For the next few posts, I want to take a look at how some 'tribal' peoples raised armies, in contrast to the way that ancient (or later) states raised armies. As moderns, we are so familiar with the way that states function that the far older systems of non-state organization and mobilization end up feeling quite alien: difficult to understand and to some modern observers, implausible. But these were real systems that really raised large armies which really did compete - sometimes quite successfully - with larger, more centrally organized states.
So we are going to look at how some of these armies were raised: first the social structures that provided the foundation for the system, then the non-state political structures which facilitated mobilizing the whole community collectively, and then finally discuss briefly the sort of armies that result from these systems. That means this week we'll be mostly focused on the structures of non-state agrarian societies, setting in place the building blocks from which we'll recruit our armies, rather than getting to much of the recruiting itself.
But this is also a useful opportunity to cover non-state societies generally and to explain what makes them non-state. I've found in online discussions that folks often want to blur this particular distinction and it is tempting to do because non-state polities often have structures that, at first blush, look like state institutions. You could absolutely describe a Gallic civitas (or 'tribe') in a way that makes it sound like a state on par with the Roman Republic (or vice-versa), but that requires ignoring important distinctions between institutions and customary, personalistic forms of non-state organization and governance, distinctions which ought not be blurred because they are quite meaningful.
Now we can't cover every sort of non-state organizing system and I don't intend to. Instead, we're going to look more narrowly at a broad 'family' of systems in pre-Roman 'barbarian Europe,' by which I mean a band of territory running from the interior of Spain (particularly the uplands of the Meseta), through what is today France (then Transalpine Gaul) and Northern Italy (then Cisalpine Gaul), into Germany and the broader Danube basin. To the Romans, the peoples of these regions were the Celtiberians (along with other Celtic-language speaking Spaniards the Romans and Greeks often grouped with them), the Gauls (living in what is today France, the Alps, Northern Italy and the broader Danube River basin) and to a lesser extent Germanic speaking peoples, a group the Romans will call the Germani, but who are not coterminous with modern Germans or German-language speakers, but broadly lived across the Rhine. We're also going to pick a time period, in particular we're going to focus on the period from the third century to the end of the first century BC, in part because that gives us a nice good chunk of literary evidence and also because it is where my own research tends to focus.
Now I want to note something right out: these are three different cultural groupings, with different and distinct material cultures and cultural practices. They do have similar military mobilization systems, which is why I think I can treat them here together, but of course any analysis like this is going to obscure some of those differences. So while this is intended as a general primer, one's next step in investigating any of these cultures would of course be to get specific, because each group is going to be different and indeed there will be differences within groups (that is, the Celtiberians are not exactly the same as other Celtic-language speakers in Spain, nor are all of the Gauls everywhere precisely the same, and so on).
Another thing to get out of the way, before we start is the language I am going to use to refer to these folks. Saying 'non-state polity' over and over again is terribly cumbersome and irritating. The normal English usage here would instead be to say 'tribe,' but that has all sorts of problems. For one, it mauls the Latin etymology, where a tribus is not a polity, but a component of one. But more broadly the word 'tribe' meaning a non-state polity bigger than a clan but smaller than a chiefdom is troublesome too, lot the least of which because the largest non-state polities aren't always run by a 'chief' or 'petty king.' Instead, I've increasingly come to borrow the Latin usage and describe these polities as civitates (sing. civitas), 'citizen-communities,' because that's what the Romans called them, both before and after they were conquered by Rome. That said, some uses of 'tribal' here are going to be unavoidable for clarity without spiraling into academic language, so I don't promise to entirely banish the word.
Likewise, I am going to use a lot of the terms the Romans use for components of this society: equites, principes, iuvenes and so on. These are necessarily imperfect: they are, after all, Latin words, translations not only of language but of concept for a Roman audience. But they're at least much closer to the original societies than their frequent modern translations, while the original words these societies - which do not write to us - used are long lost to us.
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Via
Wikipedia, the Gundestrup Cauldron, found in Denmark but apparently of La Tène manufacture (possibly from the broader Danube basin, given the motifs) and of uncertain date. Here it is handy because it shows neatly the social division in the recruitment of these societies, with the aristocrats, richly equipped in mail on horseback above, while the common small farmers are below.
I should not that the artwork of non-state Iron Age Europe doesn't tend to feature human figures very often, with the result that there are very few depictions of them - even fewer depictions of non-elite humans in basically any condition.
(Bibliography Note: The bibliography on these Iron Age (pre-Roman) non-state societies is, as you may imagine, fairly vast, but split across several languages, with work on the Gauls dominated by works in French, while scholarship on the Celtiberians is overwhelmingly done in Spanish and work on Roman-era Germanic-language speakers split over quite a few languages. On Gallic warfare, the standard references, though somewhat aged, on Gallic warfare are J.-L. Brunaux, Guerre et Religion en Gaule, Essai D'Anthropologie Celtique (2004) and J.-L. Brunaux and B. Lambot, Armement et Guerre chez les Gaulois (1987). Particularly useful for the current effort is N. Roymans, Tribal Societies in Northern Gaul: An Anthropological Perspective (1990), which offers an overview of social structures in Gaul, including both Celtic-language and Germanic-language speaking peoples. On the Celtiberians, the best starting place is certainly F. Quesada Sanz, Weapons, Warriors & Battles of Ancient Iberia (2023), trans. E. Clowes and P.S. Harding-Vera, a translation of the original F. Quesada Sanz Armas de la antigua Iberia: De Tartesos a Numancia (2010). For more detail than this, one must rapidly dive into Spanish however. On Celtiberian social structures and their ties to war, in particular, P. Ciprés, Guerra y Sociedad en la Hispania Indoeuropea (1993). Meanwhile, the Oxford Handbook of the European Iron Age, C. Haselgrove et al. eds. (2023) is finally actually published (somewhat ironically just a couple of months are I joked about its status) and offers wide-ranging overviews both regionally and topically, though it is - as much such handbooks are - priced for libraries, not for mortals.)
The Subsistence Basis
As I've noted in the past, one of the best ways to start thinking about any historical society is to begin with the subsistence foundation it is built on, because how people get food to eat and other basic necessities is going to shape everything else in a society. Because subsistence structures the daily labor of the vast majority of any pre-modern society, it dictates the daily and seasonal rhythms of life, the major concerns everyone is focused on (how to get enough food to live), and thus the social structures created around those constraints.
And here, there tends to be quite a lot of confusion. The Roman-era Gauls and Germani tend to exist in popular culture as the 'barbarians' par excellance and so get pulled in with lots of 'barbarian' tropes (which we have discussed) even when they don't apply here. So they're depicting as always eating a lot of meat and living in the middle of dense forests, to the point that people often think of Gauls or Germani as being nomadic herders eating meat all of the time, or even hunter-gatherers, because that's how they imagine 'barbarians.'
And that is...quite wrong!
All of these people we're looking at - Celt-language speakers in Spain, the Gauls (who are also Celtic-language-speakers) and the Germani - were all agrarian societies, which is to say the main source of subsistence, providing the vast majority of calories for everyday life was farming, particularly cereal farming. Why cereal farming? Because wheat (and barley) as crops can support a lot more people for a given unit of land or labor than basically any other option available to these societies, so they tend to dominate. This being Europe and Europe having received its farming system from Egypt and the Near East, that means the primary crop is wheat, supported by things like barley and rye, along the horticulture of vegetables. One difference from our discussion of ancient Mediterranean farming is that the other two legs of the Mediterranean triad - olives and grapes - are less common in this period outside of Spain (south Spain actually ends up as a big olive production region in the Roman period). Wine cultivation in what is today France is mostly a product of the Roman period; in the pre-Roman (that is, pre-58BC) period, wine is an expensive import good in Gaul, whereas beer is the locally produced alcohol.
These societies are, of course, also engaging in some animal husbandry, but it is not of the nomadic sort we discussed with the Mongols, instead it seems to be a mix of transhumant pastoralism of the sort we discussed back when we talked about cloth production or else ranching. In the latter case, in these sorts of agricultural economies, ranching animals for meat (like cows) is a capital-intensive endeavor - cows are expensive and you could support a lot more people turning that pasture over to wheat - and so it tends to be done by the rich to produce what are, in effect, luxury foods. It is the case that these societies, especially the elite may have eaten rather more meat than the general populace in the more densely populated, more urban societies of the Mediterranean, but these folks are not primarily pastoralists eating a meat-and-dairy diet, they're mostly farmers supplementing a diet that is primarily made up of grains (and beer made from grains) with fruit, vegetables, meat and dairy - relatively small amounts (by modern standards) for all but the very wealthy.
That cereal-farming based subsistence system is going to determine a whole mess of social structures which are then going to be essential for understanding how these societies raise armies, particularly because, without state institutions, these social structures are all these societies have with which to organize military force. Effectively the subsistence system here is going to determine both the basic building block that exist for an army to be built out of and also the relations between those blocks. Now outlining all of the complex ways cereal farming shape pre-modern societies would be a blog series in its own, but fortunately, we already did that series, so I can just hit the basics here and those of you who want more information can head over and read the full farming series.
The vast majority of societies of this sort consist of what we may call peasant farmers: households that exist on effectively the smallest possible size of farm that can support their family. They may own this farm, or they may be tenants or sharecroppers on land owned by large landholders, the 'Big Men,' we'll get to in a moment. The pressures that produce this accumulation at the bottom are fairly simple: families both tend to split up farms over generations, because parents want all of their children to be able to make a living, while at the same time farming households tend to grow to the limit of what their farm can support, because folks don't generally want to kick their family members out to starve if they don't have to. The natural result is that, even as new land may be cleared and brought under cultivation and the population may be growing, most farming households accumulate at the same basic minimum of subsistence and just a bit more.
For these small farmers on the edge of subsistence, the main problem is risk and variability. Farming is unpredictable and a failure in yields means starvation, consequently, society is largely shaped by the risk-mitigation strategies of small farmers. In particular, farmers tend to form dense horizontal social networks (meaning networks with social equals - other peasant farmers) with other farmers so they can rely on the help of other peasant farmers in bad times. That means village or town society is not a bunch of atomized households, but a very dense network of interconnected families who all have ties and pull on each other. These 'clan' ties mean a lot in these societies, because you rely on them to eat when times are rough.
Big Men and Small Farmers
The small farmers also cultivate vertical ties with our next group of people, the large landholders or 'Big Men.' We term these relationships patron-client relationships and the general system is often called 'clientelism' (or as the Romans would have it, clientela or patrocinium). Because while there are all sorts of pressures that tend to cause households to accumulate at subsistence, socially, you can also see the potential for a family with a lot of land - because land is the primary productive resource - to achieve 'escape velocity' as it were. With enough wealth (in land), a landholder can invest in expensive capital - mills, animals, tools - to make his already large landholdings more efficient (and also to 'loan' out on favorable-to-the-landholder terms to those who don't have them). With enough wealth (in land), that same landholder can also shape political and social institutions to his benefit.
The small farmers here might be tenants, farming on land owned by the Big Men with their Big Farms, or they might own their own small plots but be substantially reliant on the Big Man anyway. When a family needs more land to farm because they have more mouths to feed, they'll need to sharecrop or rent that land from the Big Man. When they need food or money to cover a bad harvest, they'll go into debt to the Big Man. When they need capital (in objects, not money) they can't produce - tools, mills, draft-animals, weapons - they'll need to rely on the Big Man. When they need justice, their property protected or their disputes resolved, they'll need to go to the Big Man for it. The big man is the patron, the small farmer the client.
What that means is that these 'big men' tend to become the leaders - or despots, if you prefer - of their local society, especially because of their key roles in resolving disputes and redistributing wealth. Nathan Goldwag actually had an excellent examination of these sorts of structures as they appear, in an idealized form, in J.R.R. Tolkien's Shire among the Hobbits. Modern folks, because their lives are so extensively structured by the state, tend to imagine that without the state - in a 'state of nature' - they'd be more free, but that is not the case! Instead, the rule of these local Big Men (along with the social pressures created by the need to maintain those horizontal relationships) can be quite suffocating and total; the Big Man often feels quite fine to regulate elements of one's life that all but the most totalitarian of states might well deem private. To be fair to the Big Men, they tend to imagine their role much as Tolkien does, as generous and benevolent overseers of society and in some cases their peasants might even agree; people in the past tended to believe their own values, after all. That said, one cannot help but notice that any time the little folk are given a chance to limit the power of the Big Men, they do so, so on the whole one cannot say that the little folk were always so enamored of the guidance of the Big Men.
Economically, the Big Men are large landholders, but that doesn't just mean they are a larger version of the small farmers. The key thing that distinguishes the Big Man, from an economic perspective, is that he has a large surplus, both in absolute terms, but also relative to overall production. Because the Big Man runs his estate to produce wealth, rather than to support a family, he can cut labor down closer to what the land actually requires (whereas peasant households, as units of labor, are almost always too large for their farms). At the same time, he can employ riskier strategies or shift risk on to the little farmers, enabling great efficiency in production, by, for instance, specializing in certain crops. And he has a lot more capital - animals, tools, and so on - which also improve yields.
Via
Wikipedia, the Vachères warrior, from Vachères France, now in the Museum Calvet, in Avignon, France (inv. G136c), dating to the first century BC. There are a lot of really fanciful romantic paintings and images of what a Gallic aristocrat might have looked like, but I find that this sort of sculpture - from the period and the region, although there is clearly some Mediterranean influence in its composition - is far more valuable. When you think of Gallic aristocrats, think about this fellow, with his fine mail coat (a
fantastically expensive piece of equipment) and broad shield. He would have almost certainly fought mounted most of the time.
That surplus production can in turn be used to support people doing things other than farming. That might be craftspeople producing goods that farming households can't (like metal tools and weapons), or it might be thugs who help the Big Man enforce his idea of 'justice.' Or it might be poets and artists who produce things that reinforce the idea that the rule of the Big Man is Right and Just and Good. It might also be mobilizing the community towards collective works, like building a town wall, usually with the Big Man employing the specialists directly and using his little farmers - his clients - as the bulk labor. He might also use his wealth to create all sorts of prestige goods he can use as gifts or - even better, especially from the perspective of our relatively poor non-state societies - acquire prestige objects from wealthier foreign societies (we'll come back to this in just a moment). All of which feeds back into the vertical relationships, because he can then provide these things to smaller farmers who cannot acquire or produce them themselves, the big man's end up the reciprocal bargain (though, again, because the Big Man has the power here, the bargains favor him).
Now these are general features of clientelism - or as the Romans would say, clientela - in agrarian societies, but obviously the precise structure of these patronage relationships is going to vary. While archaeology can clue us in to emerging social hierarchies - we can see Big Men archaeologically because they have lavish burials, for instance - it cannot tell us much about the underlying customs and social relationships, as unlike grave goods or human remains, customs do not survive when buried in the ground. There, we are reliant on literary sources and here of course comes the immediate problem: all of our literary sources about Gauls, Celtiberians and Germani are written by Greeks and Romans, who not only have their own agendas but may not particularly understand these communities. They're also translating local customs, which can blur terms and meanings as well, but we have no real way to work our way back to the pre-translated (both lingustically and culturally) original. We're stuck with the sources we have.
Nevertheless, it is what we have. Our literary sources comment repeatedly on the clientelistic structure of these societies, particularly Gallic society (e.g. Polyb. 2.17.12, Caes. BGall. 6.11-13, 6.15.2, Diod. Sic. 5.29.2, for the Germani, note Tac. Germ 13-14), but only rarely in any great amount of detail. Caesar, in his Comentarii de bello Gallico ("Commentaries on the Gallic Wars") offers the most sustained descriptions. On the one hand, he comments, seemingly picking up on the way that aristocrats would protect their clients that, "It seems to have been instituted for this purpose since ancient times, so that no one of the commons should be in want of help against the more powerful, that no one [of the aristocrats] suffers one of his own to be oppressed or defrauded, for if he does otherwise, he won't have any authority among his own at all" (Caes. BGall 6.11.4). That sounds relatively good.
On the other hand, Caesar says about the overall balance of power in Gallic society that, "the plebs [by which he means the commons] are held almost in the condition of slaves" because "the man, oppressed either by debt or by the magnitude of their payments [read: rents, Latin: tributum] or by the injustice of the power, give themselves in servitude to the aristocrats [nobiles, lit: 'the notable ones']: they have the same rights in all things over them as a master does over slaves" (Caes. BGall. 6.13.2). Even as oligarchicly minded, no Roman is going to write that that "the plebs are held almost in the condition of slaves" as a good thing and I think the clear implication of this line is that even Caesar is somewhat taken aback by just how strongly subordinated the little farmers are in this system.
That's not actually so surprising. Again, folks tend to assume that absent government structures, the little guy gets a fairer shake, but a big part of the development that we see in early civic governments (e.g. Solon's reforms at Athens, or the Struggle of the Orders in Rome) is that the civic expression of the state tended to provide a mechanism by which the commons might demand better treatment than what came before. Of course, we also want to be aware of just how limited that evidence is: Caesar is describing the customs in one part of Gaul and we simply lack a similar discussion of power-distance in Celtiberia or the rest of the La Tène material culture sphere (broadly associated with Gallic settlement) or among Germanic-language speakers. Still, Caesar's assessment ought to caution us against assuming that these relationships were generally ideal or that farmers living before the advent of the state lived in some anarchic utopia.
Aristocrats and Retinues
So at this point, we have vertical relationships between the small farmer clients and their aristocratic Big Men, and horizontal relationships amongst the small farmers. That leaves, of course, horizontal relationships between the aristocrats.
Now we'll get into how these aristocrats fight and how they are equipped a little later in the series, but we do have to note at the outset these are not just military aristocrats but warrior aristocrats. I often use the term 'military aristocrats' to describe a social aristocracy whose existence is largely justified through its military role - that is, this is how it generates legitimacy. But of course that military role can be about political and military leadership (the Roman nobiles are a good example of this) rather than personal martial valor. And certainly our non-state principes do serve as the military leaders, the generals and officers, of their societies. But what we see in artwork and especially in burial customs hammers home how quite a lot of their social position is based on their role as warriors, to the point that it seems like the possession of arms was a requirement for full membership in these communities (a point we'll come back to).
Via
Wikimedia Commons, a picture by Jean-Pierre Dalbéra of a Celtiberian fibula - third or second century - now in the Museo Arqueológico Nacional Madrid (inv. 22925), showing a mounted Celtiberian aristocrat.
Now of course, not all of the large landholders are equally large landholders. Some of these Big Men are very big, while others are merely large. To the small farmers socially clustered around them, the difference probably doesn't matter that much, but of course in the relations between these men it might matter a great deal.
Now once again, relationships between aristocrats are not typically something our sources allow us a lot of insight into. But we can see some things. First, our sources, particularly the Latin-language sources, tend to distinguish between two layers of the aristocracy: the broad aristocracy they call the equites ('horseman, cavalry') while there is a sub-group of these they call the principes ('first men, chief men'). In essence, you have little Big Men (equites) and Big Big Men (principes). From what we see, it is the principes that generally hold the reins of government, but we'll come back to that next week.
Now of course a note of caution: I am going to use these Latin terms - equites and principes - because they are what our sources use, but of course no Celtiberian or Gaul is going to be calling themselves this because these are Latin terms. However, I think it is better to use the words our sources do than - as some translators are wont - import later terms like 'noble' or 'knight' or 'chief,' because those modern English terms come with a lot of baggage. I don't want to imply, for instance, that these fellows exist with a rigid order of titles like the late medieval aristocracy - they certainly don't appear to! And a 'chief' may as well refer to elected leaders in some societies, hereditary ones in others. Here, equites in the sense of 'men rich enough to afford horses' and principes in the sense of 'leading men' will do just fine, even if we have to be aware that our Latin sources are bending some - unknowable to us - original word and meaning to suit Roman political terminology.
What we also see is that the most powerful of these principes are often able to form their own personal retinues, often mounted. The Aedui princeps Dumnorix had a private cavalry guard, while the Sotiates principes Adiatunnus was reported to have some six hundred permanent retainers (Caes. BGall. 1.18, 3.22). A Celtiberian aristocrat, Allucius, raised a handpicked force of 1,400 cavalry (Livy 26.50.14). These individuals are, of course, surely exceptional and these numbers may be inflated, but the point is these permanent retainers are unlikely to be drawn from the small farmer clients - rather, they're the product of horizontal relationships between aristocrats. You can tell, to be blunt, because these fellows are mostly mounted and poor farmers both do not have horses and have not practiced to fight on horseback.
There are a few different structures for horizontal relationships between aristocrats, some we can see clearly in the sources and some we might assume from the structure of these societies. Crucially, unlike the vassalage-based polities you may be more familiar with, these ties seem to have often been less formal and rigid, though no less binding. In particular, all of these Big Men don't necessarily owe allegiance to a singular king - most of these polities do not have kings and what kings they have are more first among equals than true monarchs - but rather are bound together by these horizontal ties and (we'll get to this next time) relatively weak communal governing institutions.
One form we see clearly are marriage alliances between aristocrats, frequently between different civitates, establishing bonds that might reach across the relatively fragile polities of non-state societies. Thus part of the root of Dumnorix' power were a set of marriage alliances, including not just his own marriage but also those of his mother (presumably a second marriage) and his sisters (Caes. BGall. 1.18). Likewise, the Chatti and Cherusci seem to have had a habit of intermarrying to form alliances (e.g. Tac. Ann. 11.16.2, Strabo 7.1.4).
But it is equally clear that the very biggest Big Men must also have taken smaller aristocrats as their clients as well, though our sources rarely get this granular. Whereas the relationship between the Big Men and their small farmers was effectively one of domination, the relationships between aristocrats was couched in terms of friendship, hospitality and gift exchange. This is what Polybius means when he says that the Gauls "placed a great emphasis on friendship" - sure, everyone likes having friends, but he means a rather particular, political form of friendship. So for a very big Big Man, many of the horseman in his cavalry retinue are other, slightly smaller aristocrats who hold close to him for the things he can provide.
And what can the biggest of Big Men provide? Well, of course, one advantage is that these fellows tend to be the central organizing figures in political factions and thus have access to power. But they also have greater access to goods and wealth and here we get into the role of a gift economy. To maintain their position, these aristocrats need to participate in gift-exchange with other aristocrats (and possibly with some important clients) and so need suitably impressive gifts to give. Remember, these relationships are not set in stone, so everyone in this system may be continually recalculating who it is in their advantage to support. So the wealthy and powerful Big Man is going to look for opportunities - in that feasting, hospitality and gift exchange - to display that he is the 'correct choice' for other aristocrats to support. That means giving high prestige gifts, with the inequality of the gifts often being the point of the exchange, a visual, public expression of the inequality and reciprocity between you.
If that makes no sense, consider it playing out for a moment (or alternately, you can read Beowulf, where these sorts of exchanges happen at multiple points): the wealthier aristocrat holds a feast and his junior retainers visit. They know that gift-exchange is expected and that their fellow aristocrats will judge their status and importance based on the gifts they bring, so they bring some pretty nice things. But the senior aristocrat has to outdo them all in his counter-gifts both to show that he can provide positive benefits to his retainers (in exchange for their military service) and to display his own wealth and power. Looking at burial evidence, it seems pretty clear that for the upper-most tier of aristocrats, expensive imported goods served a valuable purpose here. If your junior aristocrat offers you some, say, good locally produced beer and you respond with imported Greek wine, you've not only outdone him, but you've signaled that - unlike these local elites - you, the bigger Big Man, are plugged into to much wider, cross-regional networks of exchange and patronage. That is a very valuable message!
Another form of horizontal aristocratic bond we see are warrior bands of 'youths,' often analogized with the Irish fian. Our Latin sources typically call these fellows iuvenes, 'youths,' a term in Latin that indicates an individual in their late teens or twenties. We'll come back to these fellows later, but I want to tag their existence now: one 'feature' of these sorts of polities is the struggle of the formal political leadership to actually control their societies iuvenes, who might otherwise be engaging in private military action, formed into smaller warrior societies or bands. It's not hard to see how these bands of aristocratic 'youths' might transition, as those young men one by one inherit their fathers' wealth and estates, into lasting political bonds. Indeed, one imagines that, for the son of a smaller big man, attaching yourself to the warrior band of the son of a much larger big man might be a pretty good strategy for political and economic advancement, in time.
Finally, it seems very likely that aristocrats also engaged permanent, full-time retainers. Our sources rarely comment on these fellows - if you've picked up the sense that our sources rarely look below the most powerful of the principes, you would be correct - but the size of some of the retinues we see seem to necessitate their existence. The exception to this are warrior-retainers called devoti in Latin and apparently soldurii by at least some of the Gauls (Caes. BGall. 3.22). These followers reportedly pledge their lives to their leader, promising that should he die violently, they would die with him or else commit suicide; Plutarch (Sert. 14.4) reports the same custom in Spain; in exchange, they're maintained in the leader's household. Of course this gets comment from our sources precisely because they think it is so unusual from a Greek or Roman perspective, though the sense we get is that this was not unusual in these cultures. No source tells us where these fellows would come from, but to think by analogy to other similar societies, the second sons of the lesser elite - men trained to fight like aristocrats, but without the wealth to sustain that lifestyle - would make a lot of sense.
So we have a lot of systems - marriages and other kinship relations, hospitality and ritualized friendship, warrior bands and full-time retainers - that bind these aristocrats together. And then those aristocrats, in turn, have most of the poorer rural population bound to them as clients, tying the whole society together without state institutions. These are the ties that these societies will use to mobilize armies in the absence of state institutions. In some sense, as we'll see, what makes a polity - the civitas - is less a clear political boundary than simply a group of aristocrats that regularly work together because they are bound by these ties.
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