AELIAN (AELIANUS TAcTicus), Greek military writer of the 2nd century A.D., resident at Rome. He is sometimes confused with his namesake Claudius Aelianus (q.v.). Aelian's military treatise, T aKT LK?) 0€oopla, is dedicated to Hadrian, though this is probably a mistake for Trajan, and the date A.D. 1°6 has been assigned to it. It is a handbook of Greek, i.e. Macedonian, drill and tactics as practised by the Hellenistic successors of Alexander the Great. The author claims to have consulted all the best authorities, the chief of which was a lost treatise on the subject by Polybius. Perhaps the chief value of Aelian's work lies in his critical account of preceding works on the art of war and in the fullness of his technical details in matters of drill. Critics of the 18th century thought Aelian greatly inferior to Arrian, but on the Byzantines, and on the Arabs, who translated the text for their own use, Aelian exercised a great influence. The emperor Leo VI. incorporated much of Aelian's text in his own work on the military art. The Arabic version of Aelian was made about 135o. The copious details to be found in the treatise made it valuable to the organizers of the i6th century. The Macedonian phalanx of Aelian had many points of resemblance to the solid masses of pikemen and the "squadrons" of cavalry of the Spanish and Dutch systems, and the translations made in the i6th century formed the groundwork of numerous books on drill and tactics. It has been suggested that Aelian was the real author of most of Arrian's Tactics, and that the T aKTLICi Oecopla is a later revision of this original, but the theory is not generally accepted.
See Baumgartner's trans. in his Sammlung alley Kriegsschriftsteller der Griechen (Mannheim and Frankenthal, 5779), reproduced in 5786 as Von Schlachtordnungen, trans. Viscount Dillon (1814). See also R. Forster, Studien zu den griechischen Taktikern (Hermes, xii. 1877, PP. • F. Wilstenfeld, Das der Muhammedaner and die arabische Uebersetzung der Taktik des Aelianus (Gottingen, 188o) ; M. Jahns, Gesch. der Kriegswissenschaften, i. 95-97 (Munich, 5889) ; Rtistow and Kochly, Gesch. des griechischen Kriegswesens (5852) ; A. de Lort-Serignan, La Phalange (188o) ; P. Serre, Etudes sur l'histoire militaire et maritime des Grecs et des Romains (1887) ; K. K. Muller, in Pauly-Wissowa, Realencyklopiidie (Stuttgart, 1894).