War & Peace Quote by Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus

Vegetius is doing something sly with the word "courage": he demystifies it. In his formulation, bravery is not a divine spark or a personality trait you either have or don’t; it’s an output of training, literacy in the craft of war, and a mind stocked with usable knowledge. That’s a hard pivot away from the romantic soldier-hero and toward the soldier-technician, where confidence is earned the way muscle is earned: by repetition and competence.

The subtext is managerial, even political. Vegetius wrote in a late Roman world anxious about decline, where victories felt less inevitable and the army’s standards were a live argument about the empire’s future. Saying courage is "heightened" by professional knowledge quietly shifts blame and responsibility upward. If troops break, it’s not simply cowardice; it’s a failure of instruction, discipline, and institutional seriousness. Courage becomes a product the state can manufacture-or neglect.

Rhetorically, the line flatters both the rank-and-file and the commanders. It tells the soldier: your fear is rational, and your remedy is mastery. It tells leadership: invest in training because morale is not separate from logistics; it’s built into drills, tactics, equipment, and clarity of purpose. Vegetius’ point still lands because it reframes valor as something scalable. The bravest army isn’t the one with the most fearless men. It’s the one that best understands what it’s doing when fear arrives.