The Classical World (69 page)

The soldiers’ tactics had become more varied during the Republic’s fall, but the basic legionary had not changed: he was still armed with a javelin (
pilum
) to be thrown at close quarters, backed up byeffective use of the sword. He still wore open sandals with heavy nailed soles (‘militaryboots’), a shirt of chain mail (later replaced bya breastplate of jointed iron strips), a solid metal helmet and an oval shield or, by ad 100, one which was rectangular. In full armour, he could not swim, although swimming was one of his skills and a recommended part of his training. In close formation, his line of shields could stand firm against missiles; by opening out, it could let through the scythed chariots which were launched at it without much effect by Britons and Gauls. There were also stone- and arrow-shooting catapults, powered by torsion (one type, from its ‘kick’, was called the wild ass). Romans copied these from the Greek world, and stationed up to sixty machines behind each legion so that they could begin battle with a powered barrage, shot over the legionaries’ heads.

The main tactical development was the increasing use of local non-Roman
auxiliaries. By the late first century ad light-armed provincial troops would be put in front of the traditional legionary line and would take most of the initial battering. On the wings, squadrons of non-Roman cavalry would shoot arrows or javelins, while riding rapidly at a diagonal or circling on their enemy’s flank. The angled cavalry charge towards the centre, the hallmark of Alexander’s great victories, was not now in fashion. Opposing cavalry tended to be skirmishers, especially in the Near East where the Parthian horsemen would shoot scores of arrows as they retreated.

There had always been Roman citizen cavalrytoo, but they had last been used effectively in 109
BC
: back in Augustan Rome, cavalrymen with ‘public horses’ now included people like the poet Ovid. Rome’s cavalry strength, therefore, had to be provincial and auxiliary. In the 50s and 40s
BC
Julius Caesar had discovered and recruited the exceptional skill of German and Gallic cavalry. In Spain, too, Augustus was amazed by the fast Spanish horsemen and their skill with throwing javelins on horseback, which he described in his autobiography. After observing such troops in Germany, Pliny the Elder wrote a manual on the art, some of which survives: it is noticeable that technical Latin cavalry-terms are often based on Spanish or Gallic words. We can still read the Emperor Hadrian’s speech in north Africa, remarking on his mounted troops’ fine display of this art. There were still no stirrups to hold the riders steady, but the Romans adopted a saddle, a Celtic speciality: they gave it two ‘horns’, or pommels, which wedged the cavalryman firmly.

One particular body of cavalrymen reached the highest honour: German horsemen, huge strapping characters whose ‘amazing bodies’ were first admired and recruited by Julius Caesar as his personal horseguards. On his death, these guards split between Antony and the new ‘Caesar’. After victory, Augustus kept them on as his tall, magnificent bodyguards and stationed them in Rome, tactfully north of the Tiber. In 118, under Hadrian, a poem describes how one such German horseguard swam ‘the wide waters of the deep Danube in full armour… I shot an arrow from my bow which I hit and broke with another while it hung in the air and fell back… Let anyone see if after me they can match my deeds.’
⁸
They could not, nowadays, and yet these German guards continued on and off for centuries: Augustus’
successors sometimes put them under the command of a proven gladiator. They were a crucial support for the ‘First Citizen’.

Even more prominent were the Commander’s guards, or Praetorians. These infantry troops had first developed during the final stages of the Civil War when they had served each of the two main leaders. Highly paid and carefullyselected, the Praetorians were amalgamated by the victor and numbered up to 9,000; Augustus’ Praetorians came overwhelmingly from Italy. From the ad 20s they were concentrated in barracks in Rome, a most unrepublican presence, and their command, which had begun with low-key equestrians, went to some of the early Empire’s most influential schemers, Sejanus under Tiberius or the odious Tigellinus who did nothing to improve the Emperor Nero’s morals. They became a crucial element in every emperor’s succession and survival.

The main legions were always manned with Roman citizens. However, local volunteers could quickly be given the Roman citizenship before being enrolled. Auxiliaries, by contrast, served always as non-citizens, with the prospect of citizenship only when they retired. Their units bore ethnic names, but they soon included people of mixed nationalities, a real melting pot. Wild and untamed people very seldom served in their own homeland. Britons, therefore, were sent off to serve in central Europe, while strapping Germans paraded near Scotland on Hadrian’s Wall. Legionary pay was not particularly lavish and under Augustus the costs of weapons, tents and clothing were deducted. Inevitably, there were back-hand payments, too, required by centurion-soldiers to ‘assure’ a fellow soldier’s leave. Not until ad 69 were ‘back-handers’ abolished (at least officially), and in due course the deductions did dwindle; the sums which were held back for tents and armour became treated as a deposit, to be released to the soldier on discharge.
⁹
The Praetorian guards were much more highly paid, whereas auxiliaries received less but on varying scales which sometimes amounted to as much as a legionary’s wages (the exact rates are still disputed). Soldiering, as always, was the most widespread salaried career in antiquity.

The prize was the reward on discharge. Antony and Octavian had begun by trying to find plots of land of about 30 acres for each veteran soldier in Italy: after Actium, a great wave of settlement took veteran
soldiers mostly into the provinces. From ad 6 a cash payment was offered instead, financed by the newly established military treasury: nonetheless, the payment was less than two-thirds as big as the ones first offered in the wars of the late 40s
BC
. It did not help that this treasury was partly financed by the introduction of the hated inheritance tax on Roman citizens. Bits of land continued to be offered, too (Nero even reverted to trying to offer them in Italy), but in ad 14 soldiers were complaining they were being fobbed off with bits of marshland or rough mountain.

Despite the new treasury, Augustus’s reign ended with low military morale, a repeated need for levies and major mutinies on the northern frontier. The basic culprit was the old man’s personal drive for wars in the north from ad 5 onwards. Hard fighting here advanced Rome to the rivers Elbe and Weser; the principal remaining enemy, Maroboduus, was classed as the ‘worst since Hannibal’,
¹⁰
but the attack on him required forced levies elsewhere, and these levies provoked revolts in the Balkans, especially in Illyricum. In the end, negotiations had to begin with Maroboduus. In ad 9 a German counter-attack caught the legions dispersed and off guard and inflicted a truly frightful disaster on their commander, Varus: the German hero was Arminius (whence ‘Herman the German’). The reprisals were led by the future Emperor Tiberius, who revived outdated modes of discipline and imposed the harshest orders. They did not bode well for his years as emperor.

To man these campaigns, soldiers had been retained for far too long, sometimes for thirty years: the practice of ‘extra time’ was still widespread and resented. There had also been conscription at Rome which had brought riff-raff into the front line. The affair was all a blot on Augustus’ militarymanagement, which was any way tarnished. The old-fashioned discipline of Tiberius and his contemporaries did not help morale, either, when they came out to pull things round after some very much softer commanders.

With such specific causes, the mutinies of ad 14 were curable. Conspicuously, they did not recur, not even in the year 69 when four emperors marched against one another in succession. In 69 army pay did not even have to be increased to urge on the troops (it stayed constant until the reign of Domitian). In many provinces, meanwhile,
army life settled down to peacetime routine. From military manuals and dailyregisters which are preserved on papyrus, we can see that it was certainly not boring.
¹¹
There were regular exercises and an important array of civilian duties, including road-building, quarrying, mining and bridge-building. Soldiers became involved in surrounding life, even in seeing off plagues of locusts. Their commanders, inevitably, were called on to arbitrate and settle disputes, and not only disputes between soldiers. So much of what we see as ‘Romanization’ was the work of troops on long alert (including the aqueducts built in north Africa). Legionary camps became pools of experienced architects and engineers who could also advise on civilian projects. There was a huge volume of paperwork, to keep daily lists and details of pay: manuals urged that soldiers should, if possible, be literate, and army service was certainly an agent for promoting literacy.

Commanders of legions were senators (outside Egypt) and in a province with several legions, they were men in their mid-thirties who had already been a praetor in Rome. The linchpins of support for these amateurs were the long-serving centurions who were usually as tough as nails. The experienced ‘prefects of the camp’ were also particularlyimportant here. Each legion had five experienced tribunes of equestrian rank too: the sixth tribune was a young man of senatorial birth, eighteen or nineteen years old. By comparison, he was very raw, though the commanding legate might enjoy his company. It was exceptional, the historian Tacitus noted, for these favoured young men not to lounge around and waste their posting.
¹²

Even the ordinary men’s diet was surprisingly varied, including quite a range of meat (much of it caught by hunting). The army, therefore, spread hunting ever further down the social ladder. The camps, meanwhile, manufactured the troops’ armour and weapons, while their basic supplies were taken from the provincials, sometimes transported across long distances. It is not clear how often they were properly paid for. A legion has been estimated to eat ‘2,000 tonnes’ of grain a year, while the horses of a single cavalry unit needed another ‘635’: it would have taken a very high demand by soldiers for paid local services to compensate provincials for this burden. For soldiers, however, a particular advantage of military life over civilian life was care for the sick. Hospitals are an invention of the Roman army.

In long intervals of peace, troops in these camps would inevitably ‘soften’, and here the Romans’ long-running fear of ‘luxury’ came into play. A new commander or a visiting emperor would sometimes decide to tighten things up: in 121/2, Hadrian set about the troops in Germany. Beds were banned (Hadrian slept in camp on straw) and fancy dining rooms and colonnades were demolished. No doubt they had been the creations of soft officers: there was even a most interesting need to uproot their ornamental gardens. Hadrian himself undertook the hard marches, up to twenty miles in armour, which he reimposed on the legions. His ‘discipline’ was remembered for centuries by the authors of militarymanuals.
¹³
As a general practice, units were anyway moved around quite widely beyond their bases: by Hadrian’s time, watchtowers had become common and out lying forts could be more than a hundred miles distant from the main camp. Military minds, meanwhile, did not forget that Hannibal’s men were said to have been sapped by that winter spent among the ‘luxury’ of Capua, and Sulla’s by the ‘luxury’ of Asia. So in due course, a legionary camp would be moved on and, behind it, a township would develop on its former site. Fear of luxury thus helped indirectly to urbanize Rome’s subjects. The towns which grew up on former camp-sites helped to ‘soften’ the provincials whom the hardy soldiers had been supposed to be guarding. In Britain, towns like Gloucester and Lincoln began in this way.

If soldiers had to be separated from towns, they also had to be kept away from wives. From Augustus until the third century legionaries were not allowed to marry. Existing marriages, even, were ended at the moment of recruitment. Of course men could not be kept away from women. Liaisons flourished (soldiers even wrote of their ‘girl-friends’ and ‘darlings’), and brothels were also kept busy, though one army-unit on the northern coast of the Black Sea can be found to have been collecting the local tax from the prostitutes. Legionaries’ offspring, however, were illegitimate. In inscriptions, we find ‘sons of Spurius’ (soldier-bastards) and in the papyri of Roman Egypt, a conspicuous class of ‘the fatherless’ appear.
¹⁴
They are not orphans: they are children of legally prohibited unions, whether between Romans and Egyptians, or Roman legionaries and locals. Long before the celibate prize-fighters of the Christian monasteries, the military
minds of Rome were already opposed to marriage. One advantage was that, in the case of a military disaster, nothing would need to be paid to dead soldiers’ wives or families.

The New Age

This is the oath taken by the inhabitants of Paphlagonia and the Romans who do business among them. ‘I swear by Zeus, Earth, Sun, all the gods and goddesses and Augustus himself that I will be favourably disposed to [Cae]sar Augustus and his children and descendants all the time of my [life] in word and deed and thought… Whatever I may see or hear being said or plotted or done against them, I will report it and I will be the enemy of the person who says or plots or does these things… If I do anything contrary to this [oath]… I pray that there may come on me, my body and soul and life, my children and all my family and whatever is of use to us, destruction, total destruction until the end of all my line and of all my descendants…’ In these same words this oath was sworn by all the [inhabitants of the land] in the temples of Augustus throughout the local districts [of Paphlagonia] by the altars [of Augustus]
.     Oath sworn in Paphlagonia, 6 March 3
BC

Augustus’ first moral legislation was the prelude to his celebration of a ‘new age’ in Rome. An ‘ancient’ oracle was conveniently cited to support it and, on highly questionable grounds, it was calculated to fall due in 17
BC
. For three days and nights, beginning on 31 May, animal sacrifices were offered to Greek and Roman divinities under the general direction of the traditional priesthood for this occasion. The traditional items for purification were given to the people, but it was Augustus and his heir, the obscurelyborn Agrippa, who now led the proceedings. The daytime rites were an innovation: the grim gods
of the underworld were replaced by the goddess of childbirth, mother Earth and such gods as Apollo, Diana and Jupiter. Like so much of Augustus’ professed conservatism, the apparently traditional occasion was reshaped in a new way.