Stress on Roman discipline has a good ancient pedigree. Polybius, the major source for the army of the mid-Republic, praises Roman military punishments. He is particularly impressed by the good attitude inculcated by decimation, the execution of every tenth soldier after a unit had broken in battle, and the execution of negligent sentries. Josephus and Vegetius, under the empire and late empire, respectively, praise the early imperial army’s discipline and especially its training. But few have stopped to ask how the perspective of these observers affects their conclusions: Polybius, an officer of the Achaean League, whose army was badly trained and intermittently cowardly and whose officers had only a very limited disciplinary authority; Josephus, a leader of the Jewish levies hastily raised to resist the Romans, a militia whose insubordination, indiscipline, and infighting appalled him; and Vegetius, a would-be military reformer and starry-eyed lover of things past. Polybius, in fact, did not think Roman discipline the key to Roman success, although it was praiseworthy: he thought the soldiers of Macedon more orderly and obedient than the Romans. The Romans defeated the Macedonians, he says, not because of their discipline, but because of the superiority of their formation. And a close look at the record of the Roman army, a litany of mutinies, rebellions, and individual and mass disobedience, can easily raise doubts as to whether the army of the Romans was, by the standards of modern armies, very well disciplined at all.
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Both discipline and cohesion assume their proper role in Roman military success when they are understood in the context of a fundamental Roman cultural drive: competition in aggressive bravery arising from a heroic tradition of single combat" (Pg 170-171)
"Later Romans believed that this practice of one-on-one dueling on the battlefield was sanctified by immemorial tradition. Romulus, they believed, the very founder of Rome, had been the first to dedicate to Jupiter the spolia opima, the “noble spoils,” a special honor for a Roman commander who had killed the opposing commander with his own hand. And the Romans told a story about olden times when they were ruled by kings, a story about a duel between two sets of triplets, the brothers Horatii and Curatii. Two of the Roman brothers were cut down, the tale went, but all three of their opponents were wounded, and the surviving Roman brother fled. This was a ruse to spread out his attackers, and the Roman killed them one by one as they pursued him. And so the town of Alba, whose sovereignty was the stake for which the champions fought, was made part of Rome. When Romans imagined the fighting of their distant ancestors, they imagined it had allowed for and demanded formal combats that arose from challenges. Later Romans, in short, imagined a heroic culture not too far distant from the military culture depicted in the Iliad but even more ceremonious and ritualized.
In projecting heroic dueling back into their very earliest days, later Romans were doing nothing more than projecting back in time the military ethos by which they actually lived in the late third century bc. From the well-attested age of the Second Punic War come credible reports of single combats and of heroes who fought in many of them, including the Roman marshals Marcellus and Marcus Servilius, consul in 202 BC, who had killed twenty-three men in various duels. He had despoiled everyone of those he slew of his armor, Livy has him boast. Like Homeric heroes, Romans of the Republic claimed the armor of their victims. The Romans hung such armor on their houses as “witnesses to their bravery.” Under the Roman law such spoils could not be removed even if the house were sold, and in an emergency, when the Roman Senate needed to be replenished after a slaughter, those who displayed such spoils on their houses might be enrolled in that august body. There was a special term, spolia provocatoria, for spoils taken after a single combat that issued from a formal challenge. Polybius, our best witness to the way Romans fought in the Republic, described the seeking out of single combat as especially characteristic of the Roman way of war. He was looking into the past, but he was also describing his own generation in the second century BC, when Romans, Polybius’s own protector Scipio Aemilianus among them, still regularly sought out single combat.
Seeking out single combat was hardly confined to the Romans: it was part of the Celtic warrior tradition as well and the Greek, revived by Alexander and part of his legacy. Perhaps the most eager Greek emulator of Alexander in this regard was King Pyrrhus of Epirus. But when he found himself fighting the Romans and their allies in Italy (281–272 bc), although he fought in battle with his own hands, he proved less eager for single combat than the natives. After an Italian cavalry captain who charged him was killed, Pyrrhus nervously gave his own conspicuous equipment, no doubt including his famous helmet with its enormous crest and goat horns, to a friend, who was attacked and killed in turn. Greece offers no tales of multiple duelists to approach the Romans, nor the sense that single combat was a common rite of passage for young men of the ruling class. Seeking out single combat was a more prominent characteristic of Roman military culture than of the Classical or Hellenistic Greeks.
The force driving the quest for single combat was the yearning to demonstrate the human quality that Romans of the middle Republic most admired, virtus, or martial courage.
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It was the fiery ambition of Romans, especially young Roman aristocrats, to excel those around them in virtus that led them to seek out single combat. In the historian Livy’s version of the Corvus story Valerius accepts the challenge out of a sense of rivalry with the older duelist hero Manlius Torquatus" (Pg 175-177)
"The old stories of the Romans, then, are not just a Roman rumination on their aggressive, competitive military ethos, but also a way of worrying at the tension between that ethos and another fundamental Roman
military value, disciplina. “Discipline,” the flat English translation, fails to convey the full force of this Roman concept. For disciplina was not primarily a system of imposed or felt rules to make an unwarlike people place themselves in danger, to do something unnatural to them. In the old stories the Romans used to think about disciplina, tales like that of the son of Manlius Torquatus, it is conceived primarily as a brake to overly aggressive behavior.
The tradition as it came down to the first century bc could be summed up thus: “In war, fighting against the enemy without orders, or retiring too slowly when recalled from the fight, was more often punished than fleeing the standards or abandoning one’s position when pressed.” Roman disciplina was understood to be more a curb than a spur, and it formed an opposed pair with Roman virtus.
Details of early Roman legends are a dangerous sand upon which to build an enduring historical castle. But conceived as the dreams of men who, early and later, passed them down, elaborated them, and often invented them they reveal the concerns of those who dreamt them. The story of Corvus and related tales suggest a military culture at war with itself. The Romans had two contradictory sets of imperatives, both the heroic ethos of the single combatant and the stern code of disciplina" (pg 177-178)
"The velites seem to have fought individually as an irregular swarm, without officers or standards of their own, although they might be dispatched en masse or in groups on special missions, often with the cavalry. They also might be set to throw javelins in volleys to disrupt and discourage the enemy, like light-armed skirmishers in a Hellenistic army, although unlike Greek skirmishers they were eager to fight hand to hand as well. The maniples of the hastati, principes, and triarii were cohesive bodies of men, but the hastati and principes at least fought as individuals, maneuvering with sword and shield against the foe. Before it came to sword point, at least some of the hastati and principes threw their javelins, but the
throwing of javelins seems to have continued all through a Roman infantry fight" (Pg 179-180)
"Once the military tribunes, the officers, had been elected and assigned to their legions, the thirty-five tribes of Roman citizens were called forward in an order decided by lot. From a tribal contingent groups of four men, chosen as reasonably alike in age and body, came forward one after another for inspection by the tribunes. The tribunes of the first legion chose one man, then the tribunes of the second, then the third; the fourthwas left with the last. When the next four men came forward, the second legion got first choice and the first legion was left with the last. And so it went around until the legions had their full complement of men. This guaranteed, as Polybius says, that each legion got men of the same caliber. Yet this system was not only laborious and time-consuming, but also ensured that each soldier would serve among strangers. This method of selection cut across all previous bonds of attachment, splitting fellow tribesmen, fellow villagers, fellow tenants, clients of the same patron, even comrades in arms who had served together in the previous year.
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"All the cohesion born of previous civilian connection and previous military service the Romans cast away in selecting men for legions. This Roman system of selection, which so curiously prefigures the way athletes are drafted onto American professional sports teams and the way children are divided up for schoolyard games, suggests that the Romans of the middle Republic conceived that a soldier’s qualities as an individual were far more important to his military potential than his membership in a cohesive preexisting group.
This vision of the Roman soldier fits well with the competitive pursuit of virtus which the highborn youths of the Republic, youths like Valerius Corvus, manifested in their quest for single combat. The Roman soldier did not primarily think of himself as part of a team, and he was not treated as such by his officers. Rather, he regarded his comrades as his competitors in aggressive bravery. This was also how a Roman of the first century imagined the early fighting of his countrymen: “Their greatest contest for glory was with each other: each hastened to be the first to strike down a foe, to climb a wall, to be witnessed while doing such a deed.” In this army a commander might have to ride up and down in front of an advancing legion beating eager soldiers back into their lines with the shaft of his spear. If this aggressiveness characterized the generations when the manipular legion was evolving (and certainly the Romans thought it did) the manipular legion appears not as a rational adaptation to changing military circumstances, but as the direction in which the competitive ethos of the Roman soldier drove the Roman phalanx" (Pg 183-185)
"Yet whatever the order of their coming, the phalanx and the ethos of single combat were in conflict. Even the archaic phalanx had no greatplace for offensive prowess or heroic dueling, for aggressive virtus as the Romans understood it. To employ the phalanx in the face of this culture therefore required severity from above and self-discipline below, that is, disciplina, set in opposition to the individual ambitions of the warriors. And in fact there is a Roman story set in the mid–fifth century bc, in the age of the Roman phalanx, about another exemplar of disciplina, the dictator Postumius Tubertus, who executed his son for advancing beyond the lines without permission. It is from this dimly seen conflict between the phalanx and the culture of single combat that the singular Roman code of disciplina may derive and the odd sense, which the Romans worried at in their old stories, that for young men to disobey and fight against orders was justly punishable but at the same time right and natural." (Pg 186)
The manipular legion was a solution to the problem of how to reconcile a competitive culture of individual dueling with the unaggressive mass fighting of the phalanx. It was the archaic, mixed phalanx that the Romans learned from their neighbors, one in which missile-armed troops mingled with hoplites. In Greece this evolved under peculiar Greek cultural pressures into the mature phalanx, from which missile-users were excluded, but in Rome the aggressive cult of virtus exerted a quite different cultural pressure, not expelling missiles but finally dissolving the phalanx toward the front into the manipular legion. The ideal of virtus required the youngest men to sally forth in front of the phalanx, to gratify their
yearning for individual distinction. The power of the same ideal compelled their elders to allow them to go, to satisfy what they too considered a legitimate ambition, and to gain glory through them.
By this logic the manipular legion was not an abstract tactical system developed by a mythical Roman general staff. It was not a phalanx rationally adapted to rough terrain or to enemies who fought with irregular tactics, although perhaps
it proved useful in such cases. The manipular legion was the fruit of compromise resulting from the meeting of an imported method of fighting, the phalanx, with a people whose martial values, whether inherited or new-acquired, made fighting in the phalanx a heroic challenge for them." (Pg 189-190)
"Generalship that tended to delay battle was offensive to the inherited Roman ethic of virtus, and its practitioners were suspected of cowardice. To get their way generals had to rely on the old opposing ethic of disciplina and the power it gave them. But when generals forced the two hallowed principles against each other, as in the war against Hannibal, disciplina was often the loser. The Romans, like the Greeks before them, never made the decision that obedience was the overriding military duty. Their discipline, as Polybius reveals in amazement, was far harsher than that of the Greeks. But virtus had legitimacy as well, and legitimacy not inferior in kind." (Pg 203)
"Yet cerebral generalship was strongly resisted at Rome. Trickery and tactics, as the old senators had complained when the envoys reported the lies they had told to Perseus, could be viewed as opposed to virtus. “Among
the Romans, a bit of a trace of the old philosophy of war is left,” wrote Polybius of the Romans of Aemilius Paullus’s day. “They declare war openly, rarely use ambushes, and fight their battles hand-to-hand at close quarters.” Many Romans preferred a battle, as Livy put it, “with standards set against standards, on a clean and open field, where without fear of ambush the affair could be settled by true virtus.” The general, in this view, was to lead the army directly at the enemy, to allow his soldiers to display their virtus, and to display his own. After a loss a Roman general might be prosecuted for personal cowardice, but not for tactical stupidity. Terentius Varro, the aggressive consul who committed the Roman army to the disaster at Cannae, was not punished for his bad planning but thanked when he returned to Rome for “not despairing of the Republic.” It was far more important to the Romans that their generals be plucky and adventuresome than that they be skillful strategists and tacticians.
An unusual general like Scipio Africanus could regularly prevail in this conflict over how wars and battles should be fought. His personal heroism at the battle of Ticinus, where he was said to have saved his father’s life, and in the wake of Cannae, where he rallied a party of survivors when they threatened to surrender or flee from Italy, gave him at least partial protection against charges of personal cowardice. But even Scipio was severely criticized at Rome for lack of aggression, for moving too slowly, and for spoiling his soldiers. And he was sometimes obliged to trick his troops into obeying him by pretending that his plans were suggested to him by the gods. A less charismatic figure like Fabius Maximus,
by contrast, could exert only an intermittent sway over his army in the face of the Romans’ aggressive culture, despite the supreme constitutional power the awe-evoking office of dictator supposedly conferred." (Pg 206-207)
"Many Roman generals shared the common Roman distaste for strategy and tactics; others were impatient of slow strategy but not of tactics which did not delay the battle: the aggressive Varro deepened the Roman manipular array at Cannae. Still others, politicians in a city where politics and reputation were so wound up with war, will have been unwilling or unable to resist the impatient expectations of their soldiers and officers, whatever their private views: as long as the general and the soldier both followed the banner of virtus, the conflict between virtus and disciplina, for the most part, slept. But to make sophisticated plans—to fight like a Greek—might require that disciplina be set against virtus, and so produce
the baying of angry voters, that sound so dreaded by the politically ambitious. Frequently, therefore, in the Roman army, as Livy had Paullus complain, “the soldiers do the thinking, and the commander is led around by the gossip of the rankers.” Roman command gyrated between tactical ingenuity and tactical simplicity." (Pg 207-208)
"It is the conflict between the ancestral Roman value of virtus—and the impatient aggressiveness which grew from it—and the opposed tradition of cerebral generalship, which disciplina made possible, which explains the Romans’ facing the Macedonian phalanx head-on upon the plain of Pydna. On the day before the battle, Paullus had had to trick his own soldiers to prevent an engagement: a bald order to go into camp would not, it appears, have been obeyed. And soldiers’ entering battle against the orders of a commander was hardly uncommon in the Roman army. On the day of the battle both Paullus’s long sacrifices and his council of war were denounced as yet more delay. As long as possible Paullus lingered upon the rough ground: perhaps Perseus would advance and fight where the Romans had an advantage. But finally Paullus’s power to restrain his soldiers was at an end, and the Romans fought on ground of Perseus’s choosing. Ferociously denounced by both his officers and men, Paullus finally could resist no longer the virtus of his army. Before the Macedonians and Romans fought at Pydna the Roman ethics of virtus and disciplina fought their own battle, and in that battle virtus won" (Pg 208)
"Roman warfare of the mid-Republic was a product of fierce division over how war should be fought. The vision of generalship that Aemilius Paullus embodied, that is, the Hellenistic conception of the general as the master of trickery, tactics, flanking maneuvers, and applied scientific knowledge, was conceived as illegitimate on its face by a large proportion of his army and his officers, at least if it delayed their getting to grips with the enemy. To them the duty of the general was to lead his army straight at the foe and to fight as soon as possible. The willful virtus of the soldiers and officers pounded like a siege ram against disciplina, the ethic the general relied upon to command the obedience of his soldiers and to put his plans into action. Yet this very conflict underlies the success of the army of the middle Republic, for despite the disasters it sometimes produced, the result of the conflict was a balance between qualities essential to Roman victory: on the one hand, the bravery and aggressiveness of Roman soldiers of all ranks, and on the other the ability of commanders to use that bravery and aggressiveness. The Roman army was disobedient because it was brave: a less brave army might have been more obedient but would have won fewer wars, while an army whose bravery broke entirely through the bonds of disciplina would have been uncontrollable and so would have won fewer wars as well. In a world where their enemies often represented extremes—brave but ungovernable Gauls, drilled but sometimes timid Greeks—the secret of Roman superiority was that the Roman army, although often inferior in respects in which their enemies excelled, was adequate in respects in which their enemies were not" (Pg 210-211)
Re: The Disobedient Roman Soldier
Originally Posted by Hanny
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