A LIVING AT ARMS: SOLDIERS

LEGIONS MASSED TO CRUSH THE SLAVE REV(Of':Spartacus; a fiery charge against shrieking barbarians: images of the Roman soldier are inextricably linked to the visuals of novels, film, and television. But aside from the brief moments of battle discipline, carnage, bravery, and death, what was it like to live the life of a Roman legionary? The sources, however broadly tapped, do not allow the story of the common soldier to be told at any single time during the first three centuries AD. However, it is possible to construct a composite picture based on material from this entire period. Massed legions, screaming barbarian hordes, bravery in battle all existed, but I will lay out the rest of the legionary’s existence in all its limitations, promise, banality, and excitement.

The legionary soldier, like other invisibles, is virtually never noted individually by the main classical sources. He appears in a mass - 'the army’ or 'a legion’, or some other grouping; only in exceptional and frequently semi-fictionalized situations does a soldier appear as an individual in elite writers. For these authors, the army below the command level is except in very rare situations an undifferentiated mass playing a role in the elite drama that they called history. When the elite deigned to think about common soldiers, they liked to spotlight heroic efforts, but in the end saw mostly a dangerous body, ignorant, low born, and motivated by base instincts. Looked at from the social, economic, and cultural level of the common soldier, however, his life, although it could be hard and even at times deadly, was in many ways privileged with a stability and benefits that few other ordinary men could hope to find. This becomes clear as I look at the soldier on his own terms.

I6. The army at war. Here two soldiers advance, one with the short sword (gladius) at ready, the other with his spear (pilum).