The art of generalship or the ability of successful leadership in a military context, as Addison perceptively observed, is not at all dependent on fortune or tyche (meaning in reality good luck) to ensure victory. Victory might be obtained through good luck just happening, but the soundest method of ensuring success relies on fastidious management in the camp and while on the march in conjunction with inspiring leadership on the field of battle. How many or how few generals in antiquity measure up to such a stringent assessment of their capabilities, their practice of the art of being a general, and so deserved the successes they obtained and their subsequent immortal fame? In the following chapters the discussion aligns to this focus. Julius Caesar, for example, makes frequent reference to ‘good fortune’ in his Gallic campaigns (Nolan), but he was an able if not the consummate manager of his military adventures, in Gaul, Italy, Spain and Greece in the first century BC. In political life he perhaps lacked that lightness of touch which his successor Augustus, only a moderately capable military leader, possessed in abundance. Leonidas, the Spartan king (Evans), and the Roman emperor Decius (Potter), on the other hand, no doubt both capable soldiers, found immortality not in success, but in two of the most famous defeats in the history of the Greeks and Romans: Thermopylae in 480 BC and Abritus in AD 251 respectively.

The importance to cultures in antiquity of success in military affairs can easily be measured by noting that Homer's Iliad, among the earliest surviving literary evidence for the history and civilisation of the ancient Greeks, is essentially a tale in verse about the flawed leadership of the protagonists: Agamemnon, Achilles and Hector. All are active participants in the military campaigning around Troy and the battles that took place there (Kucewicz). None is the perfect general, but Alexander the Great (336–323 BC), probably the greatest warrior general of history, and the most sublime practitioner of generalship, constantly sought to emulate these mythical figures; and he was not an isolated example.