Truce and strategy

1 passages · search this phrase →

Often appears with: treaties, truces, and peacemaking · strategy and the aims of war · siege negotiations · siege and fortification · roman military ethics · perseus

Usually: argument (1) · betrayal (1) · the stranger's arrival (1) · skepticism (1)

Essays of Michel de Montaigne — Volume 02 primary

Michel de Montaigne · c. 1580–1588 (for the bulk of the Essays; this volume’s contents belong to the later, expanded Book I as printed in Montaigne’s lifetime)
BOOK THE FIRST > CHAPTER V (1/2)

In discussing siege policy, Montaigne weighs whether a governor should go out to parley, recounting Roman cases where deception and truce timing caused disasters, and concluding that modern rules treat parleys as especially dangerous.

WHETHER THE GOVERNOR OF A PLACE BESIEGED OUGHT HIMSELF TO GO OUT TO PARLEY Quintus Marcius, the Roman legate in the war against Perseus, King of Macedon, to gain time wherein to reinforce his army, set on foot some overtures of accommodation, with which the king being lulled asleep, concluded a truce for some days, by this means giving his enemy opportunity and leisure to recruit his forces, which was afterwards the…