

Bereft of such pangs of conscience, 21st century dictators and autocrats do not hesitate to use military force to both consolidate their internal rule and to project power across their borders, challenging the nascent global order based on principles of democracy, human rights, rule of law and respect for diversity in the name of principles of national sovereignty, independence and difference which only serve to legitimize and justify their arbitrary hold on power at all costs. Stuck in a modernity based on the primacy and power of the territorially-defined, sovereign nation-state, such rulers rely on their Modern Praetorians to acquire, exercise and expand their personal power, in a world which no longer can permit or afford the self-serving, narrow-minded, and morally bankrupt deployment of military power to mask the political, economic and ideological failings of such regimes.

As Mann noted, military power is not the ony aspect, nor even the determinant aspect, of social power and global order; but it remains nonetheless a critical one. It is from the clash of theese Modern and Post-Modern Praetorians, both inheritors of one fundamental aspect of the dual nature of Augustus’ Praaetorian Guards, that will arise a new paradigm of military power for the 21st century and beyond.  I hope my studies of War in the Modern World will allow me to better understand this process of formation of the military network of power which will play such a central role in re-shaping our futures for decades, maybe centuries to come.