Download PDF | (Blackwell companions to the ancient world. Ancient history) Paul Erdkamp - A Companion to the Roman Army-Wiley-Blackwell (2007).
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Notes on Contributors
Clifford Ando is Professor of Classics and the College at the University of Chicago. He writes on the history of law, religion, and culture in the Roman world. He is author of Imperial Ideology and Provincial Loyalty in the Roman Empire (2000) and editor of Roman Religion (2003).
Anthony R. Birley was Professor of Ancient History at the universities of Manchester from 1974 to 1990 and Diisseldorf from 1990 to 2002. His publications include biographies of the emperors Hadrian, Marcus Aurelius, and Septimius Severus. He is Chair of the Trustees of the Vindolanda Trust.
Lukas de Blois is Professor of Ancient History at the University of Nijmegen. He has published on the history of the Roman Empire in the third century AD, the Late Roman Republic, historiography (Sallust, Tacitus, Cassius Dio), Plutarch’s biographies, and Greek Sicily in the fourth century Bc. He also published (with R. J. van der Spek) Introduction to the Ancient World (1997).
Will Broadhead is Assistant Professor of History at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. His research is mainly on the history of Roman Italy, with a particular interest in geographical mobility and in the epigraphy of the Sabellic languages.
Pierre Cagniart has earned his doctorate in 1986 at the University of Texas. He is currently Associate Professor at the Department of History at Southwest Texas State University. He has published various articles on late republican warfare and his research interests also include Roman law and cultural history of the Roman principate.
Hugh Elton is currently associate professor in the Department of Ancient History and Classics at Trent University, Peterborough, Ontario. Previously he was Director of the British Institute at Ankara. He writes on Roman military history in the late empire, and on southern Anatolia (especially Cilicia). He is author of Warfare in Roman Europe, AD 350-425 (1996) and Frontiers of the Roman Empire (1996).
Paul Erdkamp is Research Fellow in Ancient History at Leiden University. He is the author of Hunger and the Sword. Warfare and Food Supply in Roman Republican Wars (264-30 BC) (1998) and The Grain Market in the Roman Empire (2005). He is the editor of The Roman Army and the Economy (2002).
Gary Forsythe received his Ph.D. in ancient history at the University of Pennsylvania; and after teaching at the University of Pennsylvania, Swarthmore College, Bryn Mawr College, and the University of Chicago, he now is Professor in the Department of History at Texas Tech University (Lubbock, Texas). He is the author of four books, the most recent of which is A Critical History of Early Rome: From Prehistory to the First Punic War (2005).
Kate Gilliver is a lecturer in ancient history at Cardiff University and is a Roman military historian. She has particular interests in military reform in the republic and early empire, atrocities in ancient warfare, and in the relationship between ancient military theory and practice, on which she has published a book, The Roman Art of War (1999).
Norbert Hanel teaches archaeology of the Roman provinces at the universities of Cologne and Bochum (Ruhr-Universitat) and has published Vetera I (1995). He has excavated in Germany and other European countries, particularly the Germanic and Hispanic provinces, and studied the naval base of the Classis Germanica KélnMarienburg (Alteburg). His main research interests are the military and cultural history of the provinces especially of the western empire.
Olivier Hekster is Van der Leeuw Professor of Ancient History at the Radboud University Nijmegen. His research focuses on Roman ideology and ancient spectacle. He is author of Commodus: An Emperor at the Crossroads (2002), and co-editor of Representation and Perception of Roman Imperial Power (2003) and Imaginary Kings: Royal Images in The Ancient Near East, Greece and Rome (2005).
Peter Herz studied history, classics, and archaeology at the universities of Mainz and Oxford. He received both his D.Phil. and habilitation in ancient history at the University of Mainz. In 1994 he was appointed Professor of Ancient History at the University of Regensburg. His research interests include social and economic history, epigraphy, the ruler cult, and the history of the Roman provinces.
Dexter Hoyos was born and educated in Barbados. After taking a D.Phil. at Oxford in Roman history, he joined Sydney University where he is Associate Professor in Latin. His academic interests include Roman-Carthaginian relations, Roman expansionism and the problem of sources, the principate, and developing direct-reading and comprehension skills in Latin. His many publications include Hannibal’s Dynasty: Power and Politics in the Western Mediterranean, 247-183 Bc (2003).
Peter Kehne studied history, philosophy, classical philology, law of nations, and Roman law at the universities of Kiel, Hanover, and Géttingen. He received his D.Phil. in ancient history and is now Assistant Professor of Ancient History at the Leibniz University, Hanover. He has published on ancient history and historians, foreign policy, international relations, and “Vélkerrecht” in antiquity, as well as on Greek and Roman military history, especially the Greek—Persian and Roman—German wars.
Wolf Liebeschuetz is Emeritus Professor of Ancient History at the University of Nottingham. He has published on various aspects of ancient history and late antiquity is a central interest of his. His most recent books are The Decline and Fall of the Roman City (2001) and Ambrose of Milan: Political Letters and Speeches (2005).
Luuk de Ligt is Professor of Ancient History at the University of Leiden. His research interests include the social and economic history, demography, legal history and epigraphy of the Roman Republic and Empire. His major publications include Fairs and Markets in the Roman Empire (1993) and numerous articles, most recently “Poverty and demography: The case of the Gracchan land reforms,” Mnemosyne 57 (2004): 725-57.
Sara Elise Phang received a doctorate in Roman history from Columbia University in 2000. She has held a postdoctoral fellowship in Classics at the University of Southern California. She performs research at the Library of Congress and the Center for Hellenic Studies. Her first book, The Marriage of Roman Soldiers, 13 BC-AD 235, won the 2002 Gustave O. Arlt Award in the Humanities for Classical Studies. She is currently conducting research into Roman military discipline.
Louis Rawlings is a lecturer in ancient history at Cardiff University. His research interests include Italian, Greek, Punic, and Gallic warfare, especially the military interaction between states, such as Rome and Carthage, and tribal societies, and the roles warriors have in state-formation. He is the author of The Ancient Greeks at War (2006).
John Rich is Reader in Roman History at the University of Nottingham. He is the author of Declaring War in the Roman Republic in the Period of Transmarine Expansion (1976), Cassius Dio: The Augustan Settlement (Roman History 53-55.9) (1990), and articles on various aspects of Roman history, especially warfare and imperialism, historiography, and the reign of Augustus. He has also edited various collections of papers, including (with G. Shipley) War and Society in the Roman World (1993).
Nathan Rosenstein is Professor of History at The Ohio State University. He is the author of a number of works on the effects of war on Roman political culture and society, most recently Rome at War, Farms, Families, and Death in the Middle Republic (2004). He is also the editor, with Robert Morstein-Marx, of the Blackwell Companion to the Roman Republic (2006).
Denis Saddington studied English and classics at the University of the Witwatersrand, before being awarded a Rhodes Scholarship to Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He has taught in the universities of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa, Witwatersrand, and Zimbabwe, and has written a book on The Development of the Roman Auxiliary Forces (1982). His main research interests are the early church, Josephus, Roman auxiliaries, and Roman provincial administration.
Walter Scheidel is Professor of Classics at Stanford University. His research focuses on ancient social and economic history, pre-modern historical demography, and comparative and interdisciplinary world history. His publications include Measuring Sex, Age and Death in the Roman Empire (1996) and Death on the Nile: Disease and the Demography of Roman Egypt (2001).
Timo Stickler is Akademischer Rat in Ancient History at the Heinrich-HeineUniversity, Diisseldorf. His research interests include the political and social history of late antiquity, especially in the western part of the Mediterranean. He is the author of Aetius: Gestaltungsspielrdiume eines Heermeisters im ausgehenden Westromischen Reich (2002).
Oliver Stoll teaches ancient history at the University of Mainz and is research fellow at the R6misch-Germanisches Zentralmuseum, Mainz (RGZM). His research focuses on the Roman army, archaeology, and history of the Roman provinces. Various articles are included in his Rémisches Heer und Gesellschaft. Gesammelte Beitriige 1991-1999 (2001). He is the author of Zwischen Integration und Abgrenzung: Die Religion des Rémischen Heeres im Nahen Osten (2001).
Karl Strobel is Professor of Ancient History and Archaeology at the University of Wagenfurt. His research is concentrated on the history of the Roman Empire, but also on the Hellenistic period, on the economic history of antiquity, and on the history and archaeology of ancient Anatolia. He has written numerous publications on the history of the Roman army, for example Untersuchungen zu den Dakerkriegen Trajans (1984) and Die Donaukriege Domitians (1989).
James Thorne studied archaeology at University College London before joining the British army in 1995, subsequently serving with the Royal Tank Regiment. His Ph.D. thesis (Manchester 2005) was entitled Caesar and the Gauls: Imperialism and Regional Conflict. His current teaching at the University of Manchester includes a course on “Roman Imperialism 264 BC-AD 69”; his other interests include warfare in classical Greece, on which he has published, ancient logistics, and a planned book on the transformation of empires into states.
Gabriele Wesch-Klein teaches ancient history at the University of Heidelberg, Germany. She is author of several articles concerning the Roman army during the principate. She has also published Soziale Aspekte des romischen Heerwesens in der Kaiserzeit (1998).
Everett L. Wheeler (Ph.D., Duke University) has taught history and classical studies at University of Missouri/Columbia, University of Louisville, Duke University, and North Carolina State University. Besides publishing numerous papers on ancient military history, the Hellenistic and Roman East, and the history of military theory, he translated (with Peter Krentz) Polyaenus’ Stratagems of War (1994). His Stratagem and the Vocabulary of Military Trickery appeared in 1988. An edited volume, The Armies of Classical Greece, is forthcoming.
Michael Whitby is Professor of Classics and Ancient History at the University of Warwick. He is author of several articles on the late Roman army and has recently been responsible for editing the late Roman section of the Cambridge History of Ancient Warfare (2006). His many publications include Warfare in the Late Roman World, 280-640 (1999).
Introduction
Paul Erdkamp
The guiding principle behind this companion to the Roman army is the belief that the Roman army cannot adequately be described only as an instrument of combat, but must be viewed also as an essential component of Roman society, economy, and politics. Of course, the prime purpose of the Roman army was to defeat the enemy in battle. Whether the army succeeded depended not only on its weapons and equipment, but also its training and discipline, and on the experience of its soldiers, all of which combined to allow the most effective deployment of its manpower. Moreover, every army is backed by a more or less developed organization that is needed to mobilize and sustain it. Changes in Roman society significantly affected the Roman army. However, the army was also itself an agent of change, determining in large part developments in politics and government, economy and society. Four themes recur throughout the volume: (1) the army as a fighting force; (2) the mobilization of human and material resources; (3) the relationship between army, politics, and empire; and (4) the relationship between the armies and the civilian population. Even in a sizeable volume such as this choices have had to be made regarding the topics to be discussed, but the focus in this volume on the army in politics, economy, and society reflects the direction of recent research.
Modern authors often claim that ancient Rome was a militaristic society, and that warfare dominated the lives of the Roman people. Interestingly, the first outsider in Rome to paint an extensive picture of Roman society and whose account has largely survived essentially says the same thing. Polybius was in a position to know, since he was brought to Rome as a hostage after the Third Macedonian War (171-168 Bc) and was befriended by one of the leading families. The main task he set himself in his Histories was to explain Rome’s incredible military success during the past decades. To Polybius, the stability of her constitution was one important element, but Rome’s military success is explained by two other elements: manpower and ethos. At the eve of the Hannibalic War, Polybius informs us, Rome was able to mobilize 700,000 men in the infantry and 70,000 horsemen. To be sure, Rome never assembled an army of such size — even in imperial times her soldiers did not number as many as 700,000. But such a number of men was available to take up arms and fight Rome’s opponents in Italy or overseas. In other words, almost all male, able-bodied citizens of Rome and her allies could be expected to serve in the army at one point or another. Military service was indeed the main duty of a Roman citizen, and military experience was widespread. The empires that Rome had defeated in the past decades — Carthage, Macedon, the Seleucid Empire — had lost the connection between citizenship and military service, instead relying largely on mercenaries. Polybius was also struck by the military ethos that Roman traditions instilled in the Roman elite and common people alike. Citizens and allies were awarded in front of the entire army for bravery in combat. Decorations were worn on public occasions during the rest of the soldiers’ lives. Trophies were hung in the most conspicuous places in their homes.
So when we consider this people’s almost obsessive concern with military rewards and punishments, and the immense importance which they attach to both, it is not surprising that they emerge with brilliant success from every war in which they engage. (Polybius 6.39)
At the time that Polybius witnessed Roman society, the army and military ethos played important roles in the lives of almost all male Roman citizens. In that sense, Rome’s was a militaristic society.
Although war and the army remained important aspects of the Roman Empire, it would be difficult to characterize Roman society at the time of Augustus (31 BC-14 AD) or Trajan (98-117 AD) as militaristic to the same degree. Just as the term “Roman” applied to ever widening circles, more and more recruits enlisting in the legions came from Spain, Gaul, and other provinces, while the people of the capital city did not serve in the armies anymore. Moreover, military service had become a lifetime profession for a minority of the empire’s inhabitants. Recruits signed up to serve for up to 25 years. Many would die while serving in the army, though more of natural causes than due to military action. Many veterans from the legions became prominent members of local society, while those who had served in the auxiliary forces earned Roman citizenship at discharge. However, only a few percent of the empire’s population served in the armies or fleets. Large sections of the empire hardly saw Roman armies at all during the next centuries, while many soldiers never saw combat. The army still held an important place in society, mostly so in the border regions where the majority of troops were concentrated, but this role had changed significantly.
Waging war remained the largest task undertaken by the state, and the army was the largest institution that the state created. It certainly was the most expensive, taking up about three quarters of the annual imperial budget. Mobilizing, equipping, and feeding the several hundred thousand men that were stationed between Brittannia’s northern border and the Arabian desert was an undertaking that could not be sustained by the market alone, and required the direct intervention of the central and local authorities. On the other hand, the presence of Roman legions and auxiliary forces was the engine that drove crucial developments in the economy and society of the border regions. And it was through the army that many members of local aristocracies were integrated into the Roman Empire.
The army retained a central role in the power structures within the empire. Addressing the Roman Senate, Augustus used the phrase “I and the army are well,” leaving no doubt about who ruled the empire and with what backing. Hence the close connection between emperor and armies was an important message to convey not only to the senators in Italy and peoples throughout the empire, but — most crucially — to the armies as well. While the Praetorian Guard, which was stationed near Rome, played an important role on the accession to the throne of Claudius in 41 AD, in the civil wars of 68-69 AD the armies of the Rhine, Danube, and the East decided who would be put on the throne. While the nature of the relationship between the emperors and the senatorial class (to which belonged many of the authors on whose historical narrative we nowadays rely) colors — and possibly distorts — our picture of individual emperors, the most important development in the position of the emperor during the next centuries may be said to have been the changing relationship between army and emperor. Whatever their qualities and intentions, emperors could not function without maintaining close relations with the troops. One of the problems was that many units were almost permanently stationed in the same region, and drew recruits from their locality. Troops developed regional ties that proved stronger in times of crisis than the ties with Rome or the emperor. In the mid-third century AD the position of emperor became the prize in a struggle between the various armies stationed in Britain, along the Rhine and Danube, and in the East. Diocletian (284-305) and Constantine (312-337) managed to restore control of the armies. In the meantime, however, Rome and Italy had lost their centrality, while internal threats played as much a role in the development of the army as did external wars.
The traditional view of the late Roman Empire held that, as the nature of the opponents along the borders changed and their strength became ever greater, the empire threatened to collapse under the stress, leading on the one hand to more state control of society in order to maintain military strength, on the other hand to a weakening army, consisting more and more of barbaric peoples or farmer-soldiers of dubious military value. This picture now seems largely untrue: the central authorities did not suffocate civil society in order to maintain the war effort, nor were the Roman armies of the fourth, fifth, and sixth centuries AD less capable of striking forceful blows at their opponents. In the fourth century, many Germanic peoples served in the Roman armies. The landowners paid money to hire men, and kept their own people on the land. The western half of the Roman Empire did indeed collapse, as after the battle of Adrianople large tracts of land came under the control of migrating Germanic peoples — in particular Vandals, Visigoths, and Ostrogoths — who were eventually allowed to settle under their own rule, but who increasingly made it impossible for the central Roman authorities to gather the resources necessary to sustain a sizeable army of their own. The armies of the emperor Justinian (527-565), which were backed by a populous eastern empire and reconquered Italy, northern Africa, and southern Spain from their Germanic kings, may be seen as the last Roman armies.
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