As the frontiers of the empire stabilized, the role of the army changed. Gone were the days of continuous conquest and now the army could expect to be largely immobile for years at a time. Augustus had settled the number of legionaries at about 150,000, and a total of twenty-eight to thirty legions was maintained in the first two centuries ad. They were stationed along the more vulnerable frontiers of the empire. The Rhine had been allocated eight legions in 23 bc but as things became calmer four were seen to be enough. Further east along the Danube was the most vulnerable area, and in ad 150 ten legions, a third of the entire army, were stationed there. Eight legions were allocated to the eastern border, three to Britain, and two to the whole of north Africa. Thus over half of the legions were strung along the Danube-Euphrates axis. This was why Rome became increasingly marginalized as a command centre and why, in the fourth century, Constantine was to choose what had hitherto been the Greek city of Byzantium, at the fulcrum of this axis, as his new capital, Constantinople. In the west, cities north of Rome such as Mediolanum, the modern Milan, and Trier, now became used as imperial capitals. (For the army in general, see Simon James, Rome and the Sword: How Warriors and Weapons Shaped Roman History, London and New York, 2011, and Nigel Pollard and Joanne Berry, The Complete Roman Legions, London and New York, 2012.)
The army was the focus of an enormous official bureaucracy that kept records of every detail of its day-to-day life, its effective strength, and its operations. It offered a well-defined career for those who joined it, and as citizenship, the main criterion for entry to the army, spread, it drew on a larger and larger pool of the subject peoples of the empire. Greeks had never been enthusiastic recruits and by the end of the second century Italians were a rarity. The recruiting grounds were now Gaul, Spain, Syria, and, especially important in providing tough leaders in the later empire, the Balkans. Legions could now raise men locally instead of having to wait for recruits from Italy. There was adequate pay and a set period of service, though there were complaints on occasions that soldiers were not released when their period of service was over. Emperors would supplement the pay with bonuses on special occasions. The main drawback to army life was that a legionary could not contract a legal marriage, though, in practice, stable relationships appear to have been common and the male children of these accepted as recruitable citizens. In the reign of Septimius Severus (193-211) marriages were finally allowed.
Each legion had a nominal strength of some 5,000 infantrymen and 120 cavalry. (The evidence from the Vindolanda tablets (see below, p. 513) suggests that the fighting strength of a unit was significantly lower as a result of secondment, illness, desertion, or leave.) The infantrymen were well protected and heavily armed. Their helmets were made of bronze with an iron skull-plate inside and the upper parts of their bodies were covered in a cuirass. They carried two javelins with which to make first contact with an enemy and a sword for hand-to-hand fighting. Discipline was rigid and training, in theory, constant. A handbook on military training by Flavius Vegetius Renatus, written in the fourth and fifth centuries ad but referring back to earlier times, sums up the legions’ strengths.
The Roman people owed the conquest of the world to no other cause than military training, discipline in their camps, and practice in warfare. What chance would the small number of Romans have had against the multitude of Gauls? How could they have ventured, with their small stature, against the tall Germans? It is clear that the Spaniards excelled our men not only in numbers but in physical strength. . . and no one doubts that we were surpassed by the Greeks in skills and intelligence. But against all these we prevailed by skilful selection of recruits, by teaching, as I have said, the principles of war, by hardening them in daily exercise, by acquainting them beforehand through field manoeuvres with everything that can happen in the line of march and in battles, and by severe punishment for indolence. For knowledge of military science nourishes boldness in combat. No one fears to do what he is confident he has done well. . . (Translation: N. Lewis and M. Reinhold)
The legions were normally stationed at or close to the frontier, in those provinces allocated to the emperor in Augustus’ settlement of 27 Bc. The emperor was thus, in effect, their supreme commander and at times of crisis was expected to lead them in battle. In some cases, such as Claudius’ conquest of Britain, this leadership was token. In others—the Flavian emperors, for instance—the emperors were military men and probably more at home in the army than elsewhere. Marcus Aurelius is the classic example of an emperor with no military experience or pretensions taking his duties as supreme commander with great seriousness. As noted above, the legions always showed special respect for an emperor who shared their life with them while on campaign and throughout the empire military success was fundamental to the emperor’s status.
Each legion was commanded by a senator who had reached the status of a praetor. Like the emperor he might have had little military experience as the career path of an able senator would include both civil and military commands. By the third century, as pressures built up on the empire, command was increasingly given to those, many of them equestrians, who had had longer experience in the field. Under the commander were six tribunes, younger men, most of them, again, equestrians, some of whom would be seeking a senatorial career. The career officers were the centurions who had made their way up from the ranks. These were graded by seniority and the most senior, the primus pilus, was a man of great authority and experience who was paid a substantial salary and enough on discharge to make him eligible for equestrian status. In a society where inherited status remained important, the army was a major instrument of social mobility, a means by which a man could achieve respected status purely through merit. A fine example, from the first half of the second century ad, is Quintus Lollius Urbicus, the son of a Berber landowner from the small town of Tiddis in the province of Africa. His career as an army officer took him to the ends of the empire. He served first in Asia, then in Judaea, where he was involved in the suppression of the Jewish revolt of 132-5. He then served along the Rhine and Danube borders before being made governor in Britain, from where he campaigned into Scotland. Finally he was made prefect of the city of Rome, an extraordinary career for one whose origins were so modest.
With the changed conditions of the first and second centuries the legions became settled in bases, normally stone fortresses laid out on a standardized pattern. The most sedentary legion seems to have been Legion III Augusta that supervised the African frontier between 31 Bc and ad 238. (Its base for 200 years at Lambaesis, in modern Algeria, is the best-preserved legionary fort anywhere in the world.) Civilian settlements often grew up around these settled legions. The trappings of Roman culture, baths and amphitheatres, would appear and the whole complex would have a major impact on the local economy. With time the legion would become integrated with the local community, even recruiting its men locally. The local administration could call on the legionaries’ skills as engineers, surveyors, and builders. At Dura-Europus on the eastern frontier soldiers were to be found building the city baths and its amphitheatre.
The danger was lax discipline. A report to the emperor Lucius Verus in ad 165 complained of a Syrian legion whose soldiers were wandering around the region, often drunk and not used even to carrying arms. Earlier Hadrian had spotted the problem that he knew would arise after he had called a halt to expansion. He is recorded travelling through one province after another inspecting all the garrisons and forts. According to the historian Dio Cassius:
He personally viewed and investigated absolutely everything, not merely the usual installations of the camps, such as weapons, engines, trenches, ramparts and palisades, but also the private affairs of everyone, both of the men serving in the ranks and of the officers themselves—their lives, their quarters and their habits—and he reformed and corrected in many cases practices and arrangements for living that had become too luxurious. (Translation: N. Lewis and M. Reinhold)
Such continual supervision was essential for keeping the empire’s defences in good order. Yet inactivity also bred conservatism. The legions were formidable when they confronted an enemy head-on but they assumed that the enemy would play into their hands by doing so. By the third century, armies, such as those of the Parthians, with flexible cavalry forces could outmanoeuvre a slow-moving legion. Again the legions were not fitted for siege warfare. The three years that the troops of Septimius Severus took to subdue the isolated city of Byzantium in the 190s makes the point.
From Augustus’ reign there was increasing reliance on auxiliary troops. The auxiliaries were recruited from non-citizens and grouped in units of 500 or 1,000 men. The emphasis was on skills, in archery or horsemanship, for instance, which were lacking in the heavy infantry of the legions. Gaul, Spain, and Thrace were important recruiting grounds. At first auxiliary units would serve under their own native commanders but gradually they were integrated into the structure of the Roman army, with equestrian commanders, fixed rates of pay, and the promise of citizenship at the end of service. They served in a variety of roles and, in fact, the diversity of their skills meant that they could be used more flexibly than the legions. On the march they protected the cumbersome legions from attack by probing the countryside ahead of their line of march and guarding their flanks. By the end of the first century ad they were quite capable of fighting battles on their own. The Battle of Mons Graupius, the greatest victory of Agricola’s incursions into Scotland (ad 83), was entirely an auxiliary affair (and it had the advantage of not adding to the legionaries’ casualty list). In peacetime auxiliary units were normally given guard duties along the frontiers. Hadrian’s Wall was manned by auxiliary units, for instance. On discharge auxiliaries received a bronze certificate to mark their service and the number found by archaeologists suggest that they were treasured possessions.
The Integration of Local Elites
During these centuries of relative stability, a process normally referred to as ‘Ro-manization’ took place. The word, in its loosest sense, describes the interaction of Roman and local cultures with the implication that a ‘Roman’ culture came to predominate. Insofar as the Roman city and, in the countryside, the Roman villa (see below, p. 523) became the focus of life for local elites in many parts of the empire this is certainly true but it would be wrong to assume that local cultures provided nothing of their own. In cases such as Greece and Egypt, there were civilizations much older than that of Rome and these retained a sense of cultural superiority. In the east, in the so-called Second Sophistic, Greek culture was revived in the second century, primarily, it seems, as a response to Romanization (see Chapter 29). One must also avoid the assumption that what was ‘Roman’ was unchanging. After all Roman culture was already deeply imbued with Greek elements and the interaction between the two cultures continued to be important throughout the history of the empire. So the interplay between Rome and other cultures was bound to be fluid and to have varied from one part of the empire to another. Archaeology is also showing how Romanization spread outside the empire’s boundaries, making the later relationship between Roman and barbarian far less confrontational culturally than it might have been. (Janet Huskinson (ed.), Experiencing Rome: Culture, Identity and Power in the Roman Empire, London and New York, 1999, is valuable on the cultural interactions that arose from stable administration. Greg Woolf, Becoming Roman: The Origins of Provincial Civilization in Gaul, Cambridge and New York, 1998, is excellent. See also Andrew Wallace-Hadrill, Rome’s Cultural Revolution, Cambridge and New York, 2008, for a penetrating analysis.)
The Roman empire prospered because it won the allegiance of the provincial elites who came to understand that their own status not only depended on the security provided by the Romans but could be enhanced by it. It gained vitality partly because pragmatic emperors knew they had to give these elites freedom to flourish. The shock of recognition that a local elite had much to gain from Roman rule was expressed at its most eloquent in Greece in the second and third centuries ad. A panegyrical speech to Rome by the Greek orator Aelius Aristides survives from about ad 150 in which he dwells on the advantages to the Greek cities of their subject status:
Your subjects relax in utmost delight, content to be released from troubles and miseries, and aware that they were formerly engaged in aimless shadow boxing. Others do not know or remember what territory they once ruled. . . Were there ever so many cities, inland and maritime?____Were they ever so thoroughly modernized____Not only were former empires so
Inferior at the top, but also the peoples whom they ruled were none of them on a par, in numbers or in calibre, with those same peoples under you____Now under you all the Greek cities
Emerge. . . All the monuments, works of art and adornments in them mean glory for you. . . all other competition between them has ceased, but a single rivalry obsesses every one, to appear as beautiful and attractive as possible. (Translation: N. Lewis and M. Reinhold)
Underlying this famous piece of rhetoric (Aelius Aristides was one of the leaders of a revival in Greek oratory, described in Chapter 29) is an emphasis on status within the empire. ‘You have divided all the people of the empire in two classes,’ he goes on; ‘the more cultured, better born and more influential everywhere you have declared Roman citizens: the rest vassals and subjects.’ This was the crucial point. Rome had allied herself so successfully with provincial ruling classes that they collaborated in keeping order and maintaining a common front against threats from below. Even in the revolt of 66 the more conservative of the Jewish authorities sided with the Romans.
One of the developments of the second century was a more formal distinction, enshrined in law, between those citizens who were honestiores, of higher status, and the humiliores, the rest. The honestiores, who included senators, equestrians, and local magistrates as well as army veterans, were likely to have their cases heard first and avoid imprisonment while awaiting trial while witnesses of poorer status were routinely tortured. A convicted honestior was usually exiled, his poorer fellow subjects executed by crucifixion or murdered in the arena. (For the distinction between slave and free, which provided the most rigid and important mark of status for the mass of the population, see below, p. 517.)
World History
