The Disobedient Roman Soldier

[EricD]

In this thread, I will be posting a long essay which I have been working on, which examines the military history and culture of the Roman army in its Republic. For sake of reading ease, I have broken down this essay into three posts, and this first post will contain links to the separate sections, divided by the thematic divisions with this essay. I hope you enjoy it and find it educational.

Part 1: Virtus
Part 2: Disciplina
Part 3: Training & Bibliography

I would like to put a thesis to you:

The Roman legionaries were not very well-disciplined soldiers. The Roman legionaries were, in point of fact, often aggressive and individualistic to the point of foolishness and disobedience. The Roman legionaries were impatient, rash, and impulsive soldiers, and their great courage brought with it a high chance of disobedient behaviour which would border on mutinous among modern soldiers. They also didn't train much as formations or groups.

In this, they were not actually very dissimilar to their neighbours within Mediterranean Antiquity. The Gauls and Germans were renowned for their headstrong courage. Likewise, the military histories of the Greeks and Macedonians are replete with examples of headstrong, willful, disobedient or mutinous behaviour from Hellenic soldiers of every poleis and politeia. Roman aggressiveness and lack of discipline was, in fact, quite in line with everyone else’s behaviour. They did not possess great advantages of discipline, orderliness, or training, and their great aggression was similarly quite normal for the times.

I realize that to many of you I have just spoken heresy. To many people, the iron discipline and training of the Legions is legendary. The conquest of the vast Roman Empire seems evidence of this, and we have the statements of authors like Vegetius and Josephus to support it. The strength of Rome over the barbarian hordes surrounding her was the discipline and training of her legions.

Or was it?

Much has been written before about the Roman legions, their tactics and behaviours in battle, how their performance in combat flowed from the culture and society from which they emerged. Today I would like to go further into the issue of virtus and disciplina, and examine more in depth to what extent the Roman legions in their classical period actually trained, to what extent they were obedient to their officers and commanders, and how much they actually resembled what we in modernity would consider a professional military.

Again I stress that my intent here is to explore the Roman army’s relationship to Roman society and culture. I do not wish to argue for Roman exceptionalism in aggression or discipline, or lack of discipline. They were quite of a type with all their neighbours in the period. I do, however, want to make the comparison between the Roman army’s behaviours and what a modern professional military would expect of its officers and soldiers. There is a distinct mythos about the discipline and professionalism of the legions, one which I believe is distinctly misleading.

A close reading of our best sources on the Roman army in its classical period will reveal something very different than what you expect.

Now, in the interest of intellectual honestly, we must bear in mind that I am not a professional academic, or historian, or employed as an archaeologist. I hold only a bachelor’s degree in archaeology and am not professionally employed in my field. These essays represent essentially a synthesis of the far greater original research done by others in this particular scholarly area, combined with some of my own thoughts and conjectures. In particular, I must cite the tremendous works of J.E. Lendon, Philip Sabin, Adrian Goldsworthy, Alexander Zhmodikov, Gregory Daly, and others. They are the giants upon whose shoulders you can catch a glimpse of the far-off past of pre-modern warfare, and much more can be found in their works than in this small essay.

In this essay, the main primary source texts we will work from are Polybius and Caesar. Other ancient authors will be used to support statements about Roman culture and society, and when neither Polybius nor Caesar can detail specific military events for us we will use the most reliable other primary texts we can, such as Livy and Plutarch. But why will we focus on Polybius and Caesar? Both were experienced military men, who had seen war, and who give us detailed accounts of the behaviours of the Roman army in their times. They give us the clearest picture of a distinct and important era in the history of the Roman army.

The period of my focus will be the Roman Army of the mid to late Republic into the early Empire. I refer to this as the classical period of the Roman Army, as it was this army that fought Rome’s greatest wars in the period of her rise, which ensured her dominance over her rivals, and which eventually guaranteed the end of the Republic and determined who would rule the Empire. It was an almost unprecedented prolonged period of military success, against genuinely formidable opposition, and one which later authors like Vegetius would often look back to with nostalgia. I will also argue that the Polybian and Caesarian Roman legions display a high degree of behavioural continuity, and so can be understood to be of a type with one another.

Polybius and Caesar are also both situated on either side of the reforms of Gaius Marius, and it is my belief that these reforms and their impact on the army are often genuinely misunderstood, as we shall examine.

Let us begin with the two terms I raised above: Virtus and disciplina.

It is important to understand that Roman society was an emotionally tempestuous world. J.E. Lendon wrote that the society of ancient Macedon was one of “noble companions and riotous banquets, a society of untamed emotion, of boasting, of drunken murder, a society that recalled that of epic” (Lendon 2005:138), yet you could equally apply the same description to the Roman Republic even down to the days of Caesar and Cicero. There was no central force of law enforcement or peacekeeping in the Roman Republic, it was a society of noble houses, of patrons and clients, of great rivalries, strong emotions, and above all honour and shame.

Rome had laws, but more often than not they were laws enforced by the community. To bring a grievance with another Roman to court, the Twelve Tables tell us, you as the plaintiff had to personally seize the defendant and bring him before a magistrate and the community in the Forum. This was a world of vendetta. Shame, we are told by Cicero, was the chief weapon of the censor in his moral judgement of Roman society. (Barton 2001:18) The mos maiorum, the ways of the ancestors, were the codes of conduct by which the ancient Roman organized his world. And above all other things, the masculine-dominated world of Rome valued virtus.

A Roman might be homo, a human being, by simple dint of birth. But to be a Vir, a Man, was an earned status. A Vir possessed virtus, which the Romans saw as the very best quality a man could display. To quote Plautus:

“Virtus is the very best gift of all; virtus stands before everything, it does, it does! It is what maintains and preserves our liberty, safety, life, and our homes and parents, our country and children. Virtus comprises all things: a man with virtus has every blessing.” (Amphityron)

So what is Virtus? Virtus is ferrox, it is ferocious. It is often translated to English not as “virtue” but as courage or valour. In Roman literature, often to possess virtus is to go hand in hand with magnus animus, a great spirit. Virtus is also often associated with vires, which means physical virility, strength, vitality, and energy. It is a youthful and energetic quality. Roman virtus is perhaps best compared to the arete of Homeric Greek: Excellence. Achilles was a man of arete to the Greeks, to the Romans he had unsurpassed virtus. Virtus was valour, strength, and energetic, unbounded spirit. It might also be compared to the French words preux or elan in terms of connotations.

It was a particular quality of Roman culture, as Carlin Barton’s work on Roman Honour finds, to see virtus as requiring first of all a public display and secondly a test of character to be revealed. Further, the Romans believed that a desperate hour and a desperate test were better at revealing virtus than anything else. Polybius himself states that “The Romans, both singly and in groups, are most to be feared when they stand in real danger” (Barton 2001:50). Cicero writes that “The greater the difficulty, the greater the splendour”, and Seneca agrees with him in saying “The greater the torment, the greater the glory” (Barton 2001:47).

The historian Sallust tells us that the Republic flourished due to the thirst for glory in men’s minds:

“To such men consequently no labour was unfamiliar, no region too rough or too steep, no armed foeman was terrible; valour was all in all. Nay, their hardest struggle for glory was with one another; each man strove to be the first to strike down the foe, to scale a wall, to be seen of all while doing such a deed. This they considered riches, this fair fame and high nobility. It was praise they coveted, but they were lavish of money; their aim was unbounded renown, but only such riches as could be gained honourably” (Bellum Catilinarium)

To have virtus, then, was to be seen by all to do great deeds, and deeds in war were most glorious of all. War was the most desperate hour, the most desperate test, with the highest stakes. Militarily, this exhibited itself as one of the most distinct cultural aspects of the Roman army: The Romans revelled in single combats.

This is often a fact that some people find difficult to grasp, but the Romans wanted to fight as individuals, and they wanted to compete for gloria against others, and they wanted their community to see them as braver, as more virtuous, than others. A glorious performance in single combat before your peers was the fastest way to accelerate your advancement through Roman society. Roman society lived in a state of constant strife and competition for position and status, and advancing yourself and your family by earning a reputation for virtus through great deeds was the most rapid path forward and upward.

Their panoply as soldiers supports the individual fighting nature of the Romans in war. The scutum is curved backwards onto itself, like a half-barrel in cross section. You can’t overlap it or use it together with your peers in a shield wall, but it is a strong individual defense against blows or missiles. Their weapons were javelins and swords, the weapons of an individual combatant. Polybius even tells us directly that the Romans fight with space enough for each man to act as an individual, that the sword was used for both cut and thrust, and that each man must have space to move (Polybius’s Histories, book 18, Chapter 30). They spread out to such an extent so that each man could individually fight effectively, and compete with his rivals within his peer group, as Sallust tells us, competing for glory with each other. This is also why in the traditional legion, the hastati and the velites were the youngest and the poorest men in the army, in other words the ones most hungry for social advancement, with the most to gain and the least to lose. Their behaviours in battle reflect a society seeking to give an equal opportunity for the earning of glory for each individual, which sees individual virtus as an all-important military factor.

The Romans kept within their minds a great store of stories, or exempla, about the deeds of their fathers. Like many pre-modern cultures, their oral record of stories was how they taught the younger generations about the wisdom of the past. The Roman stories are full of countless examples of men taking on the challenges of their foes in single combats, duels, monomachia, and triumphing. This could lead a man onto a political career to the consulship itself, as in the cases of Titus Manlius Torquatus and Marcus Valerius Corvus. In the highly competitive and contest-driven honour economy of Roman society, victory in single combat was the most lucrative opportunity for advancement there was, and accordingly the Romans hungered for single combat with a fierce desire. This was the good contest which Roman culture most revelled in and glorified.

Polybius comments in book 6 of his Histories: “Many Romans have voluntarily engaged in single combat in order to decide a battle,” and indeed in Polybius’s own times we have many accounts of Romans, even of very high rank and status, entering combat to perform heroic individual deeds, and often seeking to engage the leaders and champions of the enemy in said single combats.

We have already mentioned Torquatus and Corvus from the more distant past of the Republic. Later in history, we are told of Marcus Claudius Marcellus who, according to Plutarch, always accepted any challenge from an enemy for single combat and always killed his challenger. Marcellus also won the spolia opima, the greatest glory a Roman aristocrat could aspire to: As a consul in command of a Roman army at war, he engaged the enemy general, a Gallic king, in single combat, and slew him with his own hand. This was a great feat, for which Marcellus was renowned long after his own lifetime. This same Marcellus was recalled to the standard to command armies against Hannibal during the Second Punic War.

Of the Scipiones in Polybius’s day, Polybius tells us that Scipio the Elder personally led the Roman cavalry at the Battle of the Ticinus, where he was wounded in the heat of the action. This indicates the active engagement of a Roman consul in the thick of a cavalry fight. We are also told of his son, known to history as Scipio Africanus, who rescued his father in the battle. Quoth Polybius: “Scipio [Africanus] first distinguished himself on the occasion of the cavalry engagement between his father and Hannibal in the neighbourhood of the Po. He was at the time seventeen years of age, this being his first campaign, and his father had placed him in command of a picked troop of horse in order to ensure his safety, but when he caught sight of his father in the battle, surrounded by the enemy and escorted only by two or three horsemen and dangerously wounded, he at first endeavoured to urge those with him to go to the rescue, but when they hung back for a time owing to the large numbers of the enemy round them, he is said with reckless daring to have charged the encircling force alone.” (Polybius’s Histories, Book 10)

This bold action earned the younger Scipio an unquestionable reputation for virtus, and Polybius also accounts that on future occasions as a general Scipio Africanus did not place himself in harm’s way without sufficient reason. This indicates that a Roman aristocrat had a need to prove his own virtus to their followers, which Africanus did as a young man by rescuing his father in battle. It is implicit in the text that Africanus differed from other Roman generals, who often did place themselves in harm’s way without necessity. Why did they do so? They needed to prove their virtus to have any authority before fellow Romans, who would not respect them as a Vir if they hung back. This need to prove virtus by your deeds could at times be greatly hazardous, as proven by the elder Scipio wounded at the Ticinus, by Aemilius Paullus who died at Cannae, and by the death of Marcellus and his consular colleague during a cavalry skirmish in 209 BC.

Outside of the ranks of the aristocracy, Polybius’s accounts also tell us of the Roman system of honours and awards given to individual common soldiers for acts of virtus. This system of awards pays special attention to those who individually wound or slay an opponent, or whom are the first to scale a wall, or whom save the lives of a fellow-citizen in battle (Polybius’s Histories, Book 6, Chapter 39). These awards are also noted to be specially given to those who engage in such combats voluntarily during skirmishes and small actions, where the soldier had the choice to engage or not and thus a brave deed is seen as especially worthy of praise. Polybius tells us that the commanders of the Romans gave such awards publicly, before the assembled ranks of the community, and that those who were commended for bravery were likewise honoured at home as in the army.

Looking down to Caesar’s accounts of his own times and wars, we see a similar ethos of virtus in action throughout the ranks, from Caesar down to the common soldier. J.E. Lendon makes the credible argument in Soldiers & Ghosts that the culture of the Republic had shifted somewhat, the centurions becoming the primary champions of virtus in Caesar’s day, while the patrician aristocracy increasingly refrained from it as they no longer served in Rome’s citizen cavalry, nor was 10 years service required prior to holding office. This may have been the case to an extent, however I would note that military service was still the primary driver of social advancement, and even a man as civilian as Cicero had to serve in war.

Polybius accounts that in the Roman army of his period, centurions were chosen for their cool heads and steady courage rather than for hot-blooded virtus:

“They wish the centurions not so much to be venturesome and daredevil as to be natural leaders, of a steady and sedate spirit. They do not desire them so much to be men who will initiate attacks and open the battle, but men who will hold their ground when worsted and hard-pressed and be ready to die at their posts. “ (Polybius’s Histories, Book 6)

However, being ready to die at one’s post was also seen as a form of virtus by the Romans, and Carlin Barton’s research found that Roman honour took a peculiar glory in being unbroken in spirit even in defeat. It also may be the case that Polybius, as an aristocrat himself and a personal friend of the Scipiones, focused mostly on the deeds of the cavalry aristocrats in his day, and so did not hear or see fit to record as many accounts of the heroic deeds of centurions and common soldiers as Caesar did. Caesar, being a popularis and having campaigned with the same army for many years and undoubtedly being very familiar and closely bonded to his soldiers, fills his Commentaries with many tales of particularly brave or courageous centurions acting as heroic individuals and competing with one another for gloria. In this, he was also undoubtedly trying to cater to the tastes of the Roman public, who loved such stories of brave men and brave deeds. Caesar may have been propagandizing himself and his legions, but what aspects he chooses to emphasize are themselves significant as to indicating his attitudes and beliefs and those of Roman society and the army.

Perhaps the most famous of these exempla is the story of the two centurions Vorenus and Pullo. Their camp closely besieged by the Nervii, the two rivals challenged one another to a contest of valour, and charged out into the ranks of the enemy alone, each striving to prove himself braver than the other. As Caesar tells us “When the fight was going on most vigorously before the fortifications, Pullo, one of them, says, "Why do you hesitate, Vorenus? or what [better] opportunity of signalizing your valor do you seek? This very day shall decide our disputes." When he had uttered these words, he proceeds beyond the fortifications, and rushes on that part of the enemy which appeared the thickest. Nor does Vorenus remain within the rampart, but respecting the high opinion of all, follows close after.” (De Bello Gallico, Book 5, Chapter 44).

Note here the aspect of public performance necessary to proving one’s virtus. Note Vorenus’s sensitivity to his community seeing him as lesser in courage than another man. Additional evidence for the high combat involvement and aggression of centurions are their casualty rates. When Caesar accounts for the losses he takes in battle, he invariably lists many dozens of centurions in most engagements, indicative of their aggressive and prominent role in the thick of combat. Of the seven hundred Romans who fell at Gergovia, in Caesar’s account, forty six were centurions. One in fifteen of Roman dead of Gergovia were centurions, a class of soldier who made up only one in eighty of the legion’s ranks.

Nor are the Roman aristocracy entirely excused from the needs of proving virtus, for even Caesar himself fought in close combat in his own accounts. At the Battle of the Sabis, against the Nervii in 57 BC, Caesar accounts of himself seizing a shield from one of his soldiers (He even notes that he had left his own shield behind due to his haste to respond to the Gallic surprise attack) and advancing to the front ranks of the combat to encourage and lead his men when they were closely pressed by their Gallic opponents (Goldsworthy 2006:301-302). Similarly, at the height of the Gallic counter-attacks on his siege lines at Alesia in 52 BC, Caesar tells us of how he took command of the Roman cavalry and “hastens to share in the action” (De Ballo Gallico, Book 7, Chapter 87), and how his arrival was known to both his own troops and the enemy by the colour of his robe (Ibid, Chapter 88), indicating the desire to be visible to his soldiers.

While Lendon may be true when he says that the Roman aristocrats in Caesar’s day concerned themselves mostly with commanding and less with fighting with their own hand (Lendon 2005:218-219), it seems clear to me that the Roman aristocracy still concerned itself greatly with virtus, and from Caesar’s accounts they saw it as a good and admirable thing to enter combat yourself with your own hands. Similarly, stories of Pompey’s campaigns also abound with anecdotes about him fighting in the forefront of battle in the manner of Alexander the Great (Goldsworthy 2006:301). And just as Polybius’s Histories tell us of many Roman consuls who died in action during the war with Hannibal, Caesar’s Civil War is also full of Romans of high rank killed in action, such as Titus Labienus at Munda or Curio at the Bagradas River. The Roman aristocracy may have been on the road to becoming a civilian aristocracy of lawyers, intellectuals, and merchants, but that cultural transformation was not yet complete. The ethos of Virtus still ruled in Caesar’s day.

So much for Virtus. What of the famed Roman discipline?