HKB
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Often appears with: supply, logistics, and encampment · battle and tactics · xenoetas · tigris · siege and fortification · molon’s camp · military discipline and training · flooded river · engineers and improvised bridges · crossing the tigris
Usually: narrative (2) · crisis of belief (1) · sudden reversal of fortune (1)
Pressured by soldiers’ impatience, Jovian and officers resist crossing the flooded Tigris; selected Gauls and northern Germans force a night passage, signal success, and engineers plan bridges with bladders and animal hides.
report being spread that we were at no great distance from our own frontier, the army raised an impatient shout, and demanded to be at once led across the Tigris. 12. But the emperor and his officers opposed this demand, and showed them that the river, now just at the time of the rising of the Dogstar, was much flooded, entreated them not to trust themselves to its dangerous currents, reminding them that most of the…
Xenoetas, initially successful, attempts to cross the Tigris after Molon’s men claim Molon’s army will defect, but Molon’s night positioning and marshy ground trap the attackers.
[Sidenote: Xenoetas at first successful.] The fact was that when the general Xenoetas had been despatched with absolute powers, as I have before stated, his unexpected elevation caused him to treat his friends with haughtiness and his enemies with overweening temerity. His first move however was sufficiently prudent. He marched to Seleucia, and after sending for Diogenes the governor of Susiana, and Pythiades the co…