Sir Sandwiches and Shirt Stays: Military Style

The fact that the military is stylized at all levels, more rigorously codified than any other subgroup in virtually all it does, probably comes from the fact that the action that defines its core in theory, if not as a majority of its time, namely killing people in battle, isn't amenable to any degree of stylization at all. The amazing thing is that military style is correctly transmitted outside the style center to the provinces, as Roman theaters and Corinthian columns spread from the Italian peninsula to the farthest-flung outposts of the Empire: still tending to be startled when, in places like Libya, Lebanon, or the British Isles, finding an intact theater or the same domestic sculpture dug up near Trajan's Forum, back in the center of it all. Here, Fleming features military funerals are so stylized precisely because the deaths that led to them were undoubtedly so chaotic.