This week we’re going to take a look at the process by which the Romans raised legions in the Middle Republic (c. 290-100 BC, think the age of Pyrrhus, Hannibal and the various well-known Scipios; this is also the period of Rome’s initial overseas expansion and its great power wars), what the Romans called the dilectus, a phrase which literally means ‘selection.’ And the goal here is a step-by-step nuts and bolts look at the process, examining both what key Roman officials and the soldiers being selected are doing at each point.
A particular benefit of looking at this process is that we can actually substantially reconstruct the process for the Roman dilectus, which sets it apart from almost any other ancient (and indeed many pre-modern) conscription or mobilization systems. We have far less visibility, for instance, into how the army of a Greek polis would actually be mobilized and almost no visibility into how soldiers for, say, an Achaemenid army were mustered. But this is one army in one period, where we can actually outline the process with some confidence.
Before we jump into that, I should note our sources for this. The main source for any reconstruction of the Roman dilectus is Polybius, a Greek who wrote in the mid-second century; the sixth book of his Histories includes a schematic outline of the Roman military system that is the foundation for everything we know about it. But Polybius’ description is, at points, very schematic. Fortunately, later sources help us out here, particularly Livy (Titus Livius); he’s writing in the first century but has sources now lost to us from substantially earlier (including some Polybius that we do not have; we’re missing big chunks of both authors). And while the dilectus is not functioning in Livy’s day, he related events from when it did that give us interesting details, like where key officials might be and what they might have or be doing at key moments in the process. Combining those episodes from Livy (and a few other authors) with Polybius’ large schema is what lets us reconstruct the process, though we need to be careful that the process may not have worked the same in all eras (indeed, we can be quite sure it must have changed really substantially in the 80s BC due to the Social War).
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Timing the Dilectus
Before we dive in, we should stop to clarify some of our key actors here, the Roman magistrates and officers with a role in all of this. A Roman army consisted of one or more legions, supported by a number (usually two) alae recruited from Rome’s Italian allies, the socii. Legions in the Republic did not have specific commanders, rather the whole army was commanded by a single magistrate with imperium (the power to command armies and organize courts). That magistrate was usually a consul (of which there were two every year), but praetors and dictators,1 all had imperium and so might lead an army. Generally the consuls lead the main two armies. When more commanders were needed, former consuls and praetors might be delegated the job as a stand-in for the current magistrates, these were called pro-consuls and pro-praetors (or collectively, ‘pro-magistrates’) and they had imperium too.
In addition to the imperium-haver leading the army, there were also a set of staff officers called military tribunes, important to the process. These fellows don’t have command of a specific part of the legion, but are ‘officers without portfolio,’ handling whatever the imperium-haver wants handled; at times they may have command of part of a legion or all of one legion. Finally, there’s one more major magistrate in the army: the quaestor. A much more junior magistrate than the imperium-haver (but senior to the tribunes), he handles pay and probably in this period also supply. That said, the quaestor is not usually the general’s ‘number two’ even though it seems like he might be; quaestors are quite junior magistrates and the imperium-haver has probably brought friends or advisors with a lot more experience than his quaestor (who may or may not be someone the imperium-haver knows or likes). With that out of the way:
The first thing to note about this process, before we even start is that the dilectus was a regular process which happened every year at a regular time. The Romans did have a system to rapidly raise new troops in an emergency (it was called a tumultus), where the main officials, the consuls, could just grab any citizen into their army in a major emergency. But emergencies like that were very rare; for the most part the Roman army was filled out by the regular process of the dilectus, which happened annually in tune with Rome’s political calendar. That regularity is going to be important to understand how this process is able to move so many people around: because it is regular, people could adapt their schedules and make provisions for a process that happened every year. I should note the dilectus could also be held out of season, though often the times we hear about this it is because it went poorly (e.g. in 275, no one shows up).
The process really begins with the consular elections for the year, which bounced around a little in the calendar but generally happened around September,2 though the consuls do not take office until the start of the next calendar year. As we’ve discussed, the year originally seems to have started in March (and so consuls were inaugurated then), but in 153 was shifted to January (and so consuls were inaugurated then).
What’s really clear is that there is some standard business that happens as the year turns over every year in the Middle Republic and we can see this in the way that Livy structures his history, with year-breaks signaled by these events: the inauguration of new consuls, the assignment of senior Roman magistrates and pro-magistrates to provinces, and the determinations of how forces will be allotted between those provinces. And that sequence makes a lot of sense: once the Senate knows who has been elected, it can assign provinces to them for the coming year (the law requiring Senate province assignments to be blind to who was elected, the lex Sempronia de provinciis consularibus, was only passed in 123) and then allocate troops to them. That allocation (which also, by the by, includes redirecting food supplies from one theater to another, as Rome is often militarily actively in multiple places) includes both existing formations, but is also going to include the raising of new legions or the conscription of new troops to fill out existing legions, a practice Livy notes.
The consuls, now inaugurated have another key task before they can embark on the dilectus, which is the selection of military tribunes, a set of staff officers who assist the consuls and other magistrates leading armies. There are six military tribunes per legion (so 24 in a normal year where each consul enrolls two legions); by this point four are elected and 2 are appointed by the consul. The military tribunes themselves seem to have often been a mix, some of them being relatively inexperienced aristocrats doing their military service in the most prestigious way possible and getting command experience, while Polybius also notes that some military tribunes were required to have already had a decade in the ranks when selected (Polyb. 6.19.1). These fellows have to be selected first because they clearly matter for the process as it goes forward.
The end of this process, which as we’ll see takes place over several days at least, though exactly how many is unclear, will have have had to have taken place in or before March, the Roman month of Martius, which opened the normal campaigning season with a bunch of festivals on the Kalends (the first day of the month) to Mars. As Rome’s wars grew more distant and its domestic affairs more complex, it’s not surprising that the Romans opted to shift where the year began on the calendar to give the new consuls a bit more of winter to work with before they would be departing Rome with their armies. It should be noted that while Roman warfare was seasonal, it was only weakly so: Roman armies stayed deployed all year round in the Middle Republic, but serious operations generally waited until spring when forage and fodder would be more available.
That in turn also means that the dilectus is taking place in winter, which also matters for understanding the process: this is a low-ebb in the labor demands in the agricultural calendar. I find it striking that Rome’s elections happen in late summer or early fall, when it would actually be rather inconvenient for poor Romans to spend a day voting (it’s the planting season), but the dilectus is placed over winter where it would be far easier to get everyone to show up. I doubt this contrast was accidental; the Roman election system is quite intentionally designed to preference the votes of wealthier Romans in quite a few ways (we’ll discuss this more when we do our 101-series on the Roman Republic later this year).
So before the dilectus begins, we have our regular sequence: the consuls are inaugurated at the beginning of the year, the Senate meets and assigns provinces and sets military priorities, including how many soldiers are to be enrolled. The Senate’s advice is not technically legally binding, but in this period is almost always obeyed. Military tribunes are selected (some by election, some by appointment) and at last the consuls can announce the day of the dilectus, conveniently now falling in the first couple of months of the year when the demand for agricultural labor is low and thus everyone, in theory, can afford to show up for the selection process.
Phase I: Bueller? Bueller? Bueller?
(I was torn in this joke whether I should Latinize Ferris Bueller’s name to Buellerus, -i (second declension), in which case it would be, “Buelle?” (the vocative), or if it ought to be Bueller, -is, as above, since third declension nouns don’t have a different vocative from their nominative form)
Also I should note this is the one part of the process that I think has a satisfactory academic treatment, in E.H Pearson, Exploring the Mid-Republican origins of Roman Military Administration: with Stylus and Spear (2021) – alas, one of those books not priced for mortals – which has a whole chapter on the dilectus, though Pearson’s focus is substantially on the documents involved and thus on only the first phase of the mobilization process. In any case, I largely follow Pearson here.
So once elected and inaugurated, the consuls select the day of the dilectus. Polybius is quite wordy in his description of the process, but it gives us a nice schematic vision of the process. In practice, there are two groups here to keep track of in parallel: the dilectus of Roman citizens, but also the mobilization of the socii who will reinforce those Roman legions once raised. The two processes happen at the same time.
So, on the appointed day(s), Polybius tells us all Romans liable for service of military age assemble in Rome and are called up on the Capitoline Hill for selection. This was a point that raised a lot of skepticism from historians,3 mostly concerning the number of people involved, but those concerns have all pretty much been resolved. While there might have been something like 323,000 Roman citizen males in the third or second century, they’re not all liable for general conscription, which was restricted to the iuniores – Roman citizen men between the ages of 17 and 46, who numbered fewer, probably around 228,000; seniores in theory could be conscripted, but in practice only were in an emergency. In practice the number is probably lower still as unless things were truly dire, men in their late 30s or 40s with several years of service could be pretty confident they wouldn’t be called and might as well stay home and rely on a neighbor of family member to report back in the unlikely event they were called. That’s still, of course, too many to bring up on to the Capitoline or to sort through calling out names, but as Polybius notes they don’t all come up, they’re called up by tribe. The Roman tribes were one of Rome’s two systems of voting units (the other, of centuries, we’ll come to in just a moment) and there were 35 of them, 4 urban tribes for those living in the city and 31 rural tribes for those living outside the city.
So what is actually happening is that the consul sets the date for the dilectus, then assigns his military tribunes to their legions (this matters because the tribunes will then do a round-robin selection of recruits to ensure each legion is of equivalent equality), then calls up one tribe at a time, with each tribe having perhaps around 6-7,000 iunores in it. Conveniently, the Capitoline is plenty large enough for that number, with estimates of its holding capacity tending to be between 12,000 and 25,000 or so.4 And while Polybius makes it seem like all of this happens on one day, it probably didn’t. Livy notes of one dilectus in 169, conducted in haste, was completed in 11 days; presumably the process was normally longer (though that’s 11 days for all three steps, not just the first one, Livy 43.14.9-10).
Once each tribe is up on the Capitoline, recruits are selected in batches; Polybius says in batches of four, but this probably means in batches equal to the number of legions being enrolled, as Polybius’ entire schema assumes a normal year with four legions being enrolled. Now Polybius doesn’t clarify how selection here would work and here Livy comes in awfully handy because we can glean little details from various points in his narrative (the work of doing this is a big chunk of Pearson (2021), whose reconstruction I follow here because I think it is correct). We know that the censors compile a list not just of Roman senators but of all Roman citizen households, including self-reported wealth and the number of members in the household, updated every five years. That self-reported wealth is used to slot Romans into voting centuries, the other Roman voting unit, the comitia centuriata; those centuries correspond neatly to how Romans serve in the army, with the equites and five classes of pedites (infantry). Because of a quirk of the Roman system, the top slice of the top class of pedites also serve on horseback, and Polybius is conveniently explicit that the censors select and record this too.
So at dilectus time, the consuls, their military tribunes (and their state-supplied clerk, a scriba) have a list of every Roman citizen liable for conscription, with the century and tribe they belong to, the former telling you what kind of soldier they can afford to be when called and the latter what group they’ll be called in. And we know from other sources (Valerius Maximus 6.3.4) that names are being read out, rather than just, say, selecting men at sight out of a crowd. That actually makes a lot of sense as dilectus (‘select’) may really be dis-lego, ‘read apart,’ from lego (-ere, legi, lectum) ‘to read.’5 And that matters because the other thing the Romans clearly have a record of us who has served in the past. We know that because in an episode that is both quite famous but also really important for understanding this process, in 214 – after four of the most demanding years of military activity in Roman history, due to the Second Punic War – the Roman censors identified 2,000 Roman iuniores who had not served in the previous four years (or claimed and been granted an exemption), struck them from the census rolls (in effect, revoking their citizenship) and then packed them off to serve as infantry (regardless of their wealth) in Sicily.6
So what happens as each tribe comes up is that the tribunes can call out the names – in batches – of men with the least amount of service, of the particular wealth categories they are going to need to fill out the combat roles in the legion.7 The tribunes for each legion pick one recruit from each batch that comes up, going round-robin so every legion gets the same number of first-picks. Presumably once the necessary fellows are picked out of one tribe, that tribe is sent down the Capitoline and the next called up.
Once that is done the oath is administered. This oath is the sacramentum militare; we do not have its text in the Republic (we do have the text for the imperial period), but Polybius summarizes its content that soldiers swear to obey the orders of the consuls and to execute them as best they are able. The Romans, being practical, have one soldier swear the full oath and then every other soldier come up and say, “like that guy said” (I’m not even really joking, see Polyb. 6.21.3) to get everyone all sworn in. Of course such an oath is a religious matter and so understood to be quite binding.
Then the tribunes fix a day for all of the new recruits to present themselves again (without arms, Polybius specifies) and dismiss them. Strikingly, Polybius only says they are dismissed at this point – not, as later, dismissed to their homes. This makes me assume that the oath being described is administered tribe by tribe before the tribe is sent down (this also seems likely because fitting the last tribe and four legions worth of recruits on the Capitoline starts to get pretty tight, space-wise). Selecting with the various tribes might, after all, take a couple of days, so the tribunes might be telling the recruits of the first few tribes what day the entire legion will be assembled (that’ll be Phase II) after they’ve worked through all of the tribes. Meanwhile, once your tribe was called, you didn’t have to hang around in Rome any longer, if you weren’t selected you could go home, while the picked recruits might stick around in Rome waiting for Phase II.
That leads to the other logistical question for Phase I: the feasibility of having basically all of the iuniores in Rome for the process. Doubts about this have led to the suggestion that perhaps the dilectus in Rome was mirrored by smaller versions held in other areas of Roman territory in Italy (the ager Romanus) for Roman citizens out there. The problem with that assumption is that the text doesn’t support it. The Romans send out conscription officers (conquisitores) exactly twice that we know of, in 213 and 212 (Livy 23.32.19 and 25.5.5-9) and these are clearly exceptional responses to the failure of the dilectus in the darkest days of the Second Punic War (the latter is empowered to recruit under-age boys if they look strong enough to bear arms, for instance). But I also think it was probably unnecessary: this was a regular occurrence, so people would know to make arrangements for it and the city of Rome could prepare for the sudden influx of young men. This is, after all, also a city with regular ‘market days,’ (the nundinae) which presumably would also cause the population to briefly swell, though not as much. And we’re doing this in an off-time in the agricultural calendar, so the farmhands can be spared.
Moreover, Rome isn’t that far away for most Romans. Strikingly, when the Romans do send out conquisitores, they split them with half working within 50 miles of Rome and half beyond that (Livy 25.5.5-9). The implication – that most of the recruits to be found are going to be within that 50 mile radius – is clear, and it makes a lot of sense given the layout of the ager Romanus. Certainly there were communities of Roman citizens farther out, but evidently not so many. Fifty miles down decent roads is a two-day walk; short enough that Roman iuniores could fill a sack with provisions, walk all the way to Rome, stay a few days for the first phase of the dilectus and walk all the way back home again at the end. We’re not told how communities farther afield might handle it, but they may well have trekked in too, or else perhaps sent a few young men with instructions to bring back a list of everyone who was called.
Meanwhile the other part of this phase is happening: the socii. Polybius reports that “at the same time the consuls send their orders to allied cities in Italy, which they with to contribute troops, stating the numbers required and the day and place at which the men selected must present themselves.”8 Livy gives us more clarity on how this would be done, providing in his description of the muster of 193 the neat detail that representatives of the communities of socii met with the consuls on the Capitoline (Livy 34.36.5). And that makes a ton of sense – this is happening at the same time as the selection, so that’s where the consuls are.
We also know the consuls have another document, the formula togatorum, which spells out the liability of each community of socii for recruits; we know less about this document than we might like. Polybius tells us that the socii were supposed to compile lists of men liable for recruitment (Polyb. 2.23-4) and an inscription of the Lex Agraria of 111 BC refers to, “the allies or members of the Latin name, from whom the Romans are accustomed to demand soldiers in the land of Italy ex formula togatorum.”9 That then supplies us with a name for the document. Finally, we know that in 177, some of the socii complained that many of the households in their territory had migrated into other communities but that they conscription obligations had not been changed (Livy 41.8), which tells us there was a formal system of obligations and it seems to have been written down in something called the formula togatorum, to which Polybius alludes.
What was written down? Really, we don’t know. It has been suggested that it might have been a sliding scale of obligations (‘for every X number of Romans, recruit Y number of Paeligni’) or a standard total (‘every year, recruit Y Paeligni’) or a maximum (‘the total number of Paeligni we can demand is Y, plus one more guy whose job is to throw flags at things.’). In practice, it was clearly flexible,10 which makes me suspect it was perhaps a list of maximum capabilities from which the consuls could easily compute a fair enough distribution of service demands. A pure ratio doesn’t make much sense to me, because the socii come in their own units, which probably had normal sizes to them.
So, while the military tribunes are handling the recruitment of citizens into the legions, the consuls are right there, but probably focused on meeting with representatives of each community of the socii and telling them how many men Rome will need this year. Once told, those representatives are sent back to their communities, who handle recruitment on their own; Rome retains no conscription apparatus among the socii – no conscription offices, no records or census officials, nada. The consuls spell out how many troops they need and the rest of it was the socii‘s elected official’s problem.
Phase II: Unit Divisions
All of that sets up for the second phase where the recruits return on the appointed day and are reassembled, probably on the campus Martius (the field of Mars, just outside the city), which in any case is where the whole process will end up moved to in the first century (probably to accommodate the larger number of Roman citizens). Moving the process outside of the ritual boundary of the city, the pommerium, would have been important, because the power of certain Roman magistrates to command armies (imperium, a crucial concept we’ll deal with when we get to the series on the Republic) only exists fully outside this boundary. It also keeps them from being hassled by the Tribunes of the Plebs (a distinct and entirely different office from the military tribunes!), whose powers don’t exist outside the pommerium. That said, Polybius doesn’t tell us where this part takes place and I don’t myself know of any source that explicitly does.
I should stop to note that this phase gets short shift in the scholarship. Brunt, Italian Manpower (1971) 625ff somehow manages to miss it entirely, conflating it with the selection of recruits in Phase I, but it is clearly a distinct stage in the process. Polybius is not subtle here: after the oaths are taken, the tribunes dismiss the recruits (Polyb. 6.21.6), designating a time and place for them to reassemble without arms and then when they show up then (Polyb. 6.21.7), they are divided into units, are ordered to get their equipment and then sent home again (Polyb. 6.26.1) to reassemble one more time (Polyb. 6.26.2) when the army is properly formed. That is three clear stages: selection, apportionment and mobilization, which occur on different days in different places.
The function of this phase is the division of recruits into their constituent units. First the pedites (again, ‘infantry’) are split into four types: velites, hastati, principes and triarii. Polybius notes that the “youngest and poorest” are assigned to the velites, then the next to the hastati, and so on, creating a sliding scale by both wealth and age; one paragraph down he reiterates that the velites are mostly the youngest soldiers (Polyb. 6.22.1). In practice, we know that the centuries of the pedites were stratified by wealth and that wealthier soldiers were expected to bring heavier, more expensive kit (even Polybius notes this, Polyb. 6.23.14). The equipment of the velites, who were light infantry skirmishers that screened and supported the legion, would have been much cheaper than the equipment of the rest of the infantry (who were all armored, heavy infantry), so I think the right reading of Polybius is that the velites consist of both the young of all of the classes of pedites (putting green soldiers in a position to both prove their courage, but also one where if they falter it doesn’t cause the line to collapse; light infantry can retreat and advance freely) as well as the very poorest of the pedites who couldn’t afford heavier equipment even if they wanted to.11
The velites carry a sword (Livy tells us it is the same sword as the heavy infantry, the gladius Hispaniensis, Livy 38.21.13), a small shield (the smaller version of the parma; cavalry use a larger version of this shield), and javelins (Livy clarifies they carry seven of them; these are lighter javelins, the hasta velitaris, Livy 26.4) along with a modest helmet.12 The velites themselves emerge as a distinct arm of the Roman army during the Second Punic War, but an integrated light infantry skirmish force existed earlier; it’s not clear how the velites would have differed from earlier light infantry leves milites or rorarii. Perhaps not very much.
Meanwhile the heavy infantry (hastati, principes and triarii) carry a large oval shield (the scutum), a sword (the gladius Hispaniensis, a versatile cut-and-thrust sword), two heavy javelins (pila), and wear both a metal helmet (the ubiquitous bronze Montefortino-type) and body armor. Poor soldiers, Polybius tells us, wear what in Latin is a pectorale (and thus in English a ‘pectoral’); this gets represented as a single smallish bronze plate over the upper-chest, but our evidence for this equipment suggests a more complete cuirass consisting of a front and back plate joined by side and shoulder plates, with a broad armored belt protecting the belly, a sort of ‘articulated breastplate’ which you can see below. Wealthier Romans were required to furnish themselves with mail. Once again, the fact that the tribunes are likely to have access to the census, and thus the self-reported wealth figures of the recruit’s households (tied to their century assignment) is going to facilitate these divisions.
Each class (except the velites) then elect ten senior centurions and ten junior centurions, with the very first fellow elected being the primus pilus, the most senior centurion of the legion. Centurions then handpick their supporting officers (the optio). We are given no clues as to how this election would be accomplished, but the numbers here we’re now dealing with are fairly small (1200 infantry per type, except just 600 triarii), so the procedures here don’t have to be that complex. The centurions then assist the tribunes in breaking up each class into maniples (120 men) and centuries (60 men), with the velites being attached to the maniples of the heavy infantry rather than getting their own, because they’re a supporting force. Meanwhile, the cavalry is being divided as well into ten squadrons, each with three officers (decuriones), who have their own optiones.
Once all of those divisions are complete, the tribunes instruct the men on how they are to arm themselves and then send them home (Polyb. 6.26.1). I should note here the Paton translation (rev. Walbank and Habicht, but I don’t think they change anything here) reads, “The tribunes having thus organized the troops and ordered them to arm themselves in this manner dismiss them to their homes” but a more strictly literal translation would run, “The tribunes, having made the divisions and given them orders concerning equipment then dismiss the men to their homes.” There’s an assumption worked into the translation that soldiers arm themselves; I think this assumption is correct, but it is not required by the text.
But of course the staging of this process only really makes sense if soldiers do self-equip. Otherwise, why send them all to their homes at this stage, when you have the entire army gathered and divided into units? If equipment was state issued, it’d be trivial to hand it all out right at this stage and then march off to war. Instead, soldiers are dispatched home with orders concerning their equipment.
Meanwhile, the process for the socii is running in parallel. We know basically nothing about this stage of their process, but it is certainly happening. All Polybius tells us is that “the magistrates [of the socii], choosing the men and administering the oath in the manner above described, send them off, appointing a commander and a paymaster” (Polyb. 6.21.5). The implication is that the socii have a similar process to the Romans (albeit in miniature as there are many communities of socii who collectively provide about as many troops as the Romans, so their dilecti – whatever name they really went by – will be much smaller). This is reflective of the Roman attitude towards the socii – they do not care how the troops are raised or paid, only that they are raised. So long as the socii show up at the appointed time with the right gear, ready to fight, the Romans are fine with the process.
But the system here mirrors the Roman one quite strongly. Each Roman army has a presiding magistrate (like a consul) and an assigned financial magistrate (a quaestor), just as each socii detachment has a commander and a paymaster. The commander of these socii units show up in our sources as praefecti cohortium and seem to have been drawn from the local elite of those communities (just like the Romans). So while the Romans are dividing into units and then heading home to buy, fetch or borrow their equipment, the socii are at work recruiting their own troops to the numbers and of the types demanded at the dilectus, arming them, making arrangements for their pay (the Romans supply food, but not pay, for the socii) and then sending them to the planned rendezvous.
Phase III: Mobilization
Now, at last – at a later time and date – the army truly assembles. The Roman soldiers, having sworn (probably at the end of Phase I, since Polybius specifies this is an oath to the consuls who, you may notice, are absent from Phase II) to show up at the appointed time and place for the army now do so, with the arms they’re required to have. The rendezvous location need not be in Rome and indeed frequently was not: often these legions formed up in friendly territory closer to the intended combat zone (e.g. Livy 22.11; 31.11; 34.56; 37.4, etc., etc.) and so the individual recruits (or more likely groups of them, having made arrangements with their buddies in Phase II) have to get themselves to the muster point.
It is at this point that the process for the Romans and socii converge, as the socii are arriving at the same spot, on the same day, under arms in their own small units with their leaders. The army commander (again, generally a consul) now appoints twelve Roman officers, the praefecti sociorum as senior officers over the socii who are divided into two wings (alae), which generally flank the legions in battle. The praefecti sociorum, we’re told, first have the job of pulling out an elite subset of the socii, the extraordinarii, from the socii cavalry (who generally outnumber the Roman cavalry, though not by a fixed ratio as Polybius suggests) and infantry.
And then finally the whole army sets down its first fortified marching camp (which Polybius then describes in some detail and which we’ve already discussed), completing the process. We also at this step hear about the presence of non-soldiers in the camp, because the tribunes now administer an oath to everyone, “free and slave” not to steal anything from the camp and to return any found property to the tribunes. We’re not very well informed about what non-combat personnel in a Roman camp in the Republic would consist of, but they clearly existed and we’ve discussed broadly their outlines before.
We also know – and this is a point that Pearson goes into more depth on – that once the army was formed, the Romans kept track of who was in it. There is often an assumption that ancient generals couldn’t really know how many troops they had, but at least in the Roman case this clearly wasn’t true.13 In the imperial period, soldier’s received pay ‘s pay and expenses were handled by a running account for each individual soldier and there’s no reason to think this system wasn’t also in operation during the Republic. Indeed, Polybius notes that costs for food and any missing equipment were deducted from soldier pay, which essentially demands a tracking system for everyone (except the socii, who get their food for free and aren’t paid by Rome, presumably to save the book-keeping headache of reconciling a couple dozen different communities’ paystubs). We can see the exact same system in operation in Roman military records preserved on papyrus from Egypt in the early imperial period.
Observations on the System
To close out, I want to offer just a few scattered observations on the system as it functions:
The Roman dilectus as described is plausible and could have functioned. There is actually quite a lot of research on maximum possible crowd sizes, hearing distance and space in Rome in particular because it has implications for how we understand Roman politics. And strikingly, while a lot of things in Roman politics were not configured to be easy for very large crowds, this process, which breaks everyone up until they’re in small enough units to all hear a single person shouting out of doors is of a scale where this could all pretty much work as described.
Polybius’ description is heavily focused on the role of the tribunes and Elizabeth Rawson supposed decades ago that this was because Polybius was working from some informal records or commentarii of one or more military tribunes from the Second Punic War.14 And I think that’s right. Polybius makes several ‘they used to do that, now they do this’ remarks in his description, which I suspect reflects him noticing differences between the commentaries he had and the process as he could have observed it in the mid-second century. There is a growing consensus among scholars – note both Michael Dobson15 and I suppose also me16 – that Polybius’ book six description, placed chronologically in 216, is probably more correct for that period (broadly the first decade or so of the Second Punic War) than for Polybius’ own time, sixty-odd years later. We’re missing most of the later books of Polybius and it is possible he intended to set up a subsequent contrast or to chronicle developments as he went. It seems fairly likely, for instance, that Polybius’ very positive description of the Romans’ constitutional structure was intended to serve as a ‘before’ to an ‘after’ narrative set closer to Polybius’ own day.
This was also a fairly well organized process, making use of a lot of records and documents. Conveniently for the Romans, while a once-every-five-years census might miss a lot of things, it won’t miss the appearance of seventeen-year-old young men. Consequently through this period, when the census was regular, this was one task it was perfectly well-suited for (and probably one of the tasks for which it was originally designed). The Roman census seems to have been less regular in the tumultuous first century BC and also difficult to carry out effectively oversees. Augustus, for all of his ‘putting things in order,’ after taking on the role of censor for himself (as part of being emperor), notes first that a regular census with its attendant ritual (the lustrum) hadn’t occurred at all between 69 and 28 BC. Augustus reports three censuses of Roman citizens, one in 28BC, one in 8BC and one in 14AD, hardly as regular as in the republic and there’s no hint that he’s just leaving the rest out. But by that point, the Roman army was a professional, long-service volunteer force and the Roman voting assemblies had ceased being politically significant; the census had thus lost its military and political significance.17
In terms of operation there was very little space in this system for meaningful compulsion. Instead, the entire system, for both citizens and the socii, functionally relied on a lot of active, willing compliance. Citizens had to first report their wealth and sons, then they had to show up to the dilectus. The law proposed dire penalties (loss of citizenship and sale into slavery) for draft-dodgers, but the Roman state itself had no draft officers or law enforcement to respond if there was mess resistance (and indeed, the Roman people do, on multiple occasions, shut down the dilectus in protest of this or that; check out the Partial Historians podcast for a lot of these instances as they move through the Struggle of the Orders). Romans who were drafted could attempt to claim some kind of exemption and by the third century the fact that the dilectus happens on the Capitoline within the pommerium meant the Plebian Tribunes (again, different from the military tribunes) could intervene if the consuls were unreasonable. In practice, there’s a lot of reason to suppose exemptions were frequent unless the situation was indeed dire.
And then the process itself is rife with opportunities for desertion, since selected recruits are sent away twice – once all the way home – before having to voluntarily march to the army to join it on the appointed day. Instead it seems clear to me that this system relied heavily on social pressure in order to function: military service was honored, dodging it was shamed and so except in cases of mass refusal, anyone trying to dodge the dilectus was unlikely to get much support from friends, family or neighbors. It shouldn’t surprising that given a choice between improving one’s status and reputation through service or being de facto (or de iure!) exiled from the only society you have ever known, young Roman men chose the first option overwhelmingly. The affair of 214 suggests that even in a period where Roman armies were regularly being destroyed completely, the draft-dodger rate was something just below 1%.
Finally, as such systems go, this system was extremely effective. Between 218 and 214, Livy would have us believe that the Romans mobilized a massive proportion of their available iuniores manpower at one point or another (though not all at once); effectively everyone without a valid excuse, save for the 2,000 draft dodgers (who were then promtply conscripted and sent to Sicily). And the numbers mostly line up; between 214 and 212 the Romans called up something on the order of a quarter of a million men (including the socii). Counting the casualties in the bitter losses of 218-216, the total almost certainly rises over 300,000, close to half of all of the military aged males liable for service in Italy. Given the scale of the Roman state – the Roman Republic of this period not counting the socii was already about an order of magnitude larger than the largest polis – achieving mobilizations of that kind of depth was a remarkable achievement.
Part of that success was that the system was so minimal: it was cheap to run. Unlike more bureaucratically sophisticated states (like those of the Hellenistic East), which extracted vast tax revenues and then used the money to entice soldiers, Rome’s ‘serve for the honor and glory of it’ military system didn’t bankrupt the very modest resources of the Roman state.18 Part of this has to do with the ‘franchised’ nature of the system. Rome runs the largest single dilectus but is essentially also benefiting from dozens of Italian communities running smaller local variations of the system, allowing the Romans to reach deep into these communities.
Ironically the systems success leads to its steady irrelevance as Rome’s expanding frontiers and increasing wealth led to a gradual shift away from mass-conscription armies towards the professional, long-service volunteer forces of the early empire, though it is worth noting that the dilectus still functioned well into the first century BC.
- And the dictator’s master of the horse.
- On this, see J.T. Ramsey, “The Date of the Consular Electionsin 63 and the Inception of Catiline’s Conspiracy” HSCP 110 (2019): 213-270.
- Particularly in P.A. Brunt, Italian Manpower (1971)
- Pearson (2021) compiles them; the issue is also discussed in Taylor (2020).
- The philological argument here is Pearson (2021), 16-17. It is not air-tight because legere has a lot of meanings, including ‘to pick out’ along with ‘to read.’ That said, given that the verb of being recruited into the army is conscribere (‘to write together, to conscript’), there really is a strong implication that this is a process with written records, which the rest of the evidence confirms. I think Pearson may or may not be right about the understood meaning of dilectus implying writing, but the process surely involved written records, as she argues.
- A punishment post, this is also where the survivors of the Battle of Cannae were sent. Both groups remain stuck in Sicily until pulled into Scipio Africanus’ expedition to Africa in 205, so these fellows don’t get to go home and get their citizenship back until the conclusion of the war in 201.
- in particular, we generally assume the lowest classes of Roman pedites probably could only afford to serve as light troops, the velites, while the wealthy equites had their own selection procedure for the cavalry done first. Of course, rich Romans not selected for the cavalry might serve as infantrymen if registered in the centuries of pedites which is presumably how Marcus Cato, son of the Censor, ends up in the infantry at Pydna, Plut. Aem. 21)
- Polyb. 6.21.4. Paton’s trans.
- Crawford, Roman Statutes (1996), 118 for the text of that inscription.
- Something pointed out by L. de Ligt in his chapter in the Blackwell A Companion to the Roman Army (2007)
- In Polybius’ day, there may have been significant overlap between these two definitions just because Roman military success was likely to put enough loot in the pocket of a seasoned veles to enable him to afford the equipment of the heavier infantry.
- Perhaps in some cases a leather or textile head-covering rather than a metal one; evidence here is very thin.
- In practice, I suspect a lot of ancient armies had better record-keeping than is often assumed, especially if they pay soldiers or impose harsh legal penalties for failure to answer the levy.
- E. Rawson, “The Literary Sources for the Pre-Marian Army” PBSR 39 (1971): 13-31.
- The Army of the Roman Republic: The Second Century BC, Polybius and the Camps at Numantia, Spain (2008)
- “The Adoption and Impact of Roman Mail Armor in the Third and Second Centuries B.C.” Chiron 52 (2022): 135-166
- In the third and early second centuries, the census would have also mattered for the levying of the Roman land/wealth tax, the tributum, but this was discontinued in the second century.
- On the modest comparative financial resources of the Roman state, see Taylor, Soldiers and Silver (2020).
Thanks for the article! Two questions occur to me;
Let’s start with the shorter one – Would the first soldier selected to actually speak the whole oath be chosen for their social status? And/or would being the primary actor here improve their social status?
It sounds as if things proceeded generally the same through the Republic and into the Imperial; what impact did the Marian Reform(s) have on the system? It always sounds as if it were a serious or near-complete overhaul.
I’m myself curious about the first question.
As for the second, many scholars nowadays doubt the Marian Reforms were ever one thing, and find the term unhelpful; arguing that these changes happened over a long period rather than under Marius specifically. (I was taught the traditional view in a Classics course I took recently, but our professor was not a military historian.)
I think the reforms of Gaius Marius were more about social inclusion; someone without land as property and means to buy his own weapons could then server; The Marian reforms were a kind of ‘new deal’ of the Roman republic.
The public conception of the Marian reforms and what scholars actually think about the so-called Marian reforms (note the added hyphenated word) are very different. I may try to work in a ‘what were the so-called Marian reforms’ post here in the next few weeks because it’s clear that most folks aren’t fully aware of just how much of the significance of Marius, personally, in the process has drained away.
That would be extremely interesting! So please and thanks on that idea.
That would be informative since I think most people’s conceptions of the Marian Reforms are shaped by Total War, if they have heard of them at all.
There is of course the enormous chasm between what is intended by an action and what the practical result is. I don’t doubt the initial impetus was simply “we’re short on soldiers, but we have all these men who can’t serve because of some archaic rule; let’s do the sensible thing”. But of course the eventual result was armies of troops who were more loyal to the generals who led them than to the SPQR.
That die was cast when the Gracchi were murdered. Create a large underclass – get a revolt.
shouldn’t it be similar to how schools choose freshman spokesman ? Reasonably handsome, son of famous people, who could be relied on to speak clearly without stutter ?
The Marian Reforms, if they existed at all, consisted of allowing the poorer citizens to serve in the army. They didn’t end the practice of raising new armies for specific campaigns — indeed, one of the reasons why Sulla was able to convince his army to march on Rome the first time was because they were worried Marius would disband them and raise his own legions instead. The real change, I’d argue, took place after Julius Caesar’s assassination and during the Second Triumvirate. Political power in Rome fell into the hands of warlords who were important because of the huge armies they commanded; disbanding your troops just because you weren’t currently fighting any wars would see your power drain away and leave you vulnerable to attack by a rival warlord, so people kept their armies around even during peacetime. When Augustus took over he formalised the situation, resulting the army of long-service professionals we all know and love.
Tl;dr the “Marian Reforms” really ought to be called the “Augustan Reforms” instead.
Bueller -i?
Why not second declension ending in -r, like Alexander (which still takes the vocative as -er)?
(Note – I realize that there could be an excellent reason why a modern name would not be latinized in that way, but I just started learning latin and just hit the ‘2nd declension ending in -r’ section)
🙂
Very interesting post! It’s inspired four questions, of varying degrees of seriousness.
Q1) You mention in note 11 that a seasoned veles likely has enough loot in his pocket to afford better equipment given Roman military success in the time period. How did loot distribution work out? I vaguely recall from reading my Livy that you have a number of announcements of Consul So and So, after winning and returning to Rome (usually with a Triumph) distributed X amount to each soldier, usually giving double for centurions and a lot more to cavalry. Was there some kind of set formula as to how loot was to be distributed? Were soldiers allowed and able to grab stuff and keep it beyond what the consuls disbursed? Any idea as to how common ‘cheating’ the system was of soldiers trying to grab more?
Q2) How does the opposite end of this process work? Barring a few disasters in the Punic Wars, the likely outcome of a Roman army in the Middle Republic is to come home after a campaign. Was there any set procedure for making sure everyone got home okay, or was it just a kind of “Imperium’s over, legion’s disbanded, get lost” sort of thing?
Q3) As a sitting member of the ACOUP senate, I did not get the censor’s requirements of bringing my own kit. What should I be showing up with when I natter on every month?
Q4)Most importantly of all, how did they decide who got to be the designated Paeligni flag-flinger? That does seem to be a vital office of high honor within the Ala, and I imagine everyone wanted to try to be selected for it.
Q2: Julius Ceasar was doing a very weird/bad thing crossing the Rubicon with his legion southward, right? I guess that implies armies marched most of the way back to Italy as a unit, then just before they got there they disbanded, which would also fit with things like travel safety (you don’t want to disband in enemy territory) and practicality (you want to disband *before* people start reaching their hometown, not after)
Q3: I would suggest a device with a good internet connection, a nice bit of seating, a good snack and a cup of tea.
It wasn’t just weird/bad when Caesar crossed the Rubicon. Theoretically and legally, Caesar’s command existed only on the far side of the river; the second he walked across it, by law he was simply a citizen of the Republic with no authority over his fellow citizens. He went from an agent of the state performing his duty to the lawless head of a rogue army.
It’s related to what Dr. Devereaux mentions a couple times in this post about the pomerium, the legal boundary of Rome that marked where Rome’s walls would theoretically have been if Rome had walls. An officer only held imperium outside of that boundary, where he was a representative of Rome’s collective authority on campaign; if he set foot across that line, he was a Roman among Romans.
It should be noted that, by Caesar’s day, the pomerium ran through otherwise-undifferentiated urban sprawl, and it would be entirely possible for an official to be living on the far side of what theoretically separated the city of Rome from occupied territory.
The one question I have about this: if people were going to fudge their self-reported wealth, what direction did that fudging likely happen in?
I was thinking about this also, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that this system is actually fairly well designed to encourage accurate self reporting of wealth. Since you’re not just outfitting your own equipment, but being directly ordered by a superior officer you have just taken a sacred Oath to obey in front of basically all of your social peers, presumably the social and legal consequences of not showing up in the correct kit for your unit is going to be pretty severe. And here I think back to Bret’s previous post about the effectiveness of various kinds of armor, to come up with two truths: armor is very effective, and armor is very expensive. Your superior officer has access to the census information on your self-reported wealth, so if you are trying to inflate your wealth on the census, he’s going to ask you to show up with full Triarii kit, and now your choice is to bankrupt yourself and your family to get that kit, or to break your Oath and ostracized yourself socially by not showing up properly equipped or at all. Meanwhile, the Roman Republic is going to war pretty much every year in this period and there’s a very good chance you’re going to have to serve at least once during the 5 year interval between taking the census. If your superior orders you to gear up as a Hastati, everyone will notice if you show up in nice Trinari-level kit. But war is scary and dangerous and armor makes it less dangerous, so you want to take as much armor as you can actually afford to stay safe. So you don’t want to underreported, especially because of the escalating layers of political privileges afforded to higher ranking centuries.
So the constant warfare and conscription of the Middle Republic creates a social and financial incentive not to over-report, while safety and political self interest incentivize you not to under-report just to save some coin on equipment. I’d wager the structure probably leans ever so slightky toward being somewhat conservative in estimating your wealth to the census, which serves the to help keep the wealthy political families on top by raising the bar to join the club, but the moment you can actually afford better gear you want to report up.
This makes me wonder whether you could ‘correct’ your census wealth on the spot, like say “hey my fortunes have changed since the census and I could afford better gear now, could you reasign me to the principes or whatever”
As someone who is not a historian but is Israeli, I am stricken by your concluding remarks on willing compulsion and how they are mirrored in Israeli society. You mention that in the Second Punic War, right after Cannae, only 1% of Roman citizens draft-dodged – but this is not too different from the role of military service in mainline Jewish Israel in the country’s first 30 years, when it was under constant existential threat. Draft resistance as we know it in Israel did not exist until the Lebanon War, which a) was a war of choice and b) happened after the peace agreement with Egypt alleviated the existential threat. A lot of the draft resistance leaders, like the Yesh Gvul founders, had recently served with distinction in the 1970s, even as they objected to the occupation of thee Palestinian Territories.
The Yesh Gvul movement seems, if I may express my opinion in casual terms, very based
All Israel’s wars were wars of choice. They *chose* to take the Palestinians’ homeland from them.
In a literal sense, all wars are wars of choice. One can always choose the option not to fight, however great the penalty for taking that option.
But from from the standpoint of an Israeli citizen, a war in which Israel will be destroyed if it does not fight, is a lot less optional than one in which it won’t be.
A war started by taking someone else’s homeland from them is a lot more of a war of choice compared to most wars.
You appear to be willingly disregarding the fact how that homeland was obtained first. Let’s put it mildly – the users of that land were on a borrowed land and that lease just expired.
The original war was a war of choice. Now that the Israeli state has existed for several generations, current wars aren’t really wars of choice any more.
Sorry, but if you were trying to make a point, I’ve lost in it the Israel bashing.
The only point was to counter the historically incorrect narrative being advanced.
“Israel should be a Jewish national homeland” is neither historically correct nor incorrect, it’s a matter of values and political/ideological loyalties.
I think Israelis have a right to a nation-state (I wish my ethnicity had a nation state of our own, but we don’t). Maybe you disagree. But, the difference is not about historical facts, it’s about values.
To say that the founders of Israel chose to take the Palestinians’ homeland from them and therefore chose to start the resulting wars is historical fact, not opinion. If you believe that the founders of Israel were entitled to take the Palestinians’ homeland from them, that is indeed a question of moral opinion rather than fact.
The historically incorrect narrative that when European Jews immigrated to Palestine, they bought land and then had the temerity to defend themselves when the Palestinians tried to drive them off it when it turned out the Jews were better farmers than they were?
Yeah, that would be the one. People’s political rights to decide for themselves the fate of themselves and their homeland is not something that landlords can sell when selling their private property. The conflict was never about who was the better farmers, it was about Jewish colonists seeking to take over Palestine in whole or in part and institute Jewish ethnic power and the Palestinians trying to defend themselves against their homeland being taken from them.
So…transfer of land title is illegitimate when a “landlord” does it?
That’s…certainly a take.
Transfer of individual land title usually does not change the legal regime of the land. If I sell my US house to a Chinese landlord, the land does not become subject to PRC law instead of US law.
The British were the regime, and agreed to the new regime. Whoever owned the land, in national or personal terms, had agreed to a transfer.
“Yeah, that would be the one. People’s political rights to decide for themselves the fate of themselves and their homeland is not something that landlords can sell when selling their private property.”
I agree, which is why I’d ground the right of Israel to exist in the collective, national self determination of the Jewish people, not in private property agreements.
Do you think the Jewish people has the right to a nation state of their own?
Palestine was the homeland for the Israelis no less than it was for the Arabs. Jews deserved and still deserve a nation-state of their own no less (and of course no more) than Poles, Lithuanians, Egyptians and Iraqis do.
I don’t support the Israeli occupation of the territories, and I think a two state solution is the only fair solution, but it’s also true that if Arab countries had accepted the existence of Israel in 1948, we wouldn’t be in this situation today.
No, Palestine was absolutely not “the homeland for the Israelis no less than it was for the Arabs”. When the Zionist movement set out to take over Palestine and create a Jewish state there 95% of the inhabitants were Arabs. Palestine was the Palestinians’ homeland and the founders of Israel came in and took the Palestinians’ homeland from them.
Yes, it’s possible that things would have turned out differently if the Palestinians had given up their homeland without a fight. It’s always possible for people being invaded to simply not fight back, but that doesn’t change the fact that it is the invader who chooses to start the war, and the Israelis were the unambiguous aggressors.
From the Israeli perspective, it was their homeland, from which they had been unjustly expelled by the Romans. Now, this was a very long time ago, so whether they had a right to return there nearly 2,000 years later is a matter of opinion and of course much more could be said about the roles of the Ottomans, British, UN, etc in creating the situation.
But what’s relevant for where this discussion started is that the people being called up for military service in the early Israeli army were enormously likely, by virtue of being in that place at that time, to be among those who believed that this was rightfully the Jewish homeland and that they had a right and indeed a moral obligation to fight for it. Of course, they could’ve chosen to flee and become refugees somewhere else (as could the Palestinians, the Ukrainians today, etc) but that doesn’t make it a war of choice as that term is typically used. What matters here is not whether or not this view is correct but that it was widely held and therefore encouraged voluntary compliance with military recruitment.
South Dakota is like 84% white right now, but that doesn’t change the fact that it’s the national homeland for the Sioux people. (And yes I know the Sioux are from Wisconsin/Minnesota originally, that’s not really relevant here).
It is immensely relevant. The burning questions are what having a homeland means and what rights you get from it. Therefore where people really came from is the crucial question.
*Everyone* believes that their actions are justified. If we define war of choice simply as someone who doesn’t think their actions are justified then there are no such war.
The founders of Israel chose to take the Palestinians’ homeland from them, which triggered the resulting wars. That makes those wars wars of choice on their part.
“The burning questions are what having a homeland means and what rights you get from it.”
Mary, some might think the burning question is what happens to the people who you have declared NOT to have a homeland. Should they be expelled, imprisoned for the rest of their descendants natural lives, executed or what?
To show the importance of this question, consider that if the United States is the homeland of any ethnic group, it must surely be the Native Americans. So whatever fate should be inflicted on the side you don’t support in Israel/ Palestine, should also be inflicted on non-Native Americans.
So, what fate does natural justice require? And how do you know it requires that fate?
FWIW, at least until after World War Two “right of conquest” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Right_of_conquest# was an actual legal doctrine based on the pragmatic principle that denial of the right is meaningless unless one is able and willing to use military force to deny it. Sort of how like treason and rebellion is only a crime if you lose.
No, it must be the survivors of the original inhabitants, who exist solely at the southernmost tip of South America.
The rest? Genocide. You don’t want to reward genocide, do you?
As mentioned above, that’s a funny way of saying “bought the land and then defended themselves when they were attacked.”
“It is immensely relevant. The burning questions are what having a homeland means and what rights you get from it. Therefore where people really came from is the crucial question.”
The Sioux are certainly more indigenous to South Dakota than white Americans are, but fine, substitute Minnesota if you prefer. This is something of a distraction by way of an analogy anyway, my point was that a group (in this case Israeli Jews) can be native to a place, and have legitimate national rights to it, even if they’re no longer currently the majority there.
“the survivors of the original inhabitants, who exist solely at the southernmost tip of South America…You don’t want to reward genocide, do you?”
I’m not sure what the evidence is that the descendants of the original inhabitants of North America are solely to be found in Tierra del Fuego, but for the purposes of this argument will take your word for it.
It occurs to me that the original inhabitants of Israel and Palestine were certainly not the Israelites, for they famously left us written documentary evidence that they dispossessed and where possible enslaved or massacred the prior inhabitants. As someone who does not wish to reward genocide, you can not regard that region as the Jewish homeland rather than the Palestinian one.
As I said, the interesting question is how you treat the people whose homeland it is not.
So how do you think the Israelis should be treated, given that they are, by your own argument, living in the Palestinians homeland, rather than their own?
“I’m not sure what the evidence is that the descendants of the original inhabitants of North America are solely to be found in Tierra del Fuego, but for the purposes of this argument will take your word for it.”
I wouldn’t take her word for it, without some actual reason (e.g. from ancient DNA) to think so.
As always, very interesting! On a minor note: I have never seen the spelling ‘pommerium’ before
It’s so interesting to see all these little practical details about how these things actually worked. I’m wondering what sort of things qualified you for an exemption to the draft. I’m assuming serious disability would (e.g. missing limb, blindness); did they allow exceptions for things like “my dear parents will starve to death unless I’m there to take care of them” or “I’m my parents’ only surviving son”? And how did you go about applying for an exemption?
I don’t know anything for sure, but I imagine that one way of getting an exemption would be to, when you are called up to the front to serve, go there and then lay out your reasoning? That would minimize the amount of labour needed by not recording exemptions from people not selected (which in a normal year might well be something like 4 in 5 people, so it means 80% less work noting down exemptions)
That would fit the requirement/design element of being simple to run, and since you have to exempt yourself in front of your peers (your tribe), it discourages lying strongly, and it seems very simple.
But again, this is just me thinking “how would I do it?” without any actual source
The obvious question here is how the Roman census of the Republican period relates to the census as described in Luke 2, regarding the birth of Jesus. Two hundred years separates the events, but I have to wonder: Was the census that called Mary and Joseph to Bethlehem military in nature? Or did it have to do with tax revenues?
How does the Biblical narrative relate to this process?
This is something that has caused a lot of debate, but the narrative in Luke seems pretty confused when it comes to this. As Bret mentions above, Augustus conducted three censuses of Roman citizens (likely for propaganda purposes more than anything else). It is clear though that Jesus did not have citizenship (he couldn’t have been crucified, for one, and the same author shows pretty clearly how differently citizens were treated with Paul in Acts) and none of them correspond very well to Jesus’ birth. There was one local census in Judaea under Quirinius, as reported by Josephus, but this happened in 6 AD when the land was directly incorporated into the Empire. There is also no evidence that local censuses required people to go to the home-town of their ancestors, especially not an ancestor who lived a thousand years earlier.
I would think that Luke mixed up Augustus’ empire-wide censuses with Quirinius’ provincial one, and that the travel to one’s ancestral home was a plot device to get Jesus to Betlehem
There are a number of key missing details and likely mix-ups in Luke’s account of the census. But note that it’s quite likely that *Joseph himself* (not merely his far-distant ancestors) was a native of Bethlehem, which would make the journey make more sense from a local-census-point-of-view.
Luke explicitly says the census happened when Quirinius was governor of Syria, and Josephus mentions a census being conducted by Quirinius for tax purposes—indeed Josephus says the census led to a tax revolt. However, that was a local census, which would not have affected Jesus’ parents if they were indeed living in Galilee. There is no record of Augustus ever ordering an empire-wide census. Luke’s story appears to be an ahistorical account to explain how Jesus could be the Messiah—who was prophesied to be born in Bethlehem—when everyone knows he was from Nazareth.
Something which is usually pointed out as pretty strong evidence that Jesus was a historical figure: No need to invent a way for him to get to Bethlehem if he wasn’t already associated with Nazareth, and an invented Messiah probably wouldn’t be.
Actually, Luke says that the census was the first (“protos”) when Quirinius was governor, which is strange since I don’t think anyone else mentions multiple censuses. I have read the suggestion that “protos” should be translated “before,” which would make sense if the census of Quirinius was famous (or infamous), but I don’t know what a Koine expert would say about the plausibility of that translation.
Most everyone here knows more about Roman history than me, so I can’t vouch for how convincing this argument here is. But, in the interest of balance, here is a conservative Christian arguing for the accuracy of Luke’s account. His argument is essentially that:
1) the census was limited to Judaea, not the whole Roman Empire,
2) it was started in 6 BC and then aborted,
3) the taxation *itself* was picked up and brought to completion under Quirinius in 6 AD.
Tim McGrew is a philosophy professor at a public Midwestern univeristy, not a historian (and he does make some errors that I’ve picked up), so, again, I can’t vouch for how convincing this would be to someone who’s well acquainted with Roman history, but he’s clearly a smart guy who makes good arguments *in his subject area* (philosophy) so take it for whatever you think it’s worth. The discussion of the Luke’s census account starts at about minute 8:00 and goes on for 20-25 minutes.
FWIW the New International Version and English Standard Version both list “before” as an alternative translation in their footnotes: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Luke%202&version=NIV,ESV
Belated: The NIV and ESV are both “smart conservative” leaning translations, so they want to raise the option of a translation that is less jarring historically (or at least harder to disprove). The original NRSV is the better scholarly translation, and it says “while governor” not “before”.
Not obvious to me lol, but I’m not up on my Bible at all. Is that really why Mary and Joseph went to Bethlehem? For a census? If so, I had no idea.
That’s what the Bible says, but it looks like fudging to get Jesus’ butt into Bethlehem to be born despite everyone knowing he wasn’t from there.
Gospel of Luke only. Matthew has a different story, John and Mark don’t talk about Jesus’s birth at all.
There’s a blog post from another historian about the birth of Jesus and (partly) about that census.
http://kiwihellenist.blogspot.com/2020/12/nativity-stories.html
Shame he couldn’t spend thirty seconds on Google:
“(Some apologists reject all of the references to siblings, wanting Mary to have perpetual virginity for some reason. They do this either by interpreting the word ‘sibling’ metaphorically every time it appears, or by making up a story that Joseph had a previous marriage, so that Jesus had some half-siblings. If you don’t start out taking perpetual virginity for granted in advance, the mental acrobatics look pretty silly.”
“The idea is first raised in an apocryphal text called the Protoevangelium of James, composed in the second half of the 2nd century:[12] here Mary remains a life-long virgin, Joseph is an old man who marries her without physical desire, and the brothers of Jesus mentioned in the canonical gospels are explained as Joseph’s sons by an earlier marriage.[28] … In the 3rd century, Hippolytus of Rome held that Mary was “ever-virgin”,[34] while Clement of Alexandria, writing soon after the Protoevangelium appeared, appealed to its incident of a midwife who examined Mary immediately after the birth (“after giving birth, she was examined by a midwife, who found her to be a virgin”) and asserted that this was to be found in the Gospels (“These things are attested to by the Scriptures of the Lord”), though he was referring to an apocryphal Gospel as a fact. The 3rd century scholar Origen used the Protoevangelium’s explanation of the brothers to uphold the perpetual virginity of Mary (“There is no child of Mary except Jesus, according to those who think correctly about her”).[25] Origen also mentioned that the gospel of Peter affirmed the perpetual virginity of Mary, saying that the “brothers” of Jesus were from a previous marriage of Joseph.[35][36]… Early Christian theologians such as Hippolytus[44] (170–235), Eusebius (260/265–339/340) and Epiphanius (c. 310/320–403) defended the perpetual virginity of Mary.” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perpetual_virginity_of_Mary
So the “some reason” why “some apologists” “want” Mary to have perpetual virginity is that a large number of ancient sources say she had perpetual virginity. Maybe these sources are wrong; sources are, sometimes. But presenting the claim as some sort of weird hang-up whilst showing no awareness of that the sources even exist is extremely sloppy. It’s like saying “Some ancient scholars want Aristotle to have been associated with Alexander the Great for some reason”, without realising that this is a claim taken directly from the ancient texts.
How exactly does Mary remain anatomically a virgin after passing a baby through her birth canal?
“virgin” isn’t a physical condition, or doesn’t have to be viewed as one, it can be seen as an ontological state instead.
Thomas Aquinas thought rape victims who had not had consensual sex still qualified, for example.
But the passage in question upthread mentions a midwife examining Mary postpartum. What exactly was she supposed to be looking for- a miraculously regenerated hymen?
“a large number of ancient sources say she had perpetual virginity.” All the sources cited are later than the Gospels; none cite any evidence and all are more concerned with the theological issue of original sin and miraculous birth than with anything else. So characterising them as ‘sources’ is generous.
Paul refers unambiguously to “James the brother of the Lord”, and the Gospels name four brothers. This was before the idea of perpetual virginity became an issue. In the normal way, we would accept that the natural inference that Mary went on to have several other children – four named brothers and some un-named sisters.
All the sources cited are later than the Gospels; none cite any evidence and all are more concerned with the theological issue of original sin and miraculous birth than with anything else. So characterising them as ‘sources’ is generous.
By those standards, we’d have to throw out, e.g., Plutarch as a source for ancient history, since he’s writing centuries after the events, doesn’t normally cite evidence, and is more concerned with illustrating famous people’s personality traits than anything else.
Paul refers unambiguously to “James the brother of the Lord”, and the Gospels name four brothers. This was before the idea of perpetual virginity became an issue. In the normal way, we would accept that the natural inference that Mary went on to have several other children – four named brothers and some un-named sisters.
So one source potentially affects the way we interpret another source. That’s quite normal when studying ancient history. If we had a situation where, say, Herodotus mentioned Themistocles’ brother, and Plutarch said that he was actually Themistocles’ half-brother, most historians would take Plutarch’s statement seriously, and even those who thought he was mistaken wouldn’t accuse him of just making things up.
But as mentioned earlier, the claimants aren’t historians but theologians. They’re basically saying “surely Mary must have remained an unsullied virgin her entire life”, based on no evidence but simply because it happens to strike them so; and then they reinterpret the gospels however it takes to support that. I’m reminded of the teetotaler fundamentalists of the early 20th century who insisted that every instance of “wine” in the Bible was really referring to unfermented grape juice. So yeah, they were almost certainly pulling the perpetual virgin interpretation of Mary out of their cloacas.
Lots of cultures (including my own ancestral culture) use “brother” in a broader sense that can includes first cousins (and, e.g. my family and others from that culture will import that usage into English when they’re speaking English, although American or English people generally wouldn’t). My understanding is that Aramaic doesn’t and didn’t have a word for “cousin”, and they would either say “brother” to refer to cousins or more commonly specificy the exact relationship, “father’s sister’s son” or whatever.
The Gospel of Peter seems to be first century and the Infancy Gospel of James is probably from sometime in the second century, so even if they’re later than the canonical Gospels, they’re still quite early relatively speaking. I don’t see any good reason for accepting the NEw Testament and automatically rejecting early church traditions outside the New Testament, except within a specifically Protestant confessional framework (and not even all Protestants at that).
But as mentioned earlier, the claimants aren’t historians but theologians. They’re basically saying “surely Mary must have remained an unsullied virgin her entire life”, based on no evidence but simply because it happens to strike them so; and then they reinterpret the gospels however it takes to support that.
That’s a pretty bold claim. Would you care to back it up?
But as mentioned earlier, the claimants aren’t historians but theologians.
The Gospel writers weren’t trained historians in that sense either, so we’re left with the question of why you’re choosing to trust some ancient theological accounts by non-historians over other (somewhat later, but still quite early) theological accounts by non-historians.
Actually scratch that, you’re really choosing to trust *some 19th and 20th century interpreters* of the Gospel writers, not the gospel writers themselves. As far as I know, Christian writers right up through John Wesley (including Luther, Calvin, Cranmer, Zwingli and other early Protestant authorities) generally accepted the perpetual virginity.
“I’m reminded of the teetotaler fundamentalists of the early 20th century who insisted that every instance of “wine” in the Bible was really referring to unfermented grape juice.”
Except in one case there’s a broad and continuous tradition backing them up, and in the case of wine there isn’t.
There was a broad and continuous tradition that Moses had horns too, based on a mistranslation that was uncritically accepted for centuries. Generally speaking, my personal inclination is to adhere to a Protestant standard of being highly skeptical of centuries-after-the-fact embellishments to Christian doctrine. In fact my primary doubts about the Gospels themselves is that they cannot be reliably attested to anything close to the lifetime of the people who were supposedly there.
The Gospel writers weren’t trained historians in that sense either, so we’re left with the question of why you’re choosing to trust some ancient theological accounts by non-historians over other (somewhat later, but still quite early) theological accounts by non-historians.
To be fair, I’m not sure any ancient author would really count as a “trained” historian; there was no ancient Roman equivalent of a PhD in History you could study for. You’re right about the arbitrariness of rejecting non-Biblical early Christian material out of hand, though.
There was a broad and continuous tradition that Moses had horns too, based on a mistranslation that was uncritically accepted for centuries.
That might not be a mistranslation, actually: https://www.haaretz.com/jewish/2018-03-27/ty-article/why-even-some-jews-once-believed-moses-had-horns/0000017f-da78-dea8-a77f-de7a90fe0000
Generally speaking, my personal inclination is to adhere to a Protestant standard of being highly skeptical of centuries-after-the-fact embellishments to Christian doctrine.
The authors attesting Mary’s perpetual virginity are, by ancient standards, not unacceptably far from the events they’re talking about. Historians are happy to use Plutarch as a source for classical Greece, Livy as a source for early Roman history, or Diogenes Laertius as a source for philosophical history — not uncritically, of course, but nor do they dismiss them as “centuries-after-the-fact embellishments”.
Besides, you’re begging the question by assuming the idea actually is an embellishment. There’s nothing usual in ancient history about the first surviving reference to something coming from a century or more after the event in question, nor is there anything in the Bible that requires Mary to have had children apart from Jesus (indeed, the fact that when he’s crucified Jesus entrusts Mary to the care of one of his disciples rather suggests she didn’t have any other children to look after her).
In fact my primary doubts about the Gospels themselves is that they cannot be reliably attested to anything close to the lifetime of the people who were supposedly there.
The textual history of the Gospels is better attested than virtually any other ancient text, and the earliest surviving fragment dates to between around 100 and 150 AD, making it closer to both the date it was written and the events it describes than any surviving copy or part copy of virtually any other ancient text.
By the way, Michael, I’m still waiting for some evidence of your claim that the early Christian authors were deliberately making stuff up.
That’s just it- I don’t count them as “early” Christian authors at all (except relative to the 2000 years since then). I consider them basically revisionists long after the fact of an older tradition. Unless one can argue that they were presenting scholarship of now-lost sources instead of purely theological arguments, I consider them as reliable of the truth as comic book writers.
That’s just it- I don’t count them as “early” Christian authors at all (except relative to the 2000 years since then). I consider them basically revisionists long after the fact of an older tradition.
The Protoevangelium was probably written during the second century, which places it closer to the events it describes than most surviving ancinet sources. Even people like Eusebius and Epiphanius are closer to the life of Jesus than Plutarch and Diogenes are to many of the people they write about. By the standards of ancient history, they aren’t unusually “long after the fact” at all.
Also, to prove that they are “basically revisionists long after the fact of an older tradition”, you’d first have to prove that the prior tradition contradicted them, which you haven’t.
Unless one can argue that they were presenting scholarship of now-lost sources instead of purely theological arguments, I consider them as reliable of the truth as comic book writers.
This is not a standard we apply to other ancient texts — e.g., I don’t know of any historians who accuse Plato of making up Socrates’ military service, even though Plato was obviously writing philosophy rather than history — so I don’t see why we should make an exception here.
And for about the fifth time or so, religious writers have motive to make stuff up that secular historians do not. They just aren’t comparable. One almost has to start with the presumption that any religious source is more probably a lie than not.
On the contrary, secular writers have a motive to lie that religious ones don’t: they expect to benefit from it.
Religious writers do not write to be rewarded with Hell for their sin of lying.
Generally speaking, my personal inclination is to adhere to a Protestant standard of being highly skeptical of centuries-after-the-fact embellishments to Christian doctrine
Protestants don’t actually do this, though. Most classical Protestant doctrine derives heavily from Augustine in the 5th c AD, i.e. “centuries after the fact”. The New Testament is a pretty short book and you can’t really base a religion on that alone (and reading it it seems clear to me that the writings in it were never meant to be read as stand-alone documents, but in the framework of a broader tradition).
“I consider them basically revisionists long after the fact of an older tradition. Unless one can argue that they were presenting scholarship of now-lost sources instead of purely theological arguments, I consider them as reliable of the truth as comic book writers.”
They weren’t really long after the fact, and as far as tradition goes, they are the tradition. These are some of the oldest extra-biblical sources we have.
Also, I don’t see a good counterargument here, considering that “brother” is often used in a broader sense (and was interpreted in that broader sense by most Christians historically).
And for about the fifth time or so, religious writers have motive to make stuff up that secular historians do not. They just aren’t comparable. One almost has to start with the presumption that any religious source is more probably a lie than not.
That’s just foolish. Secular writers have all sorts of motives to make things up. There’s a reason why I chose Plato’s portrayal of Socrates as an example — he has an obvious motive to portray Socrates as this super-virtuous guy, and serving your city-state in war was seen as a virtuous thing to do. And yet, whilst it’s agreed that Plato chooses to accentuate the positives about Socrates, I don’t know of any reputable historian who’d argue that we should start with the presumption that Plato is just making stuff up out of whole cloth.
But there are lots of reputable historians who’d argue that we should start with the presumption that theologians were just making stuff up out of whole cloth. Many for example consider the entire Biblical history of the Jews prior to the Babylonian captivity as at best heavily embellished legends that were written down in the form that comes down to us as quite deliberate religious propaganda.
Anyone can write down anything, and if pre-Gutenberg it was lucky enough to survive to the present day have it now be called an ancient source. That leaves us to literally consider the source; and religious texts purporting to document miracles are the most suspect of sources.
And why should we not regard that as something historians? Especially given that many, perhaps most, do not argue it, they merely assert it.
But there are lots of reputable historians who’d argue that we should start with the presumption that theologians were just making stuff up out of whole cloth. Many for example consider the entire Biblical history of the Jews prior to the Babylonian captivity as at best heavily embellished legends that were written down in the form that comes down to us as quite deliberate religious propaganda.
Firstly, the early books of the OT were written by different people, in a different time period, in different genres, and dealing with different events, to the NT and Church Fathers, so the analogy you’re drawing is dubious at best.
Secondly, even the more minimalist scholars don’t generally start from the presumption that the writers of the Bible were making things up out of whole cloth.
Thirdly, historians do actually make use of early Christian authors — even (gasp!) theologians — as historical sources. A lot of what we know about late antiquity, for example, we know thanks to the Christian writers of the period.
Fourthly, please name a few of these “lots of reputable historians” and why they think we should start with the presumption that theologians were just making stuff up out of whole cloth, so we can tell whether their reasons are cogent or whether they’re simply motivated by prejudice and scholarly snobbery.
Anyone can write down anything, and if pre-Gutenberg it was lucky enough to survive to the present day have it now be called an ancient source. That leaves us to literally consider the source; and religious texts purporting to document miracles are the most suspect of sources.
“This particular individual never had sex” is not, in itself, an inherently suspect claim.
“And for about the fifth time or so, religious writers have motive to make stuff up that secular historians do not.”
I wouldn’t use the term “making things up”, but secular historians can absolutely have biases- political, ideological, economic or cultural- that go into their work and that need to be filtered out.
In any case, I’m much less skeptical of religious accounts in general than historico-critical people tend to be (and that goes irrespective of religion, incidentally: I’m not simply going to assume that the biographers of Muhammad made everything up.
I think this discussion boils down to the principle “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”.
The case of the midwife. How could it be possible that Mary’s hymen remained intact after childbirth? Was her hymen so extraordinarily flexible it could do that? Do we have any other medical evidence of hymens that have remained intact after that?
Another example that has been brought up was Plato’s claims of Sokrates at war. That doesn’t sound extraordinary to me. This blog has numerous times demonstrated that a man of his era would have had to go to war or be ostracized by his peers and society. Sokrates’ good reputation is clear evidence that he was a soldier, otherwise we would know him as draft-dodger or he would be completely unknown.
The claims of warheroism are more unusual, but not extraordinary. Just because he was a famous philosopher doesn’t mean that he couldn’t have been good at war and liked it. Maybe he relished the experience and delighted in hacking off limps. Even this blog has posted examples of intelligent, educated men who considered good old war a jolly good fun.
I think this discussion boils down to the principle “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence”.
What is so important about the claim that a particular individual didn’t have sex?
What is so important about the claim that a particular individual didn’t have sex?
Should be “extraordinary” rather than “important”, obviously.
“Religious writers do not write to be rewarded with Hell for their sin of lying.”
This assumes that the writer actually believes in Hell, or that lying would be a sin.
And the Gospels differ on key points, as do parts of the OT, so someone along the way was in fact making stuff up.
BTW, do you believe that Mohammed and Joseph Smith were perfectly sincere? Or that they in fact were reporting the guidance they received from archangels?
This assumes that the writer actually believes in Hell, or that lying would be a sin.
Both of those things are standard Christian teachings, so it seems a reasonable assumption absent contrary evidence.
And the Gospels differ on key points, as do parts of the OT, so someone along the way was in fact making stuff up.
That’s not how human memory works. Eyewitnesses often remember the same event differently; if you tell someone else a story, they’ll often remember it slightly differently to how you told it to them. It’s quite possible for accounts to vary without anybody involved deliberately lying.
BTW, do you believe that Mohammed and Joseph Smith were perfectly sincere? Or that they in fact were reporting the guidance they received from archangels?
I’d guess they probably were sincere. But the analogy isn’t that strong, because both Smith and Muhammad benefitted from their claims to divine guidance in a way that Clement of Alexandria et al. didn’t benefit from their claims that Mary was a virgin all her life.
Religious writers do not write to be rewarded with Hell for their sin of lying.
That’s a terrible argument. There are all sorts of reasons a religious writer might fictionalize a story. Maybe they think the Holy Spirit is prompting them to do so, maybe they think the greater good calls for it, maybe they think it’s only a venial sin (what some church writers called an “officious lie”, I think), maybe they think the genre doesn’t call for strict factual accuracy, maybe they convince themselves it’s not fictional after all. Even within the Christian tradition, when you can speak an untruth and when you can’t have been the subject of lengthy debates historically.
Mind you, I don’t think the early Christian writers of the Infancy Gospel (or the canonical gospels) actively made stuff up (nor do I think the Islamic hadith writers made stuff up, necessarily), but that’s for other reasons, not because I think in either case they had moral scruples against it.
Religion has a lot less of an impact on moral behaviour than many people seem to think.
That’s a terrible argument. There are all sorts of reasons a religious writer might fictionalize a story. Maybe they think the Holy Spirit is prompting them to do so, maybe they think the greater good calls for it, maybe they think it’s only a venial sin (what some church writers called an “officious lie”, I think), maybe they think the genre doesn’t call for strict factual accuracy, maybe they convince themselves it’s not fictional after all. Even within the Christian tradition, when you can speak an untruth and when you can’t have been the subject of lengthy debates historically.
To be fair, I don’t think it’s a worse argument than “religious writers have motives to make things up, unlike secular authors, therefore the default assumption should be that religious authors are lying”.
Tacitus (or Plutarch) are trying to relate historical events. Suetonius is a gossip columnist with a critical and powerful audience. We read them with that background in mind. The gospel writers were embedded in a religious tradition and writing from that tradition; prophecies and the demands of religion were paramount. So we read them with that in mind. They are not coming from the same place as Tacitus or even Suetonius.
The Gospels are written within the genre of ancient biographies, so comparisons with Plutarch and Suetonius are perfectly legitimate.
No they are not written in the same genre as Plutarch. They are written within a Jewish prophetic tradition, albeit one influenced by various Persian, Greek and Syrian currents of religious thought.
This is emphatically not to say that they ‘made things up’. A religious tradition has a different, parallel standard of ‘truth’ (“Yes, I know the world is round as a matter of geography; it is flat as a matter of theological fact” are perfectly sensible statements – the host is both a biscuit and the flesh of Christ.)
No they are not written in the same genre as Plutarch. They are written within a Jewish prophetic tradition, albeit one influenced by various Persian, Greek and Syrian currents of religious thought.
Which Jewish prophecies, in particular, do you think the Gospels resemble?
This is emphatically not to say that they ‘made things up’. A religious tradition has a different, parallel standard of ‘truth’ (“Yes, I know the world is round as a matter of geography; it is flat as a matter of theological fact” are perfectly sensible statements – the host is both a biscuit and the flesh of Christ.)
That is emphatically not how most Christians have understood things.
The whole ‘born in Bethlehem, of the line of David, as foreseen by John, martyred by the wicked ruler’, to cite just some; the virgin birth and perhaps the resurrection are perhaps influenced by Syrian traditions, and the claim to universalism might come from Iran. These things are murky.
Our own age adheres to a single standard of material truth. The malleability of religious (and similar) traditions, coupled with the believers sincerity, strongly suggests they did not have that same standard. And why should they? “My ancestors tell me to do this” is a different usage of the verb than “My friend John tells me he saw Judy yesterday.”
The whole ‘born in Bethlehem, of the line of David, as foreseen by John, martyred by the wicked ruler’, to cite just some; the virgin birth and perhaps the resurrection are perhaps influenced by Syrian traditions, and the claim to universalism might come from Iran. These things are murky.
So the Gospels reference prophecies and supernatural events. So does Plutarch.
Our own age adheres to a single standard of material truth. The malleability of religious (and similar) traditions, coupled with the believers sincerity, strongly suggests they did not have that same standard. And why should they? “My ancestors tell me to do this” is a different usage of the verb than “My friend John tells me he saw Judy yesterday.”
The only time I can think of when people made the “Something can be true in theology and false in other disciplines” argument was in the middle ages, and they were promptly declared heretical by the Church.
I believe it was Aquinas who taught that the Bible could be interpreted literally, allegorically, metaphorically or as parable. A statement can fall into more than one of these categories. But there is ordinary practice as well – a medieval Christian might instantly aver that Jerusalem was the at centre of the world and also set out for Tartary knowing that it was further away to the east than he was to the west. It was ‘at the centre’, but not so for planning a journey. We see this all the time in current discourse – standards of truth shift as the subject changes.
I believe it was Aquinas who taught that the Bible could be interpreted literally, allegorically, metaphorically or as parable. A statement can fall into more than one of these categories.
“Some statements in the Bible are meant ot be interpreted allegorically” is different to “Yes, I know the world is round as a matter of geography; it is flat as a matter of theological fact.”
But there is ordinary practice as well – a medieval Christian might instantly aver that Jerusalem was the at centre of the world and also set out for Tartary knowing that it was further away to the east than he was to the west. It was ‘at the centre’, but not so for planning a journey. We see this all the time in current discourse – standards of truth shift as the subject changes.
A medieval Christian, if he were at all educated, would have known that the earth was round and that therefore no city could be at the centre of it.
People forget that the Comedia of Dante Alighieri ~1308 AD takes the Earth being round as an essential plot point.
A census of the provinces would have been for the purposes of establishing taxation.
Which is why the idea that a census that requires people to return to the territory of their ancestors is… well, a but silly, from a historical perspective. You’re trying to get a survey of people and their assets and property; insisting that they leave behind everything your census is actually interested in accounting because of where your ancestors lived would defeat the entire purpose.
It’s entirely possible that Joseph held some property in Bethlehem and merely lived and worked in Nazareth.
Don’t leave us hanging, why did no one show up for the dilectus in 275?? I’m dying to know.
Also, I googled “rome 275 bc dilectus” and your page was the top google search result. The ACOUP blog is making waves!
Unfortunately, the relevant book of Livy is lost, and we only have a summary which states that one of the consuls that year, Manius Curius Dentatus, auctioned off the goods of someone who refused to answer when his name was called. This was in the middle of Rome’s famous war with Pyrrhus, so presumably there was some draft resistance due to the that, which led Dontatus to make an example of one of the resistors.
Valerius Maximus preserves some information about the incident (Val. Max. 6.3.4): “This example was imitated by M’. Curius the consul. When he was forced to proclaim a sudden enlistment of soldiers, but none of the young men came forward, he caused lots to be drawn for all the tribes, and commanded the first name that was drawn for the Pollia, the tribe which had come first, to be summoned. And because this man did not answer to his name, he made a public sale of all his possessions. As soon as the young man heard of this, he ran to the consul’s tribunal, and appealed to the college of tribunes. But then M’. Curius declared that the commonwealth had no need of a citizen who was incapable of obedience; and so he sold both his goods and the young man as well.”
This is 275, so the sudden enlistment described is (as Livy, Per. 14 makes clear) the army that will go on to win the Battle of Beneventum. Presumably the reluctance to sign up had to do with the perception that previous commanders had failed at the job of fighting Pyrrhus of Epirus and there was an unwillingness to go.
Is “none of the young men came forward” to be taken literally? Am I mistaken in assuming that could only have happened as a concerted form of (for lack of a better word) civil resistance?
Valerius Maximus was a rhetorician, not a historian, so it’s fair to say he may be exaggerating. Even if there was an organized draft strike of some kind, it seems implausible that literally everybody chose to participate in it.
OTOH, whatever happened in 275 was clearly a big deal, because it made it into our extremely brief periocha of Livy 14. The entirety of chapter 3 gets these two sentences:
“When consul Curius Dentatus was recruiting an army, he sold the possessions of a man who had not appeared. He defeated Pyrrhus, who had returned, and expelled him from Italy.”
So whatever happened in terms of the dilectus that year, it was roughly as important (as measured by the space Livy chose to spend on it) as the final victory over a famous military genius and notorious Roman enemy. The periochae of chapters 14 and 15 get one sentence each, and that’s it for the entire year 275.
A comparable year in American history might be 1863, which contained both the battle of Gettysburg and the New York draft riots- it may well be that, millennia from now, they also get one sentence each in the surviving history of their time.
Correction, that should say chapters 4 and 5, not 14 and 15.
Note that there was the first stage of calling for volunteers. “No volunteers” is not yet “organized resistance”, if the men had then come forward if called by name. Could there have been events of dilectus where, to the contrary, there was no draft because more volunteers came forward than soldiers needed?
Also note the divergence between Livy´s epitome and Valerius Maximus. The epitome mentions only confiscation of property (auctioning it off). Valerius Maximus adds enslaving the man himself (selling him as well). Enslaving a Roman citizen was a big deal. Would Livy and epitome have mentioned selling the man if that was the tradition?
Always nice to encounter a search term that hasn’t yet been gamed by the SEO gremlins.
I’m sure by now Amazon is selling rome 275 bc dilectus cookware.
I was revisiting an older blog and the Leave a Reply field now requires a WordPress login, which I can’t seem to make work. Is this a new thing?
Never mind; the form just now has the post button WAY down below.
The “same as that other guy” shortcut also appears in a different Latin ritual: the degree ceremony at Cambridge University:
https://www.cambridgestudents.cam.ac.uk/degree-ceremonies/ceremony
The first graduate is introduced with a long bit of Latin and conferred the degree with another; subsequent graduates only get “Te etiam admitto ad eundum gradum”.
If a graduate doesn’t want to get their degree in the name of the Trinity this means another long bit of Latin to switch to the other form. Presumably the Romans were sufficiently religiously homogeneous to use the same path for everyone…
I was just scrolling down to post this.
In my year and degree the first to graduate had chosen to go for the non-Trinitarian formula, and the second for the Trinitarian. After that we all got “te etiam admitto ad eundem gradum” and could choose whether we thought of it as in the name of the Trinity or not.
The same structure for my graduation ceremony at Aberdeen. Lengthy bit of Latin to the first graduand, bop on the cap with a scroll, and then 100 or so “et tibi quoque” or some such.
I remember most of my old books (and the total war games) claiming that the Triari were armed with a thrusting spear (hasta) rather than pila, is this a misunderstanding, something that changed over time, or something else altogether?
Funny, I recall the same thing from other readings as well. The Triari would be armed with spears…
Unfortunately, the relevant book of Livy is lost, and we only have a summary which states that one of the consuls that year, Manius Curius Dentatus, auctioned off the goods of someone who refused to answer when his name was called. This was in the middle of Rome’s famous war with Pyrrhus, so presumably there was some draft resistance due to the that, which led Dontatus to make an example of one of the resistors.
This should be a reply to John, above, re: the events of 275
Interesting post, as always!
Isn’t the usual spelling ‘pomerium’?
typo or pun?: mess resistance
Was there ever any conflict between the centurions and the rest of the command structure? Because of how they are selected, it seems like they would have the support of most of the actual armed soldiers, and might not always want the same thing as the people nominally in charge.
From what I understand they have a role comparable to NCOs in modern western armies. I’m not aware of any example, but I would also guess, that they were a common way to bring complains from the men to the higher ups.
Neat! I have two questions, if it’s ok:
1) The elections are in September and the terms started in March – the early republic really had annual magistrates, elected six months before their terms started? That’s a lot of overlap. Did this have any kind of fun knock-on effects for the Romans? (Like the tail end of the Buchanan administration in the winter of 1860-1 in the States, although even then it’s at least for a four-year term.)
2) Would you rather have the rest of Polybius (or Livy), or an equivalent amount of book from a previously-lost ancient author (but no guarantees as to the subject matter)?
Nono, consuls come into office on January 1st. Presumably deeper into the past when the year started with March, the consular elections were later in the year.
I’m a bit confused about how it would work if someone doesn’t show up for Phase I and only later hears about being called.
Wouldn’t the military tribunes want to look at who they pick? And they’d need to be present to swear the oath.
Another thing, this process only describes the consular legions. Do pro-magistrates in provinces have their own legions?
Pro-magistrates do have their own legions, but these would be raised and then supplemented as necessary from the dilectus carried out in Rome. You can’t (in the Middle Republic) raise a legion in the provinces.
But what happens if you are not present to swear the oath when you are called?
Typo: “The Roman census seems to have been less regular in the tumultuous first century BC and also difficult to carry out effectively oversees.” Should be “overseas”?
I’m interested in how the prescribed equipment was defined and procured at the individual level. Were there standards or patterns of arms and armor that manufacturers used, or were expected to follow? Did some recruits use older, inherited or secondhand equipment? In short, how “uniform” were the legionaries at this time, when the state isn’t providing the goods? And did anyone care?
Typo: ‘short shift’ should be ‘short shrift’.
“The implication is that the socii have a similar process to the Romans… This is reflective of the Roman attitude towards the socii – they do not care how the troops are raised or paid, only that they are raised.”
To my mind, this suggests that the Italian cities must have had a similar system to Rome before they were socii. Otherwise, the Romans would had to have taken enough interest in how the troops were raised to impose their own system on them.
Well, I guess that all city states and smaller polities have some kind of similar draft process. The romans just did not care, as long as the specified number of people with arms and armor showed up.
All city states might have had a draft process, but it doesn’t logically have to have been the same as the Roman one. After all, the American draft process wasn’t the same as the Roman one.
And when the Romans in later years recruited troops outside Italy, in Gaul and elsewhere, I gather they were not recruited via a similar process to the Roman one.
So if the socii did recruit troops using a system similar to Rome, that suggests they were unusually similar to Rome before being conquered by it.
I wouldn’t necessarily assume that. Imposing a new legal structure is a lot of work and the Romans would be most concerned with the output in the form of X armed dudes. They’d obviously need some sort of system, but it could be run very differently and still produce the right number of soldiers.
I’m struck by the way the administration of the oath is mirrored by the equally practical procedure used in admitting people to degrees at Cambridge University. When the (alpabetically ) first person who is about to receive a particular degree fom each College is led forward, a long speech is read out about why this person in morally and intellectually suitable. The remaining graduands are basically led forward with a quick ‘And this one too’
To simplify the fact that each one has to be led forward by the right hand, the Praelector sticks out 4 fingers and leads forwards four at a time, each holding one finger.
It seems some things never change
Really interesting post – I think I’m so used to thinking in Empire terms of a long-service professional army that I forget that the Mid Republic legions were raised from scratch anew every year.
And fascinating that all the mid-ranking officers – the centurions, optios and decurions – were elected on the spot by their newly-mustered comrades. The centurion, even the primipilus, might have no more military experience than anyone else!
Is that right? It seems like a weakness…
I suspect that the soldiers pretty well always elected someone experienced. Remember, poor choice of an officer can easily get you killed. You want someone who knows what they are doing. Also, remember that Rome was at war EVERY YEAR, there were plenty of experienced men to go arround.
It could be, but one imagines that those elected would have the respect of the militi choosing them. Moreover, it was an enormous strength in a republic’s citizen army to ensure that what amounted to representatives would have a place in the command chain. The mostly voluntary compliance would not have been forthcoming in a top-down “do as you told” system.
My guess is it’s sort of like political offices in the USA. In theory you CAN elect an 18 year old to most political offices–mayor, governor, legislative branch, sheriff in many cases–but we tend not to because it’s frankly a very, very stupid idea. We elect people with experience and maturity (or at least age).
Further, the way the Roman army worked you were sure to have veterans in the army. All votes are not in fact equal; the greener soldiers are going to be looking up to the more experienced ones for advice and instruction, and “We should elect Flavius as centurion, he did good by us the past few years” is going to carry weight coming from an older soldier. It’s human nature.
I wouldn’t be surprised if a few raw recruits got elected to officer status, but even then they wouldn’t be alone and they would be a minority–they’d have more seasoned officers around them to help them, advise them, and show them the ropes. Remember, if the new guy fails, everyone fails! You NEED those troops in top shape, where they’re supposed to be, doing what they are supposed to do, for your own sake if nothing else.
Also the culture cultivated a lot more respect for people older than you than ours.
The suggestion that they would elect experienced soldiers as centurions makes sense, but did it actually happen? Bret says that recruiting drew from
“the iuniores – Roman citizen men between the ages of 17 and 46, who numbered fewer, probably around 228,000”. In an average year they’d raise four legions, or roughly 22,000 men (5500 per legion). And, Bret says, they took care to recruit
“men with the least amount of service, of the particular wealth categories they are going to need to fill out the combat roles in the legion”. If you’ve already done a year in the legion, then, absent some major emergency, you’re not going to be called up again until everyone else has done one year first.
But!
Our recruiting pool is 228,000 men aged 17-46, so in 30 birth-year cohorts of 7,600 each. Every year we call up three birth-year cohorts to form four legions, and those with least experience go first. How many times can the average Roman citizen expect to serve in the legions before he ages out? Three, at most? And those occasions will be widely spaced out. It won’t be so much “We should elect Flavius as centurion, he did good by us the past few years” as “We should elect Flavius as centurion, he’s been working on an olive farm for the last decade but apparently when he was an 18-year-old legionary he did OK, my dad said?”
I strongly suspect that the various tribes practiced “intelligent mobilisation” -they knew perfectly well who would be keen to go, and who would make a good leader, and pushed their names to the top of the list. After all, if your tribe keeps providing good centurions and optios, that’s going to look good for you, politically speaking.
Our good host also says: “And that matters because the other thing the Romans clearly have a record of us who has served in the past.” In addition, 2,000 who hadn’t served were stripped of citizenship and sent to be infantry. This implies that it was expected that people would serve several times as a matter of civic duty.
In addition, in another essay (one of his Sparta essays) he states that the average Roman farmer likely had more military experience than the average hoplite. Again, the clear implication here is that it was expected that you’d serve at least one tour of duty, if not multiple, as an adult male.
And remember, each tribe is having people selected separately. So it’s unlikely that the odds are as evenly distributed as you make them out to be.
Your last paragraph also argues against an even distribution of the odds. Let’s say Flavius had fought the Gauls once or twice before, and wanted to go back to do it again. Commodus, on the other hand, is in charge of the family farms and the only son, with no military experience, so is more hesitant (I’m not saying he’s a coward–he’d go if he needed to–but he’s not enthusiastic). Which do you want? I want the combat vet who wants another crack at the enemy, and I think you agree.
I do. The sources seem to be silent on whether this happened, but it’s pretty common-sense – and it mirrors the hands-off approach taken to recruitment among the socii. Tribe X is told “we need you to provide 20 hastati, 45 velites, 43 triarii, one optio candidate and two centurion candidates, and 8 equites. Get your list ready by this date” – and it’s up to the tribe to find them however it wants.
Bret, in case others have not already offered these, here are my proofreading concerns for this post:
record of us who has > of is who
Italy, which they with to contribute troops > ???
but that they conscription > that their
soldier’s received pay ‘s pay and > soldiers received pay and [or soldiers’ received pay and]
if there was mess resistance > mass
It shouldn’t surprising that > be surprising
What are the sources for the checkboard formation, the quincunx, please? I’ve seen in multiple media but I couldn’t find the exact source.
My first thought when you said the wealth was self-reported was “Ooof,” but then I realized, the stratified system of the army (as well as the voting centuries) would act as a corrective measure against lying on your taxes. If you pretended to be poorer than you really were you would become a less prestigious soldier. The “system” might not know you were misaligned, but fellow citizens from your community absolutely would notice. I can just imagine a wealthy man being mocked by his service as a foot-slogger being brought up whenever the discussion turned to war and soldiery.
People might even be tempted to up-claim their wealth to serve in a more prestigious role. Especially if they’re just on the top edge of their actual bracket.
This breaks down for the really really rich, of course, since they can down-claim and still remain in the top bracket. But that may have been a feature not a bug, just how modern tax loopholes are.
I’m not sure downclaiming for the really really rich would make much difference, at least not when it came to military affairs. From the army’s perspective, it doesn’t make any difference if you serve as an eques vs. if you serve as an eques pretending to be slightly less rich than you actually are.
This is a fascinating look inside ancient Rome. I had no idea that Roman armies were mostly conscripted, and that only earlier and later during the Roman Empire did they depend on volunteers to fill their ranks. Thank you for the information.