This is the second part of the second part of the second part of our four part1 look at the great third and second century BC contest between the Romans and the heirs of Alexander, asking the question, “What can defeat a Macedonian sarisa-phalanx?” Last time, we started looking at the Romans with an in-depth look at the Roman tactical system. This week, we’re going to slide up the systems of military analysis, looking at the operational and strategic advantages the Romans also enjoyed, in addition to their tactical edge.
Now I think at the beginning it is worth saying something about ‘edges’ and ‘advantages.’ As Clausewitz famously notes2war is the “play of chance and probabilities” – an unpredictable creature by nature. As a result, it is rare for any one advantage to be truly decisive in every possible case. Generals, armies and soldiers can and do get wildly lucky or wildly unlucky, though I would argue that at some point ‘repeated luck’ is, in fact, skill. And the Romans certainly have ‘repeated luck,’ edging out Hellenistic armies (and everyone else) over and over and over again with a consistency that begins to suggest something rather more than luck (as, indeed, the ancient historian Polybius spends his entire history arguing).
Instead, what I would suggest is that the Romans have a series of advantages, of ‘edges,’ any one of which might not be enough to ensure their eventual victory, but the compounding effect of which is to make Roman success extremely likely in most conditions. We’ve covered the tactical system, its attritional focus and how that might give Roman armies an ‘edge’ in winning battles. Now we’re going to look at Roman logistics, operational art, as well as Roman strategic depth and how these pile up more ‘edges’ for the Romans on top of that tactical advantage.
Suddenly it isn’t enough to just get lucky once and defeat a Roman army: rather one must get lucky many times – Hannibal and Pyrrhus, at least, show us the number is greater than three times – in order to secure forward momentum against the Romans. Meanwhile, the Romans are often just one victory away from resetting the game in their favor.
But first, as always, if you want to broaden the ever expanding recruitment base and manpower advantage of ACOUP, you can share this essay and others and if you want to support the growing economic-military resources of ACOUP, you can contribute your tributum by supporting the project on Patreon. If you want updates whenever a new post appears, you can click below for email updates or follow me on twitter (@BretDevereaux) for updates as to new posts as well as my occasional ancient history, foreign policy or military history musings, assuming there is still a Twitter by the time this post goes live.
Legionary Logistics
We’ll start with my favorite topic: logistics! The Roman reputation for logistical excellence was well-earned and it gave the Romans the ability to operate larger forces in more distant theaters, as well as to maneuver more freely. The impact on logistics on the ability of armies to maneuver over long distances is often unappreciated, but marching speeds and routes of march are often dictated by the ability of an army to support itself on those routes – better logistics means faster armies (in an operational sense) and greater freedom to maneuver (again, operationally).
Fortunately, we’ve discussed the basics of pre-industrial logistics quite extensively. For ancient armies, logistics was mostly a question of food supply, with water as a secondary issue because for the most part water logistics are so difficult that armies simply couldn’t go anywhere a local supply of water wasn’t available.
Now it is important not to oversell the Romans here: they had to operate under the same general logistical constraints (the tyranny of the wagon equation) as everyone else. It’s hard to say if Roman logistics were more than marginally better than the logistics of a Hellenistic army; certainly, Roman logistics in the Middle Republic were radically better than, say, polis logistics in the classical period, but then so were Hellenistic logistics. Improving on polis logistics isn’t hard, most polis armies were frankly logistically primitive. Still, the Romans seem to have had a mild, but significant, logistical edge on their opponents, able to operate armies at greater logistical reach and keep them in the field year-round (Roman warfare stopped being seasonal relatively earlier, some time in the fourth century at least), as well as having mastered the coordination of logistics between disparate theaters. Roman commanders regularly and casually did the sorts of things that for other logistical systems might require more exceptional leaders.
We can start with rations. Direct comparison here is difficult because we don’t have attestation for standard rations for Hellenistic armies and the smattering of reported rations figures we have are often in exceptional circumstances like armies in sieges or captured prisoners, whereas Polybius (6.39.13) gives us the standard Roman wheat rations (but excludes non-wheat rations).3 It’s very clear that the wheat rations listed by Polybius (6.39.13) would have been supplemented with meat, dairy, vegetables, fruit and so on under normal circumstances and efforts have been made to compose a ‘typical’ Roman ration package; the evidence to do the same for Hellenistic armies or indeed any other ancient army doesn’t really exist.4 However, one thing we can note right off: the grain in our sources for Roman armies is always wheat grain, whereas a lot of rations for Greek armies (classical and later) are in cheaper barley, an immediate suggestion that Roman rations may have been unusually ample. If Roth is right about the rest of the Roman rations package (though uncertainty here is significant), it also would seem that Roman soldiers tended to get a larger slice of their nutrition from things that aren’t grain as well – relatively more meat, vegetables and dairy.5 Certainly it is the case, as Roth notes, that while Roman soldiers complain loudly and often, one perennial soldier’s complaint, about insufficient or insufferable food, does not appear in our sources.
The supply situation of the army in turn was managed by the quaestor, overseen by the Roman magistrate commanding the army with imperium (generally a consul), with some of the nuts and bolts evidently handled by military tribunes. Because of the way the Roman career path works, functionally all Roman generals will have had extensive experience handling logistics before being given command of an army, while of course the Roman quaestores will all have served in the army, probably as military tribunes (who handle foraging). Consequently, Roman generals tend to be very good at handling the basic workmanlike demands of logistics – it is vanishingly rare to hear of Roman armies outrunning their logistical tethers or otherwise getting into catastrophic food difficulties.6 That isn’t a flashy kind of command skill, but it matters.
In short, the quaestor seems to have handled the basic questions of storage, book-keeping and ration allotment. For the sake of keeping his life simple, the socii received their rations (by and large, same as the Romans) as a ‘free gift’ of the Roman state, while Roman soldiers had the value of their rations deducted from their pay, something that Polybius notes (6.39.12-14) for the army of the republic and which the Romans still do in the imperial period (we see it in papyrus evidence). This is in stark contrast to the system in many Hellenistic armies, where soldier pay included an extra ration allowance (called variably, σιτος, σιτομετρία, σιτώνιον, or σιταρχία), seemingly on the assumption that soldiers having to buy food from outside the army or state’s central stores was a regular occurrence.7 By contrast it was a trope of good Roman commanders to limit or even ban this sorts of purchases and instead to run their army’s logistics entirely out of central stores (e.g. App. Hisp. 85; critiques for allowing soldiers to buy food, Sall. Iug. 44.5, Tac. Hist. 2.88).
Where did the food come from? Foraging and local contributions would have been the main source, with foraging operations generally overseen by the military tribunes, though we hear of almost every position of authority within a Roman army leading foraging expeditions at least once. The great advantage the Roman army had in this was that it could accomplish the entire grain-processing system internally: soldiers carried sickles and threshing tools (threshing was done in the camp, for safety) as well as hand-cranked mills for grinding the grain (probably carried on mules, they’re quite heavy, around 27kg). Soldiers were then responsible for baking their own bread; the Romans also had a hardtack like biscuit called bucellatum which kept better and might be stockpiled before longer operations. Consequently, a Roman army moving across hostile countryside could convert fields of ripe grain into supplies all on their own, while a Roman army moving in friendly territory could purchase (or requisition) raw grain and process it internally, rather than having to rely on civilian mills or bakeries. It’s not clear if Hellenistic armies would have had all the same capabilities – they do seem to have had handmills, so they might have, but food allowances to soldiers may suggest that they didn’t always do so.
Supplementing this were grain transfers between theaters, overseen by the Senate. Livy’ gives us some insight into this and’s habit of relating (annually) the assignment of Roman magistrates and senatorial legates gives us considerable viability into this from 218 to 167 (when our preserved text of Livy breaks off). Once Roman armies are operating outside of Italy, the transfer of bulk grain by sea to active areas of operations were frequent. We hear of grain sent from Etruria in northern Italy to Tarentum in Southern Italy in 212 (Livy 25.15.4-5, 27.3.9), to Roman armies in Greece from Africa in the Second Macedonian War (200-197, Livy 39.19.2-4; note also 32.27.2), from Africa for Roman operations against the Seleucids (Livy 36.3-4), setting up a supply depot for shipments on Chios (Livy 37.27.1). Sicilian grain, especially, seems to have been used to regularly supplement Roman supplies basically everywhere (Livy 36.2.12-13, 37.2.11-12, 37.50.10-11, 42.31.8-9). That logistical system was in turn enabled by Roman command of the sea,8 which Rome achieves in the First Punic War (264-241) and never lets go of, shutting down whatever navy any opposing state might have quickly so that Rome could move troops and supplies overseas.
The result was that Roman armies enjoyed at least logistical parity – often logistical advantages – even when operating far away from their home territories. By contrast, Rome’s Hellenistic enemies were, apart from Pyrrhus, incapable of projecting force into Italy proper in part due to the logistical constraints. Meanwhile, for Pyrrhus (and later Hannibal), operating in Italy was made more difficult by the fact that the Romans would use logistics as a capable weapon.9 Roman logistics thus gave them an operational edge: the ability to choose in most conflicts where the war would be fought; unsurprisingly, they generally chose to fight it in the home territory of their enemies – where Roman victories would have maximum impact and setbacks minimum implications.
Materiel Matters
Now you may have already noticed, that logistics capability is in turn dependent on quite a lot of equipment: you need handmills, sickles, threshing tools and cooking gear and quite a bit of it, probably in each small unit. We don’t know how many sickles (Latin falces) the Romans might bring for an army, but we do know the handmills seem to have been assigned to the contubernium, a ‘tent group’ of six or eight soldiers well-attested for the imperial period. We don’t have attestation for that unit directly until Cicero (who uses contubernales to refer to his ‘tent mates’ both literally and metaphorically) but I strongly suspect it existed earlier. In any case, one recovered imperial-period handmill recovered from Saalburg was inscribed as “con[tubernium] Brittonis.”10 Combined with the normal assumption (albeit an uncertain one) that each contubernium had its own mule to carry the tent, it would make a lot of sense.
But this fits into a larger pattern: Roman warfare was a materiel-intensive pattern of war (material or matériel meaning all of the military equipment – tools, weapons, armor, munitions, etc. – beyond food and manpower that an army needs). Put another way, Roman armies were stuff heavy. Often we can’t quite quantify that (or can’t easily compare what we can to what other, less well attested armies did), but we have our sources – particularly, I may note, Greek language sources – regularly marveling at, for instance, regular Roman field fortification (Polyb. 18.18.8, Plut. Pyrrh. 16.4, Livy 31.34.8, Josephus BJ 3.76-84) or the heavy loads of kit Romans carried (Josephus BJ 3.95, Veg. Mil. 1.19).
And here I must note now that I am, in fact, writing my book on this very facet of the Roman army, but this must be a brief summary of a few major points.
We can start with non-combat equipment: the Romans carried a lot of it. Josephus reports of a Roman army that the soldiers each carried, “a saw, a basket, a pick-axe [the multi-purpose dolabra, discussed in a moment], a leather strap, a sickle, a hook and three days provisions” when in the march (Josephus BJ 3.95) in addition to their arms, armor, clothing and other gear. To which we can add their tents (carried by contubernium, perhaps on the mule) and entrenching stakes (pila muralia) used to fortify the camp (Polyb. 18.18.3-8). The queen of this assemblage is without a doubt the Roman’s trusty dolabra, a multi-purpose pickaxe common in Italy which could double as a digging tool, an entrenching shovel, a demolition tool and so on. Frontinus notes that one Roman commander, Domitius Corbulo, was in the habit of saying that it was with the dolabra that one defeated the enemy (Front. Strat 4.7.2). Of course in addition to that, we know Roman soldiers also carried cooking gear, perhaps individually or perhaps by contubernium – mess-tins, water-cans, pots, waterskins, cups and so on are all well enough attested.
A lot of these tools relate back to the Roman habit of entrenching, a habit that Polybius returns to with some awe at multiple points – evidently Roman fastidiousness on this point was remarkable even for a relatively seasoned Greek military-man in the mid-second century (Polyb. 6.42 and 18.24). The Romans built a fortified marching camp every night on campaign; we’ve described its defenses already. Notably, they tended to build these out in the flat and open while on the move, rather than seeking locations which would require less work to protect; Polybius openly contrasts this to Greeks who “shun the hardship of entrenching” (Polyb. 6.42.2). Of course all of that required the legion to move with a lot of extra material, both the tools to assemble the camp, but also the raw materials to do so; the legions actually moved their palisade stakes with them.
On top of all of that non-combat gear, Roman soldiers were also uncommonly heavily armed and armored. On the one hand, a Roman army has a much higher percentage of armored heavy infantry than functionally any opponent it might face. The legion’s infantry component is, after all, about 71% heavy infantry, a shockingly high figure. By comparison, at Raphia, the Seleucid army’s infantry is only about 50% heavy infantry, while the Ptolemaic army’s infantry complement comes very close at about 68%, but of course doing that required the exceptional integration of large numbers of Egyptian troops into the phalanx.
On the other hand, Roman heavy infantry were heavier than just about any opponent they might face. On the weapons side, a pair of pila require a lot of iron for the long shanks and so are both heavy and expensive (more so, for instance, than a simple Mediterranean omni-spear). And on the defensive side, the Romans were the beneficiaries of an Italian armor tradition that it seems had been trending towards an emphasis on wide-spread metal body protection for some time.11 Heavier Greek armor forms and helmets persist in Italy longer, as far as we can tell, than they do in Greece, while the Etruscans do things like adopt the Greek tube-and-yoke cuirass and then cover it with metal scales.12
The Roman helmet of this period, the redoubtable Montefortino-type helmet, remains distinctively heavier than Hellenistic helmets (in a wide variety of types). Hellenistic helmets in this period tend to range from around 700-1,250g or so, whereas early third century Roman Montefortino-type helmets tend to be around 2kg (once you account for cheek-pieces), dropping to around 1.5kg in the mid-third century and roughly holding that mass through most of the second century (doubtless a reprieve to many Roman necks). Meanwhile the Roman expectation seems to have been that all of the heavy infantry wore metal body armor, either the humble pectoral or the much heavier and more robust mail lorica hamata (Polyb 6.23.14). The latter armor steadily replaces the former through the second century; Polybius, writing in the mid-second century is our last attestation for the pectoral and related armor types.
Deploying large amounts of mail armor across the bulk of the infantry was a striking thing to do by any measure. Mail armor is really expensive, because assembling a coat of c. 40,000 rings takes a lot of time and quite a bit of iron (5-10kg, generally, in a finished coat). The Romans pick up this armor from the Gauls – for whom it was the armor of chieftains and other wealthy elites – probably in the 220s. By the last decade of the third century, it seems to have been a normal part of the legion, worn by the first class of the pedites, who might have made up, conservatively, 25-30% of the army (40% if we believe Dionysius that wealthier Romans were called to serve more often). That is an astounding investment in personal protection by Romans (who bought their own equipment), but it fits with that general trend towards more robust armor in pre-Roman Italy.13
Finally, for all of this damn heavy stuff, Roman armies do not seem to have been overburdened with baggage trains. Instead, our authors are repeatedly shocked by how much of this stuff Roman generals can get their soldiers to carry (Josephus BJ 3.95, Veg. Mil. 1.19 and Polyb. 18.18 are the standard loci classici to cite for this). The Romans have their standard tropes – as most armies do – about how good generals prohibit lots of non-combat porters and sutlers from camps and keep the baggage train light, but certainly the impression we get is that lumbering, over-burdened Roman armies were the exception, not the rule. Instead, the relatively tight discipline of Roman armies seems to have enabled most Roman generals to keep most of this kit on the backs of their soldiers, when on the march, enabling the army to march leaner and thus more quickly.
That greater materiel intensity spawns its own advantages: Roman armies are more logistically self-sufficient, amply supplied, good at both offensive (sieges) and defensive (fortified camps) construction and more expensive Roman equipment came with real battlefield advantages. In particular, the combination of self-sufficient Roman logistics with disciplined Roman marches and being able to put a fortified camp anywhere gave Roman armies a lot of operational flexibility, within the confines of the normal rules for agrarian armies.
But it also speaks to strategic advantages: after all, all of this stuff has to come from somewhere. And that gets us into the broader topic of what we may call strategic depth, which in the Roman case comes from a multitude of compounding sources.
Strategic Depth
Normally the term ‘strategic depth’ is used in a very literal sense, to mean the physical distance between potential enemies and the productive core of a state – how far does an enemy have to go before they hit something of strategic importance (like major industrial or population centers). But here, I want to use the term a bit more broadly, to refer generally to a state’s ability to tolerate setbacks at the strategic level. After all terrain is just one form of strategic depth: one can create depth by forcing an enemy to wade through swamps to get to something important or force them to wade through forests of soldiers to do the same. Both accomplish the same objective of providing a depth that an opponent must push through.
Rome, by 280 when Pyrrhus arrives, does have strategic depth in the geographic sense (Italy is a big place), but much more important than that is Roman strategic depth expressed in leadership, economic resources, effective (recruitable) manpower and the political will to access them.
Now we’ve already discussed the Roman recruitment system in a lot of depth, so I will give just a brief summary here. The Roman army was a conscripted citizen militia: Roman citizens from age 17 could be called up to serve in a process known as the dilectus. Because the Romans were at war basically every year and thus called up an army every year, the average Roman citizen male could expect to serve around 7 years or so in the army – the Romans seem to have preferred to conscript men in their late teens and 20s, so this service would have been front-loaded. Note that this isn’t ‘you’re recruited for a straight 7-year tour’ but rather a Roman might, at age 17, get conscripted, spend two years in an army, then be sent home when that campaign was done, spend a year or two at home, then get conscripted again at 21, spend a few more years enrolled, and so on. Each legion was thus a composite of both experienced soldiers doing the last years of their service and young men being called up for the first time. Once called, a Roman soldier was expected to provide his own equipment (weapons, armor, tools) and fined for failure to do so, consequently military service was restricted to families with property, called the assidui – the truly poor (the capite censi) might serve in the fleet, but wouldn’t be called up to serve in the army.
Surviving Roman census statistics14 suggest that by the third century the Romans might have had, in any given year, around 228,000 iuniores (‘juniors’ – men from 17 to 46) among the assidui (whose total number might have been around 325,000).15 By contrast, the maximum mobilizations we see from either Ptolemaic Egypt or the Seleucid Empire are around 80,000 men, give or take; if we’re being generous, we might imagine some troops still in garrisons for perhaps a peak deployment of 100,000 for either (despite the fact that the Seleucids have, conservatively, at least five times the population as the Romans).
When in doubt, you can understand almost every element of Roman policy-making in the early and middle republic through the lens of, “What will most maximize military power?”
But we’re not done, because we need to get to the socii who – you will recall – make up a bit more than half of every Roman army. We’ve discussed them before too: the socii are really subject communities of the Romans, but they don’t pay tribute. Rather, the Romans protect them and allow a fairly high degree of internal autonomy and in exchange the socii provide troops for Rome’s wars and have no other foreign policy. We don’t know how those communities decided who was liable for conscription – that issue was left up to them, as was the question of how to get them equipment – but we do know that in 225 the Romans had the socii count how many men they had available to serve and the number, according to Polybius was roughly 445,000 (of which perhaps 298,000 were iuniores by the Roman definition, though if this mattered to the socii, we cannot be certain).
So the Romans have something on the order of 750,000 adult males liable for conscription, of which some 526,000 are in the band the Romans generally think of as ‘fighting age’ (17-46). That is a staggering figure, though of course the Romans never put that many men under arms at one time: peak roman mobilizations in 212 and 211 are around 185,000 (which is still more than double peak attested Seleucid or Ptolemaic mobilizations).
But there’s more than just manpower here, because remember, the Romans expect these men to fight primarily as heavy infantry and the Roman understanding of what that means includes a lot of expensive heavy equipment, much of it metal (metal objects are particularly expensive in antiquity compared to other materials because they’re hard to make). So to get these numbers, the Romans need more than population, they need population that is both willing and able to self-equip and effectively self-mobilize. We covered the political buy-in element of this with the socii in our series on the Roman Republic and on the same for Roman citizens in our post on the dilectus.
But what about the economic aspect? Here, I think the structures of farming in Italy seem to matter a great deal. In particular, the sense one gets from our Roman census data and these mobilizations is that the Roman freeholding farmer class – the ‘medium’ (neither small, nor big) farmers with enough land to be a little affluent, without being leisured rich – was wider than it was in much of the rest of the Mediterranean world. Roman Italy had no large ‘serf’ class (unlike much of the Near East) and probably had fewer slaves as a percentage of the population than most Greek poleis. Moreover, Roman conquests had intensified this effect: as the Romans expanded in Italy they would sometimes drop colonies into restive regions, creating new towns (or augmenting old ones) with Roman or socii settlers who received measured out plots of land to support them, essentially creating new assidui (rather than, say, creating mega-sized estates for the ultra-wealthy); some of these communities were Roman citizens, others – the Latin colonies – were socii with Latin Rights. Roman Italy may thus have both had more ‘middle’ farmers before the Romans, but the Romans also actively ‘terraformed’ the Italian countryside to maximize the quantity of heavy infantry it could support. Ancient historians tend to be cautious in asserting intentional Roman policies when it comes to this kind of ‘social engineering,’ but I will note that if you want to understand Roman policy in the Early and Middle Republic, asking the question, “What would maximize long-run Roman military power in this situation?” almost always produces the result the Romans end up with.16
That huge base of ‘medium’ freeholding farmers in turn provides the massive agricultural resource base to support the production necessary to arm and equip these armies. Roman and socii freeholders are buying their equipment (and probably willing to invest heavily in quality, given that it is their life on the line!) using their surplus agricultural production to support the artisans who produce the necessary weapons, armor and tools. And while we can’t see the Roman arms industry clearly, it seems evident from the scale of Roman armies and how much stuff they have when we can see them archaeologically, that this demand, churning over decades and centuries, is what builds up Roman capacity to fit out these armies, year after year. Of course, once your tour in service was done, as a Roman, you didn’t throw your sword away, but rather kept it for a brother or cousin or friend or son who would be called to serve after you. But the result of that is that the Roman rural countryside already has huge reserves of equipment and experienced, trained fighting men, just waiting for the call up in an emergency.
The result is that not only are Roman armies better armed and armored, with a meaningful ‘tactical edge,’ there are also more of them! Logistical limits keep the Romans from applying overwhelming numbers in most battles (and it often doesn’t work when they try to oversize their armies), but the resource and manpower depth of the system means they can just keep coming back. It also means the Romans can capitalize on opportunities and victories with fresh troops. Of course, you need experienced leaders to coordinate all of this, and that brings us to:
Leadership
The Roman system also provided an edge in military leadership. It was not the case that the Romans were unusually gifted with military geniuses in this period nor was their success up to one or two exceptional military leaders. Rather, Rome’s institutions reliably churned out solidly capable, workmanlike generals and did so, most importantly, in quantity.
The key system here is the Roman cursus honorum (lit, ‘the path of honors,’ but in practice the Roman political career), which once again, we’ve already discussed. The upshot of the system was that a Roman who wanted to ascend to the upper echelon of the Senate, to have an influence on public affairs and, most importantly for us, to get command of an army had to move through a series of offices more or less in order throughout their 20s and 30s to be eligible to run for the consulship at age 42 (for it was the consuls that led Rome’s major armies).
As a result, just about any aspiring Roman commander is going first to have served in the army either as a ranker (that is, common soldier) or a military tribune (a junior staff officer) and probably both. Ten years minimum of service was required (Polyb. 6.19.3). After that, our elite Roman might run for the quaestorship, where he has a two-in-eight chance of being assigned to manage finances in Rome and an six-in-eight chance of being the logistics officer in support of a Roman army. After that, his quaestorship might be extended a year or two, or he might rotate through another stint as a military tribune, interspersed with perhaps running for purely civilian mid-level offices (the aedileship or the tribunate of the plebs). Then, around age 39, he could try to get elected as one of the praetorships (4 and then 6, in our period); two of these offices were primarily legal but the other praetors were given minor commands in places like Sicily and Spain. Only then, around age 42, does our elite Roman get a shot at the consulship.
And you can see both a training function to this and a ‘weeding out’ function. On the training side, nearly any Roman consul is going to have had extensive experience managing almost every aspect of his army. Moreover, the expectation was that the consuls or praetors leading armies under whom all of these military tribunes and quaestors served exercised a mentorship function; this is an apprenticeship training system and it works! Finally, the structure of Roman politics is as an elimination contest, with fewer offices on each major step of the system and voters deciding which elites advanced and which didn’t. Consequently, truly incompetent leaders might well be weeded out before reaching the army command offices of the praetorship or the consulship.
Meanwhile, all of the elites moving through this system are collected in the Roman Senate, a body of current and former magistrates, which serves both as the body which manages overall strategic direction (operating with the combined wisdom of every living Roman who has commanded an army) as well as a large reserve of experienced commanders to draw on.
That reserve of potential army commanders – not merely officers, but generals – matters, because it allows the Romans to keep multiple armies in the field, in multiple theaters, at the same time. By contrast, in Hellenistic monarchies, the main field army is led by the king – who can only be in one place. Consequently, you see even very active Hellenistic rulers still able to only focus on theater at a time, with subordinate generals sent to deal with other problems only being able to command much smaller (and often less effective) forces. Antiochus III’s reign provides a good example of this sort of frenetic back-and-forth rush: Antiochus inherits power in 223, facing security problems in both Syria (Ptolemies) and Persia (rebellion). In 222, he heads to Syria (it goes badly) and sends general to Persia (it goes worse); in 221, he shifts, heading East and manages to get control of that problem, before shifting back to campaign in Syria from 220 to 217, before being stopped short by the Battle of Raphia. In 216, he’s up in Anatolia, dealing with problems there and stays until 213. He’s then in Armenia in 212, has a brief break and then we see him campaigning in Parthia and Bactria – his far East – in 209 through perhaps 205. Then seeing opportunity, he is back in Syria from 205 to 198, then another short break, before heading to Thrace and Greece in 196 and into a war with Rome from 192 to 188. He’s back in the East in 187 when he dies.
Back and forth, back and forth, because he only has the one primary general: himself.
By contrast, in 190 – the year of the Battle of Magnesia – the Romans had one army in Greece (to fight Antiochus), another newly raised in Italy, another in Cisalpine Gaul, another in Southern Italy, another in Aetolia (north-western Greece, on the north coast of the Gulf of Corinth), another in Sicily, a small force in Etruria, two armies in Spain (one Nearer, one Farther), another army for Corsica et Sardinia, and a fleet. Livy (37.2) counts the following commands (not counting fellows who were replaced at some point during the year):
| Place | Commander | Rank |
| Greece (headed to Anatolia) | L. Cornelius Scipio | Consul |
| Italy | C. Laelius | Consul |
| Cisalpine Gaul | P. Cornelius | Proconsul |
| Apulia and Bruttium | M. Tuccius | Praetor |
| Aetolia | Aulus Cornelius | Pro-Praetor |
| Sicily | C. Atinus Labeo | Praetor |
| Etruria | P. Junius Brutus | Praetor |
| The Fleet | L. Aemilius | Praetor |
| Nearer Spain | C. Flaminius | Pro-Praetor |
| Farther Spain | L. Aemilius Paullus | Pro-Praetor |
| Corsica et Sardinia | L. Oppius Salinator | Pro-Praetor |
Eleven independent commands. And that wasn’t an abnormal year! And then all of these experienced commanders head back to the Senate, where they’re available in subsequent years to command armies – and because commanding armies is the route to political advancement and prestige in this society, they’re eager to be called upon again.
Putting the Roman Hydra Together
Plutarch relates an episode in the Pyrrhic Wars where Pyrrhus sends an ambassador, Cineas to Rome (to try to get the Romans to surrender) and Cineas reports back that “concerning the [Roman] people, he feared that they might turn out to be fighting a Lernaean hydra, for already there were gathered twice as many men for the consul as those they had faced before, and there were many times more Romans capable of bearing arms” (Plut. Pyrrh 19.5).
Now, of course that’s Plutarch and if you’ve been around here, you know that we can have little faith anyone actually said that. But it expresses a reality: not only did the Romans have a winning tactical system and solid operational-logistical advantages, they had tremendous strategic depth. We’ll talk more later in this series about the specific circumstances for Pyrrhus here (geography and city fortifications are playing a role as well), but the basic concept is sound.
Let’s put the factors we’ve discussed together.
First, the Roman system of control in Italy, the socii-system, maximizes military power by extracting soldiers rather than tribute from the allies, broadening Rome’s recruitment base massively. The contrast to ethnic restrictions in the core units of Hellenistic armies should suggest itself. Second, the economic system of Italy is also more strongly oriented towards the middling farmers that make good heavy infantry, a facet of the local economy intensified by Roman colonial foundations in the course of the Roman conquest of Italy (which might include socii as well as Romans, so we’re not just spreading a static Roman citizenry thinner and thinner).
Third, those middling farmers are expected to equip themselves. Consequently, good equipment was a sign of social status, but also had a good chance to save your own life. So instead of taxing these folks (and generating resentment) the system creates incentives for these regular farmers to invest in military activity with high quality equipment. And fourth, because you are recruiting some of these guys every year and they need equipment every year, Rome develops a deep well of reserve equipment in the countryside, without needing to maintain big arsenals or centralized systems of equipment distribution. And this whole system works without expensive royal courts, expensive central bureaucrats, or large garrisons to enforce unpopular taxation.17
Then fifth, because Rome raises armies every year, the average Roman serves those seven or so years in their late teens and early twenties. That means both that any newly raised army is a mix of veterans (from previous dilecti) and green troops (just coming of age), giving every legion a ‘spine’ of experienced veterans, but it also means that the rural population in their thirties and early forties are all veterans too, available as an enormous ‘fallback’ pool of experienced, trained manpower in an emergency. And because of points three and four, most of them already have the gear they need too.
And then finally sixth, elite competition for command in the Roman Republic naturally creates a lot of commanders and the Roman career path ensures that anyone who reaches the consulship has experience handling every aspect of a Roman army before they are given command of one, creating an effective ‘apprenticeship’ officer training system. Because those commanders are then cycled back into the Senate, the Senate serves as a deep well of solidly workmanlike generals, meaning that while Rome doesn’t have many ‘military geniuses,’ it never lacks for competent commanders. The loss of a general – or several generals – is never crippling, there are always replacements available to take command or to be given command of new armies for new theaters.
So in addition to the logistical and operational advantages the Roman army has, and its ‘tactical edge,’ the Romans also have this enormous strategic advantage in the depth of their military capacity. That depth is not just manpower, which is part of what makes it so hard to imitate. Key elements of the Roman system – the economic-agricultural model, the colonies, the socii, the social values that keep this system running and which sustain the political will to keep digging deeper and deeper to win (which I haven’t discussed much here but are a major topic in my book project SHAMELESS PLUG) – all emerge over the long Roman conquest of Italy. Recreating them would mean recreating Roman and Italian society from the ground up, a process of decades if not centuries.
The result is that a Hellenistic state needs not just one lucky break on the battlefield – as we’ll see, getting a decisive victory against a Roman army is a tall order – but an increasingly implausible sequence of almost endless lucky breaks. Worse yet, that strategic depth means the Romans will have time to learn, potentially adopting or adapting to whatever tactics you employ. Elephants catch the Romans entirely off-guard in the early- and mid-third century. By the late third and second centuries, Roman armies casually dispose of war elephants, with what seems to have been a standard and effective set of ‘anti-elephant’ tactics.
Meanwhile the Romans are in the opposite position. Exceptional Roman logistics and distributed command means that the Romans can capitalize on any opportunity, so they just need to win once to ‘move the ball down field’ as it were. A pyrrhic victory for the Romans isn’t a problem either, as new forces can be quickly sent, with new commanders if necessary, to ‘convert’ on an opponent’s weakness. And the Romans can use their navy, their strategic depth and their long-distance logistical coordination to open multiple theaters where, in order to steadily grind forward, they only need to be winning in one of them. In practice, of course, because the Roman tactical system is good, they tend to be winning in most or all of them.
But it is one thing to lay out possible edges or advantages only in theory. We need to see how these systems actually function when pitted against each other. And that’s where we’re going to turn next, looking first at some of the relative successes of the Hellenistic military system (in particular, Pyrrhus, as well as the Hellenistic successes against Gallic and Parthian enemies) before turning to the staggering run of unanswered Roman victories that functionally destroys the house Alexander (and Philip II) built.
- This hasn’t stopped being funny for me yet.
- Drink!
- The figures we do have are collected in Foxhall and Forbes, “Σιτομετρεία: The Role of Grain as a Staple Food in Antiquity” Chiron 12 (1982).
- On this, see J.P. Roth, The Logistics of the Roman Army at War (2012).
- op. cit., esp. 24ff
- On this point, see, uh, me, “Organization of the Military Food Supply: Rome” in Brill’s Companion to Diet and Logistics in Greek and Roman Warfare (2023).
- On this, see Aperghis, The Seleukid Royal Economy (2004), 200ff.
- drink? Do we drink for Mahan? It feels like we should drink for Mahan.
- On this, see P Erdkamp, Hunger and the Sword: Warfare and Food Supply in Roman Republican Wars (1998).
- A.P. Gentry, Roman Military Stone-build Granaries in Britain (1976), 20.
- Jeremy Armstrong and Nicholas Harrison note, for instance, a shift in manufacture of armor in the fourth century BC which he thinks may indicate a shift towards wider distribution of metal armor, see J. Armstrong and N. Harrison, “The Armorer’s Craft” JRMES 22 (2021).
- On this, see Aldrete et al., Reconstructing Ancient Linen Body Armor: Unraveling the Linothorax Mystery (2013). Metal reinforcement of armor is both wildly more common in Etruscan artwork than Greek artwork but also covers a lot more of the armor.
- On this topic, see, uh, me, “The Adoption and Impact of Roman Mail Armor in the Third and Second Centuries B.C.” Chiron 52 (2022). On early mail generally, see M.A. Wijnhoven, European Mail Armour (2021), a fantastically expensive book that is worth the astounding price tag if you are really interested. Much like mail, actually: fantastically expensive, worth the price tag. I reviewed the book here..
- Particularly Polyb. 2.24, but we have a BUNCH of recorded Roman census statistics, P.A. Brunt compiles them all in one place, Italian Manpower (1971), 13-4.
- Figure follows Taylor, Soldiers and Silver (2020), 35 which in turn follows De Ligt, Peasants, Citizens and Soldiers (2012).
- And with political success tied to military glory, you can also see the incentives of why the Roman elite prefers enhancing Rome’s military power over, say, accumulating wealth more rapidly or building lots of fancy buildings (Rome’s monumental architecture remains quite modest until the first century BCE).
- Note that the Romans do pay taxes, most notably the tributum, a variable annual land tax. But at citizens of the state whose military activity they support and vote for, the Romans could count on a lot of active compliance with this regime (indeed, the wealth that made one liable for tributum was self-reported!). That’s very different from a system of imperial extraction where discriminated subject peoples are forced to pay for their ruler’s lavish lifestyle and see few benefits!
Concerning footnote 16 and the surrounding text it refers to, I guess that begs the question as to what led Rome to develop in the direction of reassigning conquered land to create more assidui and not instead more concentrated estates for the mega-wealthy which seems to be the more frequent policy choice elsewhere in the Mediterranean basin? Why weren’t say, the Diadochi breaking up newly conquered/reconquered lands into smaller freeholding lands so they could conscript a bunch of “Macedonian” heavy infantry?
I also wonder how much of the Hellenistic command concentration is centered around political reality. How many of these Hellenistic kings had subordinates they could trust with command of a force and not go rogue? That strikes my possibly naive understanding as the tighter bottleneck than availability of competent commanders, and it seems that Rome’s greater political stability allows the military function stronger than just being something that happens on its own.
It’s possible it would be difficult to get “And all this stuff goes to the Senate” to pass the assemblies, which in turn means it’s unlikely the Senate would even propose that.
And that problem that the Hellenistic kings had with unreliable subordinates seemed to turn into a Roman problem by the Crisis of the 3rd Century which they tried to solve with the Tetrarch System.
“King can’t trust subordinates” is exactly a reason, maybe the main reason, I’ve seen here and elsewhere (Think one of the podcasts our blog author was on mentioned this. the book Soldiers and Silver might have as well. If not, I’ve definitely picked it up somewhere.) Which means that while other people may well make good solid commanders (If the system can train and find such people), the ed result is the same as if there are less of them.
The soldiers and silver book also made the argument (I think, I might be misremembering or misunderstanding, it made some argument along these lines) that, since a political entity is associated strongly with one person when a king exists, that losses reflect badly on the king and a king has to be seen as active and running things as a result. Which both pushes for one big army around the king, and reduces the ability to handle multiple losses and keep going, thanks to the reputation problems.
The soldiers and silver book also made the argument (I think, I might be misremembering or misunderstanding, it made some argument along these lines) that, since a political entity is associated strongly with one person when a king exists, that losses reflect badly on the king and a king has to be seen as active and running things as a result. Which both pushes for one big army around the king, and reduces the ability to handle multiple losses and keep going, thanks to the reputation problems.
Sometimes. Other times it has the opposite effect — the king deliberately doesn’t go out to command armies, so that any defeat can be safely blamed on the subordinate general without denting royal prestige.
That can theoretically match the republic’s performance if the king can trust the generals. If not (which appears to be vastly more common), then the passive-king arrangement is, if anything, even worse — the realm has to support (with manpower and equipment) its largest single army which must do nothing but sit at the feet of the throne.
That can theoretically match the republic’s performance if the king can trust the generals.
You’re assuming this republic can trust its own generals, which isn’t necessarily a given. Being overthrown by their own military is one of the most common ways for republics to fall.
If not (which appears to be vastly more common),
“Appears” to whom? Historically monarchies have tended to be longer-lived than republics, which is hard to explain if they’re so much more unstable and wasteful.
@The original Mr. X
> “Appears” to whom? Historically monarchies have tended to be longer-lived than republics, which is hard to explain if they’re so much more unstable and wasteful.
This is not surviorship bias but close. When a republic is taken over by a rebelling general, it’s becomes a dictatorship, and later maybe a monarchy. When a monarchy is taken over by a rebelling general, it’s still a monarchy.
This is not surviorship bias but close. When a republic is taken over by a rebelling general, it’s becomes a dictatorship, and later maybe a monarchy. When a monarchy is taken over by a rebelling general, it’s still a monarchy.
There are plenty of monarchies which survived for centuries without being couped. Not to mention, there are more ways for a state to fall than simply undergoing a coup. Foreign conquest and splitting apart into lots of little pieces are also possibilities, for example.
There are also plenty of republics that have survived for centuries.
It’s very hard to disentangle “are monarchies more stable” from “until at most 100-200 years ago, most of the world was mostly dominated by hereditary aristocrats who had no interest in tolerating the formation of republics.”
“There are plenty of monarchies which survived for centuries without being couped.”
Which ones? Literally the only case I can think of are the Habsburgs and their run of luck with stable succession was famously exceptional.
It’s very hard to disentangle “are monarchies more stable” from “until at most 100-200 years ago, most of the world was mostly dominated by hereditary aristocrats who had no interest in tolerating the formation of republics.”
They had no interest in their own lands becoming republics, for obvious reasons, but they didn’t generally care so much about other countries. The ancient Greek city-states, Italian republics, and Republic of Novgorod weren’t forced to become hereditary monarchies by outside pressure. Ideologically-motivated crusades to spread one’s favoured form of government are a modern innovation.
More importantly, even if we limit ourselves to the last 100-200 years, monarchies still come out looking more stable. If anything, they’d come out looking more stable vs. republics than if we looked over the past 2,000 years or so. Plenty of republics have suffered military coups over that period (many of them several times, viz. basically all of Latin America), but I can’t think of a major monarchy that has.
Which ones? Literally the only case I can think of are the Habsburgs and their run of luck with stable succession was famously exceptional.
Most of the major Chinese dynasties, for a start:
– Western Han: 211 years (202 BC-AD 9).
– Eastern Han: 195 years (AD 25-220).
– Tang: 289 years (618-907).
– Song: 319 years (960-1279).
– Ming: 276 years (1368-1644).
– Qing: 268 years (1644-1912).
If we look a little to the east, the Korean Joseon dynasty ruled for 505 years (1392-1897). Or, if you prefer to look to Europe, the French Capets managed to stay in power for 341 years (987-1328) until they became extinct.
Three, unfortunately theoretical, arguments:
First, the same factors that constitute an uncommonly large strategic depth against outside enemies also constitute an advantage against an internal rebellion. Unless it was unusually large and lead by some military genius, the (legitimate government of the) republic is escalation-dominant over any one of its field armies. On the flip side, if a monarchy is hollow against outside conquerors, it is also hollow against a rebellious field commander.
Second, Rome used short and definite terms of appointment. If a monarchy appoints its governors for life or even hereditarily, then in effect they behave more like allies than “proper” subordinates. If the eye of Sauron is occupied elsewhere (see first point), they can stop sending tribute, or indeed send a part but less than the entirety of it, potentially indefinitely, without opening overt hostility and earning retribution, and without losing their legitimacy in the eyes of their subordinates. On the other hand, if a Roman governor/general tries to overstay their one- or two-year term, that is very obviously stepping over a line in the eyes of their subordinates. Monarchies could mostly avoid this problem by using similarly definite and short appointments, but my overall impression is that for some reason they tended not to.
Third, modern states — whether formally a monarchy or republic — are usually ministerial bureaucracies, with the power of taxation separated at the top level from military expenditures&command and siloed separately throughout. This still allows coups (“shoot the president, capture the tax department intact on day 1”) but categorically prevents prolonged rebellions and civil wars, because any commander aspiring to that would additionally face the difficulty of having to find/build a system from which to pay their soldiers and suppliers, and which the population accepts as legitimate. (This one is not a hint, because as far as I can tell, no ancient state worked this way.)
First, the same factors that constitute an uncommonly large strategic depth against outside enemies also constitute an advantage against an internal rebellion. Unless it was unusually large and lead by some military genius, the (legitimate government of the) republic is escalation-dominant over any one of its field armies. On the flip side, if a monarchy is hollow against outside conquerors, it is also hollow against a rebellious field commander.
Sure, a hollow state is vulnerable to external and internal threats, and a state with strategic depth generally isn’t. My point is simply that there’s no historical reason to suppose that monarchies were generally more likely to be vulnerable in this way than republics were.
Second, Rome used short and definite terms of appointment. If a monarchy appoints its governors for life or even hereditarily, then in effect they behave more like allies than “proper” subordinates. If the eye of Sauron is occupied elsewhere (see first point), they can stop sending tribute, or indeed send a part but less than the entirety of it, potentially indefinitely, without opening overt hostility and earning retribution, and without losing their legitimacy in the eyes of their subordinates. On the other hand, if a Roman governor/general tries to overstay their one- or two-year term, that is very obviously stepping over a line in the eyes of their subordinates. Monarchies could mostly avoid this problem by using similarly definite and short appointments, but my overall impression is that for some reason they tended not to.
Plenty of monarchies did — Imperial Rome, Imperial China, and early modern Europe are all examples. The phenomenon of hereditary governorships seems to mostly occur when there’s limited state capacity (e.g., medieval Europe).
Third, modern states — whether formally a monarchy or republic — are usually ministerial bureaucracies, with the power of taxation separated at the top level from military expenditures&command and siloed separately throughout. This still allows coups (“shoot the president, capture the tax department intact on day 1”) but categorically prevents prolonged rebellions and civil wars, because any commander aspiring to that would additionally face the difficulty of having to find/build a system from which to pay their soldiers and suppliers, and which the population accepts as legitimate. (This one is not a hint, because as far as I can tell, no ancient state worked this way.)
I don’t know how you’d define as “prolonged”, but the Russian and Spanish Civil Wars both lasted for several years.
“Most of the major Chinese dynasties, for a start:”
Yeah so you are conflating continuity of dynasty name for lack of coups. That is not true. The longest example on your list, the Song, had their capital occupied and government replaced then went to for a government in exile halfway through the period. If capital occupied, government replaced does not qualify as a coup, I dont know what does!
The Chinese dynasties were in fact the first thing I thought of before making my comment and took about half a second of consideration to dismiss. So to repeat myself, I can think of exactly one example of a monarchy that survived centuries without any coups, the Austrian Habsburgs.
Yeah so you are conflating continuity of dynasty name for lack of coups. That is not true. The longest example on your list, the Song, had their capital occupied and government replaced then went to for a government in exile halfway through the period. If capital occupied, government replaced does not qualify as a coup, I dont know what does!
Their capital was occupied by external invaders, not by a rebellious Song general. So no, that doesn’t qualify as a coup.
The capital was occupied by rebellious invaders hired by the old government so yes, that’s a coup. And it certainly does not represent continuity!
The capital was occupied by rebellious invaders hired by the old government so yes, that’s a coup.
The Jin weren’t “hired by” the Song, they were a separate state that allied with the Song against the Liao before breaking their alliance and occupying (part of) Song territory.
And it certainly does not represent continuity!
We’re talking about whether monarchies are more vulnerable to coups than republics. A state losing territory to foreign invaders is not relevant to that discussion.
@Basil Marte
> First, the same factors that constitute an uncommonly large strategic depth against outside enemies also constitute an advantage against an internal rebellion.
> Unless it was unusually large and lead by some military genius, the (legitimate government of the) republic is escalation-dominant over any one of its field armies. On the flip side, if a monarchy is hollow against outside conquerors, it is also hollow against a rebellious field commander.
I’m not conviced by your reasonning, really. To be secure against foreign threat and to be secure against internal threat aren’t necessarily correlated at all.
Seize the capitol of a republic and you may have seized a large part of the citizen body and dealt a mortal strike to the legitimacy of the regular government (failure to protect + loss of symbolic places that can then be used by the opposition). And as most armies tend to be at the frontiers it can be quite long to realize a general has gone rogue and to mount a sufficient force to match his experimented soldiers.
As for a monarchy, the king can always, you know, leave, as happened during the HYW (not really a civil war, not really a foreign war either) when to my knowledge the French king legitimacy didn’t really suffered from losing territories.
> Second, Rome used short and definite terms of appointment. If a monarchy appoints its governors for life or even hereditarily, then in effect they behave more like allies than “proper” subordinates. If the eye of Sauron is occupied elsewhere (see first point), they can stop sending tribute, or indeed send a part but less than the entirety of it, potentially indefinitely, without opening overt hostility and earning retribution, and without losing their legitimacy in the eyes of their subordinates. On the other hand, if a Roman governor/general tries to overstay their one- or two-year term, that is very obviously stepping over a line in the eyes of their subordinates. Monarchies could mostly avoid this problem by using similarly definite and short appointments, but my overall impression is that for some reason they tended not to.
Yeah that isn’t really a monarchy/republic thing. There’s also republics who allowed individuals to run again and again for example, or tried to coopt powerful individuals which might backfire badly too.
> Third, modern states — whether formally a monarchy or republic — are usually ministerial bureaucracies, with the power of taxation separated at the top level from military expenditures&command and siloed separately throughout. This still allows coups (“shoot the president, capture the tax department intact on day 1”) but categorically prevents prolonged rebellions and civil wars, because any commander aspiring to that would additionally face the difficulty of having to find/build a system from which to pay their soldiers and suppliers, and which the population accepts as legitimate. (This one is not a hint, because as far as I can tell, no ancient state worked this way.)
It is vastly easier to conquer a bureaucratic state than a personnal state. To conquer a bureaucratic state you violently remove the head of the state and take its place. Trying to do so in a personnal state is futile.
You want to pay your soldiers : you seize the tax office, read the tax book about how much the territory can pay and then seize tax money. Now try to seize the throne of St Peter and see how much catholics are going to pay you.
More generally, I do agree with The original Mr X that trying to assert that republics are more stable than monarchies is futile because then we should see vastly more republics and vastly less monarchies and that’s not the case.
I believe the Hellenic monarchies were especially unstable because they emerged from a somewhat Greek republican background and as such anyone really could be king as their legitimacy was derived from their military migth. Roman monarchy suffered from the same instability : even as monarchy cemented, a sufficiently successfull general could try his luck, something really hard to do in most hereditary monarchies.
My opinion (and I can very well be wrong) is that the Roman republic successed at creating a somewhat “Italian” republic, which enables Rome to punch well above its weight, its weight being Italy. But even then Rome struggled where most expansionnist republics struggled : when you expand, the current citizen have few interests in growing their number by enrolling conquered people, something the Roman republic somewhat achieved by letting a lot of local freedom to sooci, by giving them a somewhat good legal status and quasi-equality in warfare. But then Rome was lucky to be somewhat stable despite that, and the model failed to expand to more than Italy, and then Rome got less and less stable as it expanded onto non-citizen territories.
“It is vastly easier to conquer a bureaucratic state than a personnal state. To conquer a bureaucratic state you violently remove the head of the state and take its place. Trying to do so in a personnal state is futile.
You want to pay your soldiers : you seize the tax office, read the tax book about how much the territory can pay and then seize tax money. Now try to seize the throne of St Peter and see how much catholics are going to pay you.”
While it’s true that Henry VIII Tudor did not actually attempt to seize control of the whole of the Catholic Church, he seized the bit of it in England, and it worked extremely well from his point of view, both politically and financially. All the English tenants who had been paying rent to the monks of St. Whatever’s Abbey shrugged and started paying rent to the Duke of Somewhere, who had taken over the land from the monks.
You might also want to look at the Western Schism.
“The Jin weren’t “hired by” the Song”
Then that would be a massive break with the typical pattern of Chinese alliances.
Then that would be a massive break with the typical pattern of Chinese alliances.
There is a Wikipedia article on the subject, you don’t need to go off vague notions of what Chinese alliances were “typically” like: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alliance_Conducted_at_Sea
“There is a Wikipedia article on the subject”
Yes, there are multiple wikipedia articles on the subject. For instance there is this article which lists the payment that the Song made to the Jin to hire them… oh wait no we would never hire barbarians, we are just allying with them and giving them money to smooth things over…
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jin%E2%80%93Song_Wars
“the Song would pay an annual indemnity of 300,000 packs of silk and 200,000 taels of silver to the Jin, as well as a one-time payment of one million strings of copper coins to compensate the Jurchens for the tax revenue they would have earned had they not returned the prefectures.”
This is an extremely common arrangement in Chinese history and quite common in other places at various times as well. The Romans did it, the Persians did it, the French did it. Sometimes it bit them in the ass, other times it worked out well.
Yes, there are multiple wikipedia articles on the subject. For instance there is this article which lists the payment that the Song made to the Jin to hire them… oh wait no we would never hire barbarians, we are just allying with them and giving them money to smooth things over…
The part you quote isn’t a payment to “hire” the Jin, it’s a payment to buy some areas that the Jin had conquered from the Liao and the Song wanted for themselves.
Oh how silly of me that giving people money in exchange for them doing something could be described as hiring them.
I think you are over assigning value to this “King can’t trust subordinates”.
After all the Roman Empire, lead by an emperor (or two) survived for almost 1500 years. Civil wars happened but the empire lasted for a long time. It’s not that the Hellenistic kings did not have generals that they trusted, it’s they didn’t have a system to consistently produce a large number of competent ones. If your co-elite childhood friend dies in combat, you can’t just get a new one or even worse if he survives even though he is incompetent you are stuck with him.
After all the Roman Empire, lead by an emperor (or two) survived for almost 1500 years. Civil wars happened but the empire lasted for a long time.
Worth pointing out here that being overthrown by an over-mighty general was historically one of the main ways for republics to fall. Rome itself is, of course, the most famous example of this. In more recent times, you could also add the English Commonwealth (lasted about four years until Cromwell took over), Revolutionary France (lasted around ten years before Napoleon’s coup), or the Spanish Second Republic (eight years, three of which were spent in a civil war against its own army).
We also have plenty of examples of monarchs delegating command to his subordinates. Most medieval kings had no problem doing so, for example.
> the Roman Empire, lead by an emperor (or two) survived for almost 1500 years. Civil wars happened but the empire lasted for a long time.
A lot of those civil wars were _exactly_ a successful general overthrowing the emperor. This is not a rebuttal of Dillon’s claim.
And my impression is that even when there wasn’t a civil war, royal suspicion of ‘overly’ successful generals was a common theme in Byzantine, Islamic, and Chinese history, leading to pre-mature recalls or re-assignments.
The point isn’t whether the empire lasts a long time, it’s whether the emperor can trust his generals. And the “long time” includes lots of new dynasties formed by… rebellious generals.
> royal suspicion of ‘overly’ successful generals
it seems it’s a recurring theme in current day Russia too (replacing royal by Putin’s). I remember seeing a chart listing the many Russian generals who died in active service in the last decade
This depended on the form of kingship. The kingship in Hellenistic (and even more in later Islamic) times was a position to which a lot of people might aspire. So the incumbent had to keep a sharp watch (or dispose of all possible claimants by fratricide). By contrast, after 1100 or so in western Europe, the major royalties went by strict primogeniture (England a bit less so). Commanders or relatives could not be king, and it was quite safe for say, Louis XI to entrust command to a noble.
It probably didn’t help that Hellenistic monarchy was personal, rather than nationalistic, in nature. The kings weren’t generally heads of a nation, but individuals who held power due to military success. (Cf. the Seleucids Empire — the name comes from the ruling dynasty, not to any “Seleucid nation”.) This meant that they tended to be more fragile, since a big defeat, and consequent loss of prestige, could lead to a vicious cycle of rebellions and defections. A Roman who thought that his generals were hopelessly outmatched by Hannibal might still fight because he loved Rome and wanted to defend it; a Seleucid who thought Antiochus was hopelessly outmatched by the Romans would be more likely to defect, or at least be slack in war, because if the king is hopelessly outmatched, why are you following him and not the other guy?
Each contubernium had a pack mule, which would be able to carry the heavier items (millstones etc.).
The Romans’ big shields would help, particularly if you angled them forwards. But generally, lots of heavy infantry have got by without greaves. The shins are quite a small target, and if you try to strike them you’ll have to lower your own weapon, potentially leaving you open to attack yourself.
Yes, chopping his shin doesn’t help if he takes your head in exchange.
I think it’s interesting that the Romans don’t seem to have faced any major socii revolts during this period, even though military service doesn’t generally seem to have been a path to citizenship like in the Empire, and even though the Ptolemies faced a major rebellion from their own Egyptian phalangites. Maybe the freedom in sharing out plunder was responsible — if you’re treated as basically an equal member of the army along with Roman citizens, your politically subordinate status is less likely to rankle.
The key point in being a socius was the idea of being an ally. The allied cities were allied with Rome for their own political reasons, one of which was the Roman moght, the other the Roman style of treating allies well. The man serving in the auxiliaries was probably quite happy to be a citizen of his own city, because that brought him the possibility of being part of the political process where it mattered, i.e. at home. The key issue was having Latin rights: right of connubium and commercium, which meant your daughters might legally marry a your Roman comerade-at-arms, or that the merchants of your city would have access to the Roman markets.
Similarly, for example, I am a Finnish citizen, an ally of you Americans. I have no aspiration to ever become a US citizen, and I don’t feel oppressed for not being able to vote in November elections. After all, I just voted for the Finnish president last weekend. What I care about is the possibility of interacting on the same social level in a discussion like this, and EU firms being able to sell things also on the US market.
There was a major rebellion of Socii against Rome after the Battle of Cannae. But it seems to have been less motivated by animosity towards Rome, and more by local rivalries. Some cities and peoples thought that joining Hannibal would give them a chance to gain power over or get revenge on their local neighbors who stayed loyal to Rome.
Some of the allied communities rebelled, but most remained loyal. Indeed, had there been a truly major revolt after Cannae, it’s unlikely that even the Romans could have emerged victorious.
I think it’s interesting that the Romans don’t seem to have faced any major socii revolts during this period, even though military service doesn’t generally seem to have been a path to citizenship like in the Empire, and even though the Ptolemies faced a major rebellion from their own Egyptian phalangites. Maybe the freedom in sharing out plunder was responsible — if you’re treated as basically an equal member of the army along with Roman citizens, your politically subordinate status is less likely to rankle.
OK, for some reason all my comments seem to have appeared here, instead of below the comments I was actually responding to. Sorry about that.
Interestingly, Macedonia, which had a more “national” character than the Seleucids, was also more resilient, insofar as it managed to come back for Round 2 against the Romans instead of going into an irreversible tailspin like the (on paper, much more powerful) Seleucid Empire.
That’s where the ethnic bias comes in; There’s not that many macedonians, and, especially for those outside of actual macedon, they can’t just recruit people from Macedon because Antigonous heirs wants those for themselves.
I have not seen anyone bring this up, so I will. The Roman political system prioritized winning wars as the best path to social advancement as an elite. Being the richest Roman did not make you the most powerful and influential Roman (Crasus is a good example). Winning battles and wars makes you the most powerful and influential Roman. This means that all members of the Roman elite are incentivized to prefer maximizing military capacity for Rome over their personal wealth if they want to win the elite competition.
Furthermore, the other great source of power in Rome was having many clients. This goes back to Roman elections and assemblies. To win elections and get your way in assemblies, and to help allies win elections too, you need many clients that you can call on for political support. If you win a war and then redistribute a bunch of land to form a new Roman colony you have just created a whole colony of new clients and built up your prestige as a war winner.
Tldr; Roman elections created a need for Roman elites to have many clients to vote for them and military victories to build their prestige. This meant that Roman leaders were incentivized to prioritize increasing state military power and aquiting new clients over personal wealth.
Just to add to that, probably there were Romans who cared more about increasing their wealth and personal estates than about being the most powerful and influential person…but then presumably they wouldn’t be as influential at setting policy in their favor.
So many of the Hellenistic monarchies did in fact break up land and give it to military settlers (these are the people that make up the phalanxes, companion cavalry, and elite infantry discussed earlier in the series), but they run into the simple problem that as foreign kings ruling foreign countries (except the Antigonids), there are only so many “Macedonian” settlers to go around, and that they had to balance settling them against the already extant native populations. The Antigonids meanwhile have the simple problem of not actually controlling all that much population and territory, Taylor in Soldiers and Silver discusses how the Antigonid’s mobilization as a percentage of population, while worse than that of the Romans, was still in the same realm rather than being orders of magnitude smaller the way that the Ptolemies’ or Seluecids’ was.
In response to Adam’s first paragraph… As ‘guy’ said, the Roman political system was at least somewhat answerable to the mass assemblies. And the side effect of having a large citizen population that’s heavily conscripted to fight in Rome’s wars was that those same Roman citizens would expect to not be forgotten when it was time to distribute the spoils of conquest.
And on the flip side of that, the ‘Diadochi’ kingdoms all originated under the leadership of a single king/general and his personal army of Greek and Macedonian soldiers. Passing out land allotments to those soldiers was something a Diadochi general could get away with. Passing them out to just anyone, not so much. And by the time the Diadochi were well established (after the initial round of fighting among themselves), the original soldiers were already a ruling upper class. Passing out more estates to more ‘medium-sized farmers’ in order to raise a larger army would have undermined their power and influence by diluting that power.
The Roman system being a republic, and a republic that was almost unique in antiquity for its willingness to accept new members, had advantages here. Because Roman citizens didn’t feel threatened by the prospect of more Romans becoming citizens, prosperous citizens, and adding more strength to the Roman state. Nor was the Roman aristocracy so powerful that it strangled the growth of the Roman state by blocking policies that empowered the rest of their society, at least not during the time of the republic’s most rapid growth.
What exactly is meant by “political stability” in a discussion of republic vs monarchy? Out host has noted before that virtually no known Greek polis was a monarchy, in the sense that none of them had one man with the right to rule. I gather that was usually true of Phoenician city states, as well. Most city-states everywhere, in fact. Monarchy clearly wasn’t the stable state for a polis.
OTOH. large empires were almost always monarchies. Monarchy was the stable state for an empire. And men in small bands of hunter-gatherers are almost always co-equal. Democracy seems to be the stable state there.
The rule would seem to be that the smaller the polity, the easier it is for men to gang up on whichever of their number throws his weight around.
But it doesn’t change the fact that for any particular man to continue as ruler, he has to make sure that no other man commands power comparable to himself. For that reason, it is potentially dangerous for the King to delegate power over his largest Army to anyone else.
For that matter, for any republic to continue, it has to make sure that no one man commands power comparable to that of the republic. If the Late Republic ends up with one or more generals each of whom can raise an army comparable to that of the Republic, it has a problem.
But it doesn’t change the fact that for any particular man to continue as ruler, he has to make sure that no other man commands power comparable to himself. For that reason, it is potentially dangerous for the King to delegate power over his largest Army to anyone else.
That very much depends on how the kingship is conceived and how the succession laws work. Where anybody can, at least in principle, become king (or emperor, or whatever the title is), then it’s certainly dangerous, as the Crisis of the Third Century shows. On the other hand, when you have a clear succession law (e.g., primogeniture), it’s normally perfectly safe to do so. Most of the armies on both sides of the Hundred Years’ War were led by non-king commanders, for example, and none of them showed any inclination to overthrow their own monarchs.
“Most of the armies on both sides of the Hundred Years’ War were led by non-king commanders, for example, and none of them showed any inclination to overthrow their own monarchs.”
I wouldn’t claim to be knowledgeable about that war. I could name only three battles from it: Crecy, Poitiers, and Agincourt. The King of France was present at all three of them, the King of England at two, and in the third case the King of Englands army was led by his eldest son. That would suggest to me that there was a tendency for the King to keep a close eye on his largest army.
And, of course, the Roman Republic had centuries of legitimacy when it was overthrown by its own generals.
I wouldn’t claim to be knowledgeable about that war. I could name only three battles from it: Crecy, Poitiers, and Agincourt. The King of France was present at all three of them, the King of England at two, and in the third case the King of Englands army was led by his eldest son. That would suggest to me that there was a tendency for the King to keep a close eye on his largest army.
Three battles over one hundred and sixteen years of fighting. Whom do you think was commanding during the other engagements?
(OK, sometimes it was kings — Edward III and Henry V were both martial monarchs who led their armies in person. Most of the time, however, the armies were led by others. Richard II, Henry IV, and Henry VI left the fighting in France to their generals; on the French side, the armies which gradually drove the English out after Henry V’s death weren’t led by the king of France.)
If the Kings were present for the big battles, but not the smaller ones, that would suggest they were staying quite close to their main armies, which is the very thing your are trying to disprove.
If the Kings were present for the big battles, but not the smaller ones, that would suggest they were staying quite close to their main armies, which is the very thing your are trying to disprove.
They were present for the battles which are famous in the English-speaking world, which isn’t the same thing. Verneuil, Formigny, and Castillon involved armies of comparable size to those at Crecy, Poitiers, and Agincourt, but no kings or heirs apparent were involved.
If the king spent half his time with the army, that still sounds like he wanted to be with the army. Which doesn’t sound like he had perfect trust in other people with his army.
If the king spent half his time with the army, that still sounds like he wanted to be with the army. Which doesn’t sound like he had perfect trust in other people with his army.
For heaven’s sake, man, think. Three battles over one hundred and sixteen years is not “half the time”.
Also–
“If the king spent half his time with the army, that still sounds like he wanted to be with the army. Which doesn’t sound like he had perfect trust in other people with his army.”
It may surprise you to hear this, but lots of medieval noblemen quite liked fighting. So no, just because a king wanted to be with the army, it doesn’t follow that he was afraid of being overthrown. He might just have enjoyed going to war. (Which certainly seems to have been the case with Edward III and Henry V, for example.)
“it’s normally perfectly safe to do so”
I dunno about perfectly. Even when you need some hereditary legitimacy to get accepted, there are various hacks:
1. Lie. Make up some evidence that you’re part of some cadet line, and have the right mix of credibility and raw power that doubters go along.
2. Marriage. Force a marriage with the king’s daughter, by yourself or your son, rule the name of her or her underage grandson.
3. Displacement. A la the Shoguns, Mayors of the Palace, or later caliph/sultan relations. “Of _course_ the Emperor, Son of Heaven, is the rightful ruler and cannot be overthrown. Let me tell you what he wants, while I control his food supply…”
As for average stability, we need to count the low end as well as the high. Egypt went through 30 dynasties in around 2700 years, which is pretty amazing…
Another, and very real, problem is that sooner or later primogeniture will throw up a ruler who is insane, or simple minded, or 5 years old, or otherwise vastly unsuited to rule (or even just perceived as such). That can get you a Catherine the Great, but it can also get you an Augustulus, or outright chaos.
We’re talking about military coups, not displacement in general. But the “hacks” you mention don’t generally work.
1. Lie. Make up some evidence that you’re part of some cadet line, and have the right mix of credibility and raw power that doubters go along.
Make up evidence how? Noble families’ genealogies were meticulously recorded and widely known, at least to other noble families. Faking evidence of a royal pedigree would be very difficult, which is probably why it didn’t actually happen.
2. Marriage. Force a marriage with the king’s daughter, by yourself or your son, rule the name of her or her underage grandson.
That only works if (1) the king has at least one daughter but no sons, (2) the eldest daugher is unmarried, (3) the realm allows daughters to inherit, and (4) you’re unmarried, or you have a son of marriageable age who’s unmarried.
3. Displacement. A la the Shoguns, Mayors of the Palace, or later caliph/sultan relations. “Of _course_ the Emperor, Son of Heaven, is the rightful ruler and cannot be overthrown. Let me tell you what he wants, while I control his food supply…”
That requires that the wannabe shogun have enough resources to dominate the country whilst the monarch himself has few resources, which sometimes happens but is quite rare.
As for average stability, we need to count the low end as well as the high. Egypt went through 30 dynasties in around 2700 years, which is pretty amazing…
A lot of those dynasties were founded by collateral descendants of the previous Pharaoh who ascended peacefully, not by coups.
1. We know it happened at least once- Darius I usurped the throne from the son of the founder of the Persian Empire, Cyrus the Great. He made up some story about Bardiya actually being an imposter named ‘Gautama’. He then found a great-great-great-grandfather of his named ‘Achaemenes’ who was also a paternal ancestor of Cyrus’s. He used that tenuous connection to cliam that he was from the same dynasty as Cyrus.
As for the ‘Shogun’ method, it happened multiple times in history. But worth noting in Japan, it wasn’t even the Shogun who usurped de facto power from the Emperor. It was the Fujiwara clan. They were a family of influential courtiers who didn’t have access to any military resources that the Heian court didn’t.
We know it happened at least once- Darius I usurped the throne from the son of the founder of the Persian Empire, Cyrus the Great… As for the ‘Shogun’ method, it happened multiple times in history.
We’re talking about the whole of world history here. Being able to find “at least one” example of something happening, or even “multiple” examples (however many that’s supposed to be), doesn’t prove that something’s common enough to be worth worrying about. You might as well say “Of course people in China are at risk from pandas — there are multiple fatal panda attacks on record!”
Most of the armies in the hundred years war weren’t led by kings because most of the battles in the hundred years war were tiny.
“Verneuil, Formigny, and Castillon involved armies of comparable size to those at Crecy, Poitiers, and Agincourt, but no kings or heirs apparent were involved.”
Why could the romans carry so much equipment in the firstplace? The list given seems far in excess of what could reasonably be carried by a person no matter their discipline
They were built different, of course.
Okay, jokes aside: fit men can carry a lot of shit actually. Look up how much modern US infantry carry around, it’s ridiculous. I’m seeing figures of anywhere between 30 and *70* kg.
Of course, there are various constraints here. If you recruit soldiers just for a season instead of a year or more, they might not all be capable of carrying that much off the bat; if your infantrymen are of a prestigious social class, they might find it beneath them to carry that much around.
> Of course, there are various constraints here. If you recruit soldiers just for a season instead of a year or more, they might not all be capable of carrying that much off the bat; if your infantrymen are of a prestigious social class, they might find it beneath them to carry that much around.
On the other hand, if you recruit farmers of a social class that allows them to eat decently well most years, who are used to handplowing parts of their fields, and carrying the harvest, you might get people nearer the top part of the range more often.
It seems to me that this indicates that the Roman system treated their “middle class” fairly well – could half starved peasants carry such packs as well?
I would assume that anyone who could afford the armor was also eating reasonably well.
Actually between armour and everything else, Roman soldiers carried about the same as modern soldiers do. It’s mostly a case oi, you know, actually getting your soldiers to. (For instance, Hellenistic armies typically had their hoplites bring slaves to carry their stuff. Which you’d think would work just as well, except the slaves had to be fed, given water and everything else just like the hoplites, meaning you have the same problem as with any noncombatant brought along.)
So, since Romans had much better discipline, thye could actualyl get their soldiers to carry more of their stuff themselves.
“a saw, a basket, a pick-axe [the multi-purpose dolabra, discussed in a moment], a leather strap, a sickle, a took and three days provisions”
What’s the thing after the sickle?
Hook, fixing.
What was the hook for?
I can imagine it being a sort of general purpose tool, sort of like ropes might be. Having plenty of good metal hooks around, like having plenty of rope, is valuable if you’re routinely doing all sorts of different military engineering projects.
Possibly to tie on to the end of the 50 foot rope (I’m flashing back to the equipment lists on my Dungeons and Dragons characters….)
Tyop of hook?
A hook.
Here I was thinking everyone was bringing a Took along. Possibly because they need a Pippin around for entertainment. Also, there is the D&D reason to bring along hobbits: Halflings are self-portable trail rations and thus increase your logistical range.
On the contrary, hobbits will eat all of your rations.
If you bring your own Took, you have to bring your own lembas.
You have to bring an extra supply of lembas to accommodate all the second breakfasts.
A little-known component of the Roman anti-elephant strategies mentioned in the article was getting their Tooks to awaken Balrogs during battles; turns out elephants are *terrified* of those.
Well the Romans seems to lacking armor for their legs in contrast to other Hellenistic armies. Also it seems to me still not clear how many Romans have worn mail in the third century and early second century. Also I don’t know if we have reliable tests how much worse a composite armor of iron or bronze scales and linen is compared with a Roman mail armor.
Greaves seem to have been an optional piece of equipment for heavy infantry in effectively all of these armies, to judge from artwork. Polybius suggests that, at least in his day, the Romans usually wore them.
The question of how many Romans would wear mail is complex and bedeviled by uncertainty…which is why I addressed it in the article I wrote in Chiron, go check that out.
Finally, tube-and-yoke cuirasses are not, generally composite armors of iron or bronze scales. They’re textile or leather armors (on this, our sources are quite clear) only rarely reinforced with scales and outside of Etruria, only over certain areas (typically the belly). I feel confident in suggesting their performance would probably not match the protective capabilities of mail.
Visual evidence seems heavily favour the Roman soldier without greaves. At least that’s my knowledge.
Not generally and probably worse as mail because less metal but how much worse we don’t seem to know. Later some Roman soldiers (even elite units) seems to have preferred scale armour (I know they are not the same as the Hellenistic composite cuirass) over mail armour which is in need of an explanation.
> the article I wrote in Chiron, go check that out
I would love to, but the article is $42 mind-boggling dollars. Is there another way to read it – I know in Computer Science the copyright traditions in the field let people host papers on their own websites – or is it going to have to be going to my local university library and reading it there?
If Roman army shields were big and rectangular and stretched nearly all the way to the ground, as opposed to Macedonian shields traditionally being big and circular, the Romans might have been relying on the shield to stop attacks aimed at their shins.
It is a good point.
But Macedonian shields seems to be between 74cm (28.35in) and 66cm (26in) in diameter which isn’t per se or invariably big. The cavalry had bigger shields (around 40in in diameter) and certain infantry may have used the old classic hoplite shield although I doubt the Successors fielded many Hoplites.
Okay, so – question that has come to mind a few times now: did the Romans have a larger proportion of blacksmiths, bronzesmiths and armourers than their contemporaries in the era of the mid/late republic? I’m assuming the answer is ‘yes’ given the heavy need for metal equipment you discuss, but do we have direct evidence for this?
They may have simply been able to keep the blacksmiths they had working a greater proportion of their time on making armor and weapons. The limiting factor on a society’s ability to make weapons isn’t necessarily the number of man-hours its blacksmiths have; it can be the amount of metal. Having already-refined metal to work on helps a lot.
Also, the skilled laborers we’d identify as “blacksmiths” today routinely had a significant force of unskilled or semi-skilled laborer backing them up. Depending on our sources, it might be hard to distinguish between “one blacksmith and one apprentice” in a community of 1000 people and “one blacksmith, two apprentices, a hired worker, and two people enslaved and made to gather fuel and work the bellows” in another community. But the latter will be a lot more productive than the former.
But it’s quite possible that the Romans had more metalworkers per capita than other ancient societies. The same social organization that provided a relatively large, broad class of “medium farmers” to staff the legions would also support a lot of trade in metal tools to equip those farmers, and otherwise encourage the metalworking industry to stay robust over and above the constant trade in weapons and armor.
Speculation, but enslaved persons might have been trained in the craft, with hope for enfranchisement eventually. After which the former owner has a client, adding to his consequence, who can make the family’s arms and tools.
‘When in doubt, you can understand almost every element of Roman policy-making in the early and middle republic through the lens of, “What will most maximize military power?”’
There seems to be an interesting wrinkle in this with the choice to make the Socii cavalry to infantry ratio three times higher then the Roman cavalry to infantry ratio. This would require the Socii to maintain a large nobility who could afford to serve as cavalry instead of growing the nobility among Roman citizens. Presumably the Roman nobles were the people with the most power to influence this decision so it seems like an interesting choice. It seems like it would have been very easy for them to rationalize that if cavalry were important Rome itself should also have more cavalry so let’s increase the cavalry salaries or reduce the taxes of the eques. It seems surprising that they resisted going down this route.
Note that while Polybius says this, judging from the evidence in Livy, it’s not clear that socii did always outnumber Roman cavalry by so much. It’s more frequently something like a 2:3 ratio.
Reminds me of the St. Louis Cardinals baseball team pioneering the minor league farm system that every MLB club now has. Result: In World War II, they had depth and were able to replace players lost to military service. In the three years of wartime crunch, they won two World Series and the National League pennant all three times.
Seeing the post on Roman depth made me think of that.
I hope at some point there is an article about the fall of the western empire and, in particular, why the professional Roman army of late antiquity lost to numerically inferior “German” armies.
“The Rome that Did Not Fall” by Williams and Friell is a good read on this topic. It’s been a while since I last read it, but as I recall, they suggest that the late Roman state, especially in the West, had become quite inefficient and captured by entrenched interests, making it hard for the Emperor to raise enough revenue to maintain a large army. Essentially the government already needed to act at full capacity just to keep things going in normal times, so when a big crisis hit (a larger-than-normal barbarian invasion, a big defeat and consequent loss of men and materiel…), it was very hard to find the resources necessary to deal with it. This also meant that, even when they could potentially crush a barbarian invasion, the Romans tended to hold back, both because the consequences of a defeat could be catastrophic, and because co-opting barbarian troops was one of the few ways the Roman state could quickly increase the size of its armies.
Also there’s the possibility that the “numerically superior” Roman armies actually weren’t. It’s often suggested that Roman generals would inflate their troop returns in order to pocket the extra pay and supplies, and while I’m not sure if there’s any direct evidence for this, we know of similar things happening in other big, bureaucratic pre-modern empires (Ming China, for example), so it’s certainly possible.
Part of it is that they simply didn’t: Roman armies continued to do fairly well against “barbarian” armies for quite a while; Just like in the republic they win some and lose some but generally win more than they lose.
The problem is that they now have to deal with less resources spread across a greater area. Often you have something like the main roman army shows up, beats a bunch of barbarians into submission, onyl to then have to scarper off to the other end of the empire to deal with the next barbarian invasion.
The roman state also seems to be in a kind of financial tailspin: They need more armies and more soldiers which requires extracting more taxes, which requires more administration, which costs more and at the same time climate change, epidemics, and other factors is reducing the tax-base. A vicious circle where the roman state has to squeeze people ever harder to get the same or even less juice to cope with higher costs.
>The roman state also seems to be in a kind of financial tailspin: They need more armies and more soldiers which requires extracting more taxes, which requires more administration, which costs more and at the same time climate change, epidemics, and other factors is reducing the tax-base. A vicious circle where the roman state has to squeeze people ever harder to get the same or even less juice to cope with higher costs.
To my knowledge, increased taxation also actively destroyed Roman tax base as middling farmers became too poor, became something close to serf to local big landholders, and then the tax burden is over even less households.
Our host tangentially brought this up a few times I think, the most thorough treatment probably is in the Fremen Mirage posts. The army of the Roman empire was large, sure, however it was dispersed through a gigantic frontier and outnumbered in any one spot much more often than not. Also, the Germanics of 400 AD were not the same as those from 400 years before. So intense was the Roman influence many were already (Arian) Christians! They had been serving as temporary allies in various civil wars since at least the Tetrarchy as well. He also noted in the recent post about the Gladius its influence on the designs of often misleadingly dubbed migration period swords.
You mention equipment being handed down within families. To what extent is there evidence of or against patrons directly helping their clients arm themselves into a higher class of soldier, or supplying equipment the clients don’t have when drafted but are supposed to?
One thing I wonder about when reading about the strength of the Roman “middle class” is, how much of their wealth comes from plunder? You note that the legions are basically campaigning every year, and I think it was you also who pointed out that until industrial times, no productive activity had close to the ROI of getting together with some friends, arming up, and going out to murder some guys who’d accumulated some stuff, and taking it. And the Roman system was to be liberal about sharing that, right? Even out to the socii.
Maybe one thing that enables Rome to field such a material-heavy infantry arm is how the Romans share the loot, and how often they go out on looting expeditions?
There was a mention in a previous post about the Socii expressing their disapproval at the triumph of a general who’d only giving them half the loot he gave the Romans.
So there was obviously some level of organized loot collection and division.
Incidentally, an organised system of loot collection and division would help with battlefield discipline, since your soldiers wouldn’t need to worry about another unit getting to the enemy camp first and making off with all the good stuff. Which might explain why Roman cavalry, unlike their Seleucid counterparts, rarely seem to have gone haring off the battlefield before the fighting was actually over…
I read about Roman loot collection recently on askhistorians. It was very organized: A number of soldiers was tasked to collect the loot in a central place. There it was auctioned off, and the soldiers would receive their share in money (not sure if directly or at the end of the campaign).
Oh we *absolutely* drink for Mahan, but specifically it must be grog
May I substitute a daiquiri? It’s rum, water, and lime juice after all, so it’s very much like grog.
Weather turned around again were I live. So I would prefere to stay with grog, but I’m not above a shot of lime or lemon in my grog.
That “something solid” would be a ship’s biscuit (the weevils and maggots add proteins!). And, once you have one of those, you will want some grog for sure.
The canonical action for Clausewitz, who wrote about land combat, is drink. For Mahan, to be symmetric, it should be something solid. A toast — as in browned bread? Chips, because it sounds like “ships”? Beans, because he championed a fleet in bean?
Water and earth aren’t the only elements. I.E. “As Mahan says (blaze it!)”
Definitely! On a previous occasion I suggested a bite of chocolate.
Strategic depth — this was a most useful discussion of Rome and how it had it, and how it contrasted with others:
“First, the Roman system of control in Italy, the socii-system, maximizes military power by extracting soldiers rather than tribute from the allies, broadening Rome’s recruitment base massively.”
I do wonder how well the socii system would have worked if the people they initially conquered were e.g. Spartans.
Those being peoples who had increasing difficulties raising troops because they actively kept most of their people from being armed.
I suspect the Romans were somewhat lucky in that they actually *could* say “we want trained soldiers, not tribute” and get it.
That’s not as much of a luck thing as it sounds. Romans aren’t asking for “trained” soldiers as I understand it, just good quality soldiers, which well organized citizen soldiers could do. Most cultures around the Mediterranean, probably the middle east as well, have systems where a good chunk of their citizens (or equivalent) can act as soldiers. So the Socii system could in theory (I’m assuming social systems/institutions would accept an arrangement like the Romans had.) work in spain, Gaulish areas, most Greek areas, Phoenician city states which had militias or navies to use. Egypt and big empires are more questionable, but if Rome was next to these it would have been a city state vs. an empire, and it probably would have been conquered or need a Philip + Alexander run of leaders to even consider lots of conquest.
Arguably, in highly fragmented areas at the time, this is what most political entities have to do to compete, unless a big empire that can concentrate lots of soldiers to handle a threat, so an armed population will exist.
If Romans were trying to Socii Sparta or similar, they possibly adapt diplomatically and demand something else the political entity has, or force an institutional change. Though Sparta itself did get Helot/Periokoi armies when needed, so likely Rome asks for these, and the city’s institutions change if the soldiers don’t pull their weight. If a city needs soldiers at some point as in the previous paragraph, they will be able to do something similar.
I’d add two points to the “Socii Sparta” thing:
Firstly, if a polity doesn’t work as a socii, it can always work as an enemy. That land that was given to the new Roman colonies wasn’t empty before, it had been taken, forcefully, from the people that had claimed it.
And secondly, Rome wouldn’t need to force a systems change if it had gotten Sparta to accept the terms of becoming socii. When that hastily-put together army of helotes came back battle-hardened and enriched by spoils (this would be the big difference compared to helot armies under the Greek system), how long would they keep allowing themselves to be pushed around by the spartiates?
How general it actually was for Roman generals to have served as quaestors?
Cursus honorum including step as a questor is often quoted, sure. But on what evidence?
There is contrary evidence. Marius. Who specifically never was quaestor. His biography points out that he served as military tribune, then got elected as popular tribune without being a quaestor (in contrast to say Tiberius Gracchus who was a quaestor and then popular tribune), then ran for aedile but wasn´t elected, then got elected as praetor.
Pure numbers consideration (the number of popular tribunes had been 10 since 471, that of quaestors was 4 till 267, then just 8, and some of them as patricians were ineligible to become popular tribune), there must have been substantial fraction of popular tribunes who had not been quaestors (but who may well have been military tribunes). How common was it for non-quaestor popular tribunes to gain election as praetor, like Marius?
I’m a bit confused at how we’re able to say that Roman soldiers all marched with two pila, a gladius, a pickaxe, &c, when you’ve also mentioned that Roman soldiers were responsible for getting their own equipment. Wouldn’t making equipment the responsibility of individual soldiers/their families lead to wild variation in both the amount & the type of equipment Roman soldiers brought with them (variation that would then be compounded by the inclusion of the Socii & other non-Roman allied troops)?
Lots of modern sports leagues require people to buy equipment (shin guards. baseball bats, etc.), the players (for kids, player’s families) are given a list in some form and do the shopping themselves. Similarly, the Roman (and greek hoplites, medieval northern Europe shield wall people, steppe horseman tribes, etc.) armies use a mix of legal requirements and social interaction to require certain items, which the soldiers buy/borrow/inherit/etc. on their own.
I guess that makes sense… just seems like it’d be harder to rely on everyone doing that successfully in an era before mass manufacturing/retail
Ah, it’s probably worth noting that the image of every roman legionary looking exactly the same (at least for the same type of soldier) is, in fact, not something that happens in practice- it’s more like things were made to a basic pattern, but the details could differ.
Thinking about it a bit more, having an expected list of thing and getting them yourself is something all of us do in civilian life, and ancient people would have as well. Ancient farm family probably has leaned to get their hoe, ax, knives, and other tools, place to live with a repeated set of clothes, etc. If you are invited to, say, a wedding, everyone invited will get the standard collection of transportation, place to stay, whatever standardized combination of formal clothes you tend to go with, etc. which you’ve learned by a combination of living in a culture/society with these things, and the people running it asking for specific things.
So ancient Romans and Italians are getting their equipment, they will know most or all of what they need to buy, because warfare is a common part of ancient society and people around them know the expectations. A commander would reinforce this, with official requirements, most likely. Different craftsmen will obviously have quality and other variations, but because buying and keeping weapons is a known, traditional part of the culture, they will already know what soldiers will need and be able to make it as required.
This sounds like a messy process to me. If you are running a youth sports league and someone shows up with the wrong shoes, you can tell them to fix that for the next practice. There won’t be time for that if someone shows up without a helmet. I suspect that there might have been vendors at the assembly points selling the necessary gear for those who couldn’t find all the stuff they stored in the barn 3 years ago after their last deployment.
But why would someone choose to show up without a helmet? It’s his own life he’s risking. And his paterfamilias would have known that, and every man around him.
You own a country farm and are called up. You undoubtedly keep your gear in an attic or the barn or somesuch. You go there and this is missing and that is rusted and you realize you never got this other thing repaired after your last deployment. What do you do? It’s not like you have a “Legions are us” down in the local village, and I’m sure there was a tight time window on the call-up. So, you take what you have, and some cash, and hope to make it all good at the muster point. This has to have happened at some level.
There is something missing here of course – the Contubernium. You and your contubernales are supposed to stick together and help each other out. I wouldn’t be surprised if, being mustered together, they didn’t in some fashion help each other to make sure all 8 soldiers had the necessary gear.
There may nevertheless have been a thriving little trade in secondhand equipment sales every time the legions were called up.
“Oh crap, the helmet got left under a leak in the barn roof and now it’s a mass of rust” or things like that may not be advisable, sure. And everyone in Roman society would probably chide the person they happened to. But they’d happen.
> You go there and this is missing and that is rusted and you realize you never got this other thing repaired after your last deployment. What do you do? It’s not like you have a “Legions are us” down in the local village, and I’m sure there was a tight time window on the call-up.
We talked about this last year: https://acoup.blog/2023/06/16/collections-how-to-raise-a-roman-army-the-dilectus/
During the recruitment process, there is a specific stage between “assignment to units” and “final formation of the army” where they are dispatched home with orders to return with equipment. That gives you the time to assemble your equipment, whether it’s “retrieve it from the chest in your house” or “borrow it from a friend” or “buy some parts” or whatever combination of those you need it to be.
The other thing is that most of this equipment is durable stuff. Anything made of copper alloy, like a helmet or a pectoral, will last essentially forever. A mail shirt will rust (since it’s iron) but in an oiled bag in a barrel that’s not a serious risk either. A sword will rust, but not if it’s oiled and stored in its scabbard – and between you, your son, your cousin on the farm next door, someone is probably using that sword for most of every year.
“What do you do? It’s not like you have a “Legions are us” down in the local village, and I’m sure there was a tight time window on the call-up. ”
If you have managed to ruin the single most expensive piece of property in your family and you can’t buy a replacement at the market and you can’t beg or borrow one from your peers then as an emergency fallback you could make yourself cloth armor from the household clothing and pay the fees for showing up with the wrong equipment.
It was mentioned that soldiers showing up without required pieces of kit were fined; I assume the system enforcing this also checked for serviceability.
But beyond ensuring adequacy, why would anyone bother with enforcing uniformity? This being a preindustrial world, everything is handmade, in some sense a one-off. For most men in the army, their clothes would have been tailored — indeed quite possibly spun and woven — by their wives or other female relatives. Thus if Marcus shows up with a sword two centimeters longer than average, nobody has any reason to remark on it. If people do remark on it positively, then the trend in sword lengths will go in that direction. The gradual adoption of mail implies that for the intervening period, men wearing mail and pectoral cuirasses served next to each other.
“I assume the system enforcing this also checked for serviceability.”
A lot of rules dont require any enforcement beyond the expectation that people will adhere to them. For example, the elites don’t want you to know this but the ducks at the park are free. You can take them home; I have 458 ducks.
The earlier comments were a bit confused, so here’s a more organized (hopefully) version of the comment. The process makes sense as
-Roman military requires a certain set of equipment.
-Individual; soldiers have to buy this equipment. Because army service is a regular thing, the requirements are a well known part of life, so citizens will know what they need to have.
-Because blacksmiths, woodworkers, etc. are part of this same culture, they will know what equipment the soldiers will need, making this equipment will be one of the regular things they do.
-Roman commanders fine soldiers for equipment that isn’t right, or missing equipment, and there are some centralized production areas in case people need to get things.
-The equipment won’t be exactly the same from person to person, but since everyone knows the requirements, it will be similar enough that we can treat it as the same.
The comments about the importance of the Roman middle class here reminds me of the Fremen Mirage series. People in marginal terrain are often forced to have a large middle class since there just isn’t enough of an agricultural surplus to support a wealthy elite or the money to buy slaves. Since middle class freeholders tend to make far better soldiers than oppressed serfs that often help people in desserts, mountains, etc. etc. punch above their weight as a higher proportion of their population could be mobilized, just as with the Romans in the Middle Republic here.
Although people in mountains etc. would generally not have had money to buy mail for themselves like the Romans we see here.
We can also see here how a lot of the advantages enumerated for the Middle Republic no longer applied to the Empire.
People in marginal terrain are NOT middle class in a preindustrial society. And because they live in marginal terrain there are much fewer of them. They’re the people who can’t generate an agricultural surplus to support specialist armour makers, etc.
https://acoup.blog/2020/12/11/collections-that-dothraki-horde-part-ii-subsistence-on-the-hoof/
I meant middle class in that they’re in the middle of the social pyramid (not a landed elite or an oppressed serf) not that they’re comfortably off. This means that although their population tends to be smaller they can generally call up a much larger percentage of their population to fight than more settled societies the same as the Romans were able to get a much larger percentage of their population in arms than the Seleucids etc. This allows them to often punch above their weight
The basic problem is that for a society that would count under the Fremen Mirage, their middle class are people who, say, the Romans would think are too poor to fight.
So sure, in theory more might be able to be maintained under arms…but they aren’t going to be anywhere near as well-equipped. Nor as numerous, and the more yu’re outnumbered, the bigger the qualitative gap you need.
The basic problem is that for a society that would count under the Fremen Mirage, their middle class are people who, say, the Romans would think are too poor to fight.
I don’t know about that. The various Gallic/Germanic barbarians are usually considered pretty Fremen-ish, and lots of them were able to obtain at least as much armour as, say, a veles.
Mr. X : no, gallic warriors *did not* have anywhere near as much armors as roman.
In fact, they often did only have helmet and shields, no body armors. Bret have made a post about them quite a bit of time ago ; the average roman trooper is equipped like a gallic *elite* warrior, because gallic were not rich enough to pay decent armor, and especially not mail armor, to even the middle of the pack soldiers.
The Romans did have to face societies who came under Fremen Mirage and decide just how many of them had to fight, and with which arms. Many of the Italians.
Comparatively. The Etruscans were not poor relative to Romans, but the Samnites living in inland mountains of Italy were.
When Samnites and Etruscans were made Roman allies liable to contribute soldiers to Roman army, how precisely did Romans come up with numbers of cavalry, heavy infantry and light infantry that the allies were reasonably able and required to contribute?
Mr. X : no, gallic warriors *did not* have anywhere near as much armors as roman.
In fact, they often did only have helmet and shields, no body armors.
That is why I specifically said “at least as much armour as, say, a veles” — you know, the light skirmishers who went into battle armed with helmets and shields and no body armour.
“they can generally call up a much larger percentage of their population to fight ”
Take another look at that population pyramid. 71% are service eligible, 8% are eligible for rowing duty only and 20% are slaves. The tribal societies practice slavery as well (and the more warlike ones would have a larger proportion of slaves) so that part is a wash. So even if tribal societies were mobilized all the men you’d be talking about 90% of roman citizens vs 100% of your hypothetical belligerent shepherds.
And of course the actual experience with tribal societies at war doesn’t point to remotely that level of mobilization. In the French and Indian war a Native American population of millions only mustered tens of thousands despite foreign backing. When the Pontiac rebellion happened soon after an even larger Native American population without the foreign backing was only able to muster a force of thousands. It turns out that being able to pay your troops helps get people to fight! Being able to organize your troop helps on top of that.
Um, the Native American population by then in what is now the US/Canada probably wasn’t more than a million by the Pontiac Rebellion and the population in the Midwest was obviously much smaller. An individual tribe could raise most of its adult male population, but large-scale coordination tended to be an issue with the Pontiac rebellion actually being a bit of an exception.
Also, the Romans are *very* *very* odd here. They are the Prussia of ancient times. Few pre-industrial large-scale societies field more than 2% or so of their population, many much less.
Italy wasn’t marginal land…
No one said Italy was marginal land. Bosh was making an analogy: Rome chose to maintain a large “middle class”, while people on marginal land had a large “middle class” (people neither idle elite, nor de-militarized subsistence farmers) out of necessity.
Whether the analogy is true, I dunno, but it doesn’t rest on Italy having marginal land.
I think a closer parallel is the concern of Chinese rulers to maintain a large peasant farmer base in north China (south China was more mercantile, had more large estates and an open market in land). They provided the soldiers who manned the defences against the steppe and the core of the armies. I believe Vietnam also had a widespread soldier-farmer base.
“People in marginal terrain are often forced to have a large middle class since there just isn’t enough of an agricultural surplus to support a wealthy elite or the money to buy slaves. ”
Or because they are on marginal lands the profitability of going to kidnap slaves becomes that much more appealing and you end up with the Vikings.
> And you can see both a training function to this and a ‘weeding out’ function. …
Never expected to say this but I’m feeling the lack of citations in this paragraph. Are there any ancient sources that talk about mentorship? About the election process “weeding out” incompetent leaders? Or is this inferred from other kinds of evidence? Or just a common-sense conjecture?
Mentorship is implicit in the patron-client relationships that are very well attested in Roman society.
The weeding-out process may or may not be attested in Latin primary sources; I don’t know.
I enjoy “but an increasingly implausible sequence of almost endless lucky breaks” as a descriptor for Hannibal. Until it really counted, anyway.
Well, some years back I read a piece about the battle of Midway, were the author described the whole battle as a series of lucky breaks for the USN, and poor luck for the IJN. I couldn’t help but think, if one side is lucky all the time, maybe they doing something right.
Both sides were “doing some things right” during the Pacific War.
The Japanese seem wildly lucky in their initial conquests, but this reflects a lot of preparation, effort put into achieving surprise, practice of critical operations like the Pearl Harbor raid, and of course extreme aggression and willingness to take risks on the part of the Japanese military.
The Americans seem wildly lucky at other times, but this reflects a lot of preparation, an excellent logistical foundation for their operations, training that allowed complicated equipment to be brought to bear, and of course the ability to take advantage of the Japanese military’s aggressiveness when it overextended itself.
> You’re assuming this republic can trust its own generals
We’re talking about the Middle Roman Republic here, so it can trust them. How would you even pull off a coup in this system? The socii might be willing, but the Roman half of your army are part-timers who expect to go back to their fathers and brothers and friends, and who already have a politically privileged position (voting); what can you offer them that’s better than what they already have? Forming a new ruling class?
Okay, now you just have to contend with the 1 to 10 other armies already in the field (there were always at least two consular armies, and Bret described 11 active armies in 190), plus the fact that most of the adult males — the people you’d be trying to rule over — are themselves experienced and equipped soldiers, with all the gear they need right at home. March on Rome, and Rome marches back, in greater numbers and with shorter supply lines. Try to incorporate all soldiers in your new regime, and whoops, you just re-invented the Republic, maybe minus a Senate.
Obviously, 100 years later with Sulla and then Caesar, something had changed in the late Republic. I suspect a much larger and full-time army, full of people who didn’t have political stake in the existing system, who could see themselves as a distinct class and also weren’t easily resisted by the civilians. And much later, various Renaissance Italian republics, relying on mercenaries instead of their own citizen-soldiers, would plausibly be vulnerable to those same mercenaries being turned on them. (Which, come to think of it, is arguably what happened to Rome in the 1st century, on a larger scale.)
> Historically monarchies have tended to be longer-lived than republics, which is hard to explain if they’re so much more unstable and wasteful.
Not really. The instability takes them from monarchy to monarchy: a king is overthrown by a general who makes himself the new king, rather than the king being replaced by a republic. And republics/democracies traditionally had a scaling problem, with the voters not wanting to share the franchise, or it being difficult to expand the sense of political identity and cohesion beyond a city-state. Rome was unusual in being able to kind of pull off both (relatively liberal with citizenship, and casting ‘Romanness’ over a wider area) and even it eventually outgrew itself, dropping the citizen-soldier conscription and lacking anything like an elected Senate or Tribunate to keep the growing population engaged.
We’re talking about the Middle Roman Republic here, so it can trust them. How would you even pull off a coup in this system? The socii might be willing, but the Roman half of your army are part-timers who expect to go back to their fathers and brothers and friends, and who already have a politically privileged position (voting); what can you offer them that’s better than what they already have? Forming a new ruling class?
The comment I was replying to was (or at least seemed to be) talking about kings and republics in general, not Rome specifically. I agree that the Roman Republic at this stage was able to trust its generals; but then, plenty of monarchs have been able to trust their generals as well.
Not really. The instability takes them from monarchy to monarchy: a king is overthrown by a general who makes himself the new king, rather than the king being replaced by a republic.
Unstable and wasteful government causes other problems apart from coups — foreign conquest and the state splitting apart into smaller units are both possibilities. Also, plenty of monarchies have in fact gone for centuries without being couped, so even if you only count the period from coup to coup, I still suspect monarchies would come out as more stable on average than republics.
Possibly the thing that changed in the century was the distance to the frontiers. To get loot or glory, you had to go a lot further afield, which might have made the average voter less eager to go.
I think there was also more looting and less making socii out of the losers. More donatives to the troops, more looting by the governors and more suing of the former governor when he gets back to Rome for excess looting.
Basically less “this is the way things have to be for us to prosper” and more “let’s get loot because it’s the way up”
After all this fascinating analysis of how the Roman military machine and support system was so formidable, I look forward to an explanation or hypothesis of how it all seems to come to a halt after the early Empire. Why didn’t this juggernaut roll on across all Europe, victory to victory? How could those barbarian tribes across the Rhine and Danube hope to stop it when the mighty, rich, extabished kingdoms of the Med failed? Please examine this question for us!
There have been bits and pieces mentioned in previous posts on the blog. Mix of:
1. The rich areas were worth conquering, the poorer areas of Europe not as much, let alone the Sahara. (“The controlled everything worth controlling” is the approximate quote.) Rome gets itself some good frontiers on the Rhine and Danube, and that works fine.
2. Supply limits. Romans got good at moving stuff around, but there are still limits on how many people they can support in an area.
(Implied by various reading, but not said out loud, so take with a grain of salt. It seems like switching from 1 year consul terms plus short terms for other provincial governors to a long term ruler might reduce incentives for conquering. Everyone serving that 1 year term wants to make a splash, while an emperor is around for longer and is already the top guy by position, so is under less pressure to aggressively conquer lots of stuff right now, some military success at some point works fine. It does seem that the Empire abandons wars more easily than the Republic did, such as Germany vs. Spain, or leaving Nubia alone.
But again, this is my vague impression, not a solid historical opinion. Take with grain of salt, and await an actual answer of one comes.)
I would expand 1. with another thing, most of the places were the Romans didn’t take hold, were settelt by none-stated people. Germany, Irland, the land to the north of the Danube, the Sahara (obviously). And none-stated people are a bitch to rule. Not because of any “Fremen-Mirage” military prowess thing. They were often militarliy beaten. But actually ruling them is another can of worms.
People who are used to leaving their settlements every ten to twenty years, when their agricultural pratices have depleted the land, have a tendency to just move, when they start to get annoyed by tax man. People who never kept written records, are not to keen to have their names written into neat lists. And last but not least, people who are used to have a say in every matter directly involving them, tend to start to argue with your officials about everything.
Were the pre-Roman tribes (generally identified as Celtic) of Iberia and Gaul living in state societies, while the Germanic tribes were not?
I took a class where I was taught that, from an archeological point of view, Celts and Germans were so similar that archeologists reject those labels. That said, I wouldn’t be surprised if things tended to get less state-like as you went further north.
Don’t know about Iberia, but the coast there had been settelt by Greek and Phoenican settlers for centuries when the Romans showed up. So there was at least an foothold there.
The area of todays France was full, of places the Romans called Oppia, and that archeologist tell us look very much like (at least proto-)city states.
So while stated an non-stated is probably (like most stuff) on a spektrum, I guess it’s a fair assumption that at least during the late republik an early empire, the people got “less stated” the further you move north from the mediteranian sea.
From the Atlantic to Bohemia, south of the river Main, oppida had appeared some centuries earlier, and had generally been growing and expanding. Most archaeologists would today consider many of these oppida quite similar to Mediterranean city-states – see Fernandez-Goetz, “Urbanization in Iron Age Europe: Trajectories, Patterns, and Social Dynamics”, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10814-017-9107-1.
However, in the decades around 100 BC, the oppida east of the Rhine and north of the Danube declined rapidly and dramatically (possibly because of the Romans’ capturing the trade routes). Therefore, when Caesar’s and later Octavian’s armies appeared in the region, there was nothing worthwhile for them to conquer east of the Rhine and north of the Danube.
As for the regions north of the Main, they had never (as far as I know) seen any stone houses or proto-urban settlements. Writing, stone construction and other hallmarks of “Roman” civilization only penetrated north of the Main, ironically, **after** the empire had collapsed in the west – during the 6th and 7th centuries AD, e.g. the monastery at Fulda.
Peter Heather is good on this. To support a Roman army and Romanitas (the towns and villas that were the base of Roman rule) you needed a settled, countryside, reasonably fertile, with a border you could defend against barbarian raiding. Further Germania and the Danube steppe were not such places. You could move the frontier forward and then at considerable cost Romanise the place, but then you have defend it against the further reaches – all the way to the Volga and beyond. The Romans operated well beyond the Rhine and Danube, but kept the main lines on the rivers as one that could keep most raids out and the country near the lines productive enough to supply the armies with the basics (supplemented, of course, by transfers from the inner provinces). By the time Germania had developed enough to be worth taking, the tribal confederations had become a real threat, not easy conquests (see eg M Aurelius Marcomannic War).
Another point is that since the Emperor is already on top, he has a lot more to fear from failure: A prospective general failing might end his political career, but an emperor on a failed camapign might well get overthrown.
Another is that since the top spot is occupied, and the only way to get there now is to steal it, that incentivizes coups rather than conquests: Of all things I think Isaac Asimov (of course paraphrasing Gibbons) got that one right: “A weak general has a hard time conquering anything, a strong general under a weak emperor is likely to just go for the emperor. A strong general under a strong emperor is unlikely because a lot of what makes an emperor “Strong” is that they don’t allow that kind of competition.”
After all this fascinating analysis of how the Roman military machine and support system was so formidable, I look forward to an explanation or hypothesis of how it all seems to come to a halt after the early Empire. Why didn’t this juggernaut roll on across all Europe, victory to victory? How could those barbarian tribes across the Rhine and Danube hope to stop it when the mighty, rich, extabished kingdoms of the Med failed? Please examine this question for us!
After a certain point, it takes too long for messages to get to/from the capital to effectively control an area. It takes too long for reports to reach the central government, for instructions, reinforcements and supplies to reach the frontier.
I don’t think this was the problem. Roman field armies usually weren’t that reliant on detailed instructions from Rome. Or on getting sudden reinforcements in emergencies against the frontier societies that usually couldn’t inflict serious military reverses on the Roman army in the first place (incidents like the Teutoberger Wald are famous in part because they are exceptional).
I think that the Romans really did expand north and south until they bumped up against territory that just wasn’t worth conquest. Not from an economic point of view. They were looking at places like the Sahara Desert or Iron Age Scotland, places where there wasn’t enough lootable or taxable stuff there to pay for the costs of maintaining government over it.
In the east, of course, they bumped up against the Persian Empire, which absolutely was a peer competitor and whose territory was well worth conquering. But Persia was capable of inflicting serious defeats on the Romans pretty reliably, especially if they got careless (Carrhae, the last campaign of Julian the Apostate), so about all this amounted to was the Romans and the Persians repeatedly trading control of the same few provinces like Armenia.
Yeah, this shouldn’t be forgotten. From an economic point of view for instance, the part of the British Isles that the Romans *did* control was an economic sink. While successful revolts were rare, they took disproportionate share of Roman manpower and resources while being too poor and unurbanized to be able to pay for that. Britain took 3 legions and they seem to have been largely doing essentially garrison duty as opposed to guarding Caledonia.
Yes. Before the invention of the moldboard plow, the wet parts of Europe were agriculturally much less productive than they would be during the Middle Ages.
And on the other hand, in classical antiquity, perhaps most Mediterranean areas would have been more productive than they intuitively look today? Africa province isn’t much of a breadbasket nowadays, but the Romans were quite clear that it definitely was. To the extent there is a phenomenon to be explained at all, some blame salinization, some blame
latifundiaexhaustion of various nutrients, some assert that there used to be more yearly precipitation on the southern edge of the Mediterranean, or in the entire Mediterranean region in general.“They were looking at places like the Sahara Desert or Iron Age Scotland, places where there wasn’t enough lootable or taxable stuff there to pay for the costs of maintaining government over it.”
Not just uneconomic to govern but possibly also impossible to march through. See https://acoup.blog/2022/08/12/collections-logistics-how-did-they-do-it-part-iii-on-the-move/ – a Roman army simply cannot march through a territory with less than a certain number of people per square km, because it can only forage a certain amount of land per day. (Assuming no riverine or seaborne supply lines).
It’s not just a shark that has to keep swimming or die, it’s a whale shark that can only filter a certain volume of water each day, and from that water it needs to extract enough plankton to survive.
Another aspect of a lot of middling farmers that have to buy a lot of military hardware is the monetization of the economy. If the farmers *have* to get quite a lot of cash together they need to orientate their farm more toward the market and less towards subsistence. Just consider what an influence it makes when over centuries those farmers actually have an incentive towards accruing coins when compared to medieval serfs, who can pretty much expected to get taxed out of their coin.
Good replies to my initial post above, thanks to all contributors! My browser never lets me “Like” comments on this webpage for some reason but I “Liked” them all.
On how a Legion fights, something I’ve almost always heard about the Battle of Cannae is that one of the major reasons for the Roman defeat was that the Triarii were left behind to guard the camp, and possibly take the opportunity to attack Hannibal’s camp. As such the Legions had no third line, and when everything started to fall apart there was no way to fall back.
This has always struck me as a bit odd and implausible, as it goes against everything else we have been told about how a Roman Army fought a battle.
It would be a more reasonable assumption that the camp guard would have been the “Milites Extraordinarii” composed of the best third of the Socii Cavalry and fifth of the Socii infantry. This would make sense especially if the intention was to attack the enemy camp.
It also makes sense in terms of numbers. If 10,000 men were left behind to guard/ attack the camp this would be both approximately the number of Triarii in 8 legions, and the size of the “Special Force” from 8 legions.
It might also have some bearing on the outcome of Cannae. If a third, and the best third at that, of the Socii cavalry are missing from the battleline, this again explains how the Legions were flanked quite so dramatically.
Between the Romans’ unusually heavy kit and the need to build a fortified camp daily (and tear down the old one?), did a Roman army march slower than peers? Or were they able to make up for it with a faster tempo, perhaps reliant on the number of veteran soldiers, higher quality sandals and roads, etc?
One of the previous articles discusses marching speed https://acoup.blog/2022/08/12/collections-logistics-how-did-they-do-it-part-iii-on-the-move/
The motivation for the heavy kit seems to mostly be to speed the army up. The smaller the baggage train, the more marching hours you can squeeze into the day.
This is a point worth making explicit – when you’re trying to move a large body of men from A to B over a single road, the speed of the individual soldier is sometimes much less of a constraint than the amount of road space that the body takes up.
Taking the post’s figures, you’re looking at an army that takes up 6.6 miles of road space and marches at 3mph *when marching*. But of course the troops have to rest for one quarter of the time spent on the march, so it actually moves at only 2.25mph.
Say you decide you’re going to march light. The legionaries march in just their clothing plus a water bottle, so they can march at 4mph – which is forced-march speed, actually breaking into a jog on the downhills. But they still have to rest periodically, so in fact they’ll only move at 3mph.
But to achieve that you’ve added pack animals carrying all the kit that the 16,800 infantrymen aren’t carrying, and they take up 2.25m of road space per mule, trotting four abreast. Let’s say that three mules can carry the kit of eight legionaries (legionary kit 60lb, plus a bit for tack, mule planning payload 198lb) so you’ll need 6300 mules, taking up 2.2 miles of road space.
Your army on the march is now 8.8 miles long. If the vanguard starts to march at 0800 the rearguard won’t get on the move until almost 1100. And they’ve got to get everyone into camp before nightfall with enough time to set up camp, which means that rearguard has to be marching into the camp location NLT 1730. And they’ll take an hour for lunch. (Assumptions about timing drawn from Bret’s logistics post.) So your rearguard will be on the move for 5 hours 30 minutes, in which time they’ll travel 16.5 miles.
But if you hadn’t had that huge long expensive vulnerable mule train, and your troops carried their own kit, you’d have covered… between 15 and 17.5 miles. They’re marching more slowly because they’re more heavily loaded, but they’re able to spend longer doing it.
AND that’s not addressing the issue of whether the rest of your army can tab along at 4 mph. I am thinking here specifically of those thousands of mules, which are not speedy animals.
Plus, if I am sitting in the hills wanting to impede your progress, marching soldiers are a harder target than plodding mules.
Yes indeed. You’ve made your army larger, more expensive and more vulnerable, with no improvement in either speed or fighting power. And those mules aren’t just vulnerable on the march; you now have a bigger camp to defend, because it needs to have much bigger mule lines, which means more troops left behind in camp to defend it when the army fights a battle.
While not the detailed explanation of Roman camps that I thought of when I read your question (I can’t seem to find that particular one—but it may well be in the Loot Train series), Logistics: How Did They Do It part III has a pretty good breakdown of armies on the march in which he explains why the commonly accepted 12.5-15 mile daily range makes sense.
As an aside, I remember being struck upon first reading of that series by how large the mass of camp-followers often was: Hookers Slow You Down! , as my inner juvenile put it( sorry/not sorry—moved to the Blue Ridge Mountains just as I entered HS, and I was inundated with Civil War lore )
Try Part II here:
https://acoup.blog/category/collections/fortifications/
Building a fortified camp compensates for the need to set up camp on defensive positions like say a hill, no? Staying the night is unavoidable unless there is a large settlement available, some camping and fortification is going to be done no matter what, unless there is a large settlement available? Our host discussed the matter of quartering among civilians in great detail in his series on logistics, IIRC it seemed like a big drag on discipline (and from burdensome to tragic on the civilians it was imposed on)
So as others said few armies marched a lot over 15 miles back than. A short comparrison: Further up, people noticed that the modern infantry soldiers are carring about the same weight as the legionaries back than. The army in my home country expects soldiers to be able to do 30km/18m in 6 hours in full gear. Most are able to pull it off in less.
So expecting that the average Roman was at least as trained in walking, as the average modern soldier. If they rose with the chickens, the first legionaries should have been at the next camp site around lunch. Loads of time to set up the next camp.
Probably before the last waggon of the baggage train left camp, in the average pre modern army.
Modern marches tend to be a bit quicker, mostly because you aren’t usually forming up ten thousand folks to do them (and other little things like “having artificial light so you can break camp in the dark”). The worked out example previously with a Roman consular army (two legions plus socii) comes to ~6.5mi/10km of column, which is pretty much half the normal daily marching distance.
> Most of the major Chinese dynasties, for a start:
If the standard of stability is lasting 200-300 years without being couped, I suspect most republics can meet that, modulo other fates like getting _conquered_ by something larger.
Also, instability can include failed coups and rebellions, too. Like, the various English dynasties tended to last at least a couple centuries, but when I dug into the history of English kings, “son rebelled” or “brother rebelled” or “barons rebelled” showed up like half the time, not to mention the big changes of the 1600s. Even if, in the end, the incumbent king tended to keep power and pass it on to his intended heir, a lot of effort was spent enforcing that. And ‘coup’ needn’t mean change of the dynastic name; a king getting murdered or shut away as ‘insane’ for a premature succession is a coup too, even if you’re still in the Plantagenet dynasty.
Whereas once Parliament really took over in 1688, the history of the English monarchy suddenly gets _really boring_.
As for ideology clash — my impression is that most of the time, an empire would want to just conquer its neighbors, not meddle with governance. But Sparta did try (and fail) to impose an oligarchy on a conquered Athens.
But really, the above is getting far afield. If I remember aright, the original question was whether the Hellenistic kings were handicapped vs. Rome by inability to trust their generals, and if so whether that was a general weakness. So the real question is not “how long did a dynasty last?” but “did kings or emperors worry about over-strong generals, and self-impose some military handicaps to prevent them?” And my vague impression of Chinese history was that the answer was often “yes, and yes”. For medieval Europe you didn’t really have ‘generals’, but you did have nobles; did strong nobles threaten or weaken the power of kings? Oh yeah…
“Whereas once Parliament really took over in 1688, the history of the English monarchy suddenly gets _really boring_.”
As the apocryphal American saying goes: “There is an ancient Chinese proverb: curse your enemies to live in interesting times.”
If the standard of stability is lasting 200-300 years without being couped, I suspect most republics can meet that, modulo other fates like getting _conquered_ by something larger.
A large number of republics are/were in post-colonial Africa and Latin America, very few of which have been paragons of stability. In Mexico, for example, the First Republic lasted for 12 years (1823-35), the Centralist Republic for 11 years (1846-1863), and the Second (really third) Republic for seven years (1846-53), and the Restored Republic for nine years (1867-76). Or if we look at Europe, the French First Republic lasted for seven years before getting couped by Napoleon in 1799, and the Second Republic lasted for three years before getting couped by Napoleon II in 1851. The Spanish Second Republic lasted for eight years (1931-39), the last three of which were spent in an unsuccessful civil war. Weimar Germany managed fifteen years (1918-1933). And so on. There are many, many republican regimes that only managed to survive a little while before getting couped, subverted, or otherwise overthrown by internal forces.
Yeah you are getting tripped up by Simpson’s paradox. Republics get more viable-> low stability places start becoming republics -> more very short lived republics exist.
But many of these places weren’t low-stability before becoming republics. The House of Capet, for example, ruled France from 987 until it became extinct in 1328; if you count cadet branches, it ruled until 1792. Prussia/Germany (counting the latter as a continuation of the former) was ruled by the House of Hohenzollern continuously from 1525 to 1918. The only place listed above which could be described as “low-stability” before becoming a republic was Spain, although it’s worth pointing out that before Napoleon’s invasion the country hadn’t suffered a coup since the establishment of Hapsburg rule in the 16th century.
Seriously, the House of Capet as an example of political continuity and stability? Are you trolling?
Seriously, the House of Capet as an example of political continuity and stability? Are you trolling?
The House of Capet managed to ensure direct father-to-son transmission from the death of Hugh Capet in 996 until the direct line became extinct in 1328. If 332 years of direct father-to-son succession isn’t an “example of political continuity”, I’d like to know what is.
Oh yeah, excellent succession. Just the teensy, weensy, minor little detail that they didn’t actually have more then nominal rulership in most of the kingdom for much of this period. Oh plus the part where there was a massive scorched earth religious war between different factions within the kingdom. But besides the anarchy and war, everything was super lawful and peaceful!
If we aren’t going to let the actual political realities on the ground bother us, then why limit ourselves to the Capetian dynasty?
The house of Yamato has been ruling Japan for 2600 years! Sure there were long periods of powerlessness and wars between different Japanese states. Sure for some reason people talk about the “Shogunates” and not the Empire. Mere technicalities! The guy with the right job title was always a Yamato, therefore Japan was perfectly stable!
The few monarchies in postcolonial Latin America and Africa weren’t exceptionally stable either (nor were the new monarchies established in post-Ottoman Eastern Europe). I think that just reflects that *new* regimes, that take control after a war or revolution or some other kind of power vacuum, are going to be unstable, regardless of what kind of regime they are, because they don’t have the kind of legitimacy that comes from tradition and inertia.
Oh yeah, excellent succession. Just the teensy, weensy, minor little detail that they didn’t actually have more then nominal rulership in most of the kingdom for much of this period.
They exerted more influence than a Paris-based republic would have been able to.
Oh plus the part where there was a massive scorched earth religious war between different factions within the kingdom. But besides the anarchy and war, everything was super lawful and peaceful!
One religious war in eight hundred years is not actually that many.
The few monarchies in postcolonial Latin America and Africa weren’t exceptionally stable either (nor were the new monarchies established in post-Ottoman Eastern Europe). I think that just reflects that *new* regimes, that take control after a war or revolution or some other kind of power vacuum, are going to be unstable, regardless of what kind of regime they are, because they don’t have the kind of legitimacy that comes from tradition and inertia.
Given that most modern republics have been at least implicitly premised on the idea that newer = better, this doesn’t seem like a point in their favour.
One religious war in eight hundred years is not actually that many.
I’m not sure if the poster is referring to the post-Reformation conflict or to the Albigensian crusade, but if you’re going to count all eight hundred years (including the cadet branches) then it’s at least two. Although to be fair I’m not sure if the region where the Albigensians lived was actually controlled by France at the time.
“Given that most modern republics have been at least implicitly premised on the idea that newer = better, this doesn’t seem like a point in their favour.”
well when an old order collapses *some* form of new regime is going to take its place. I’m just noting that “new” (or newly independent) monarchies seem to be fairly unstable too, just like new republican or new party-state regimes are.
I’m not sure if the poster is referring to the post-Reformation conflict or to the Albigensian crusade, but if you’re going to count all eight hundred years (including the cadet branches) then it’s at least two. Although to be fair I’m not sure if the region where the Albigensians lived was actually controlled by France at the time.
One religious war every four hundred years, then. That’s still very infrequent. After all, the US is generally considered a politically stable country, and its last civil war was much less than 400 years ago.
well when an old order collapses *some* form of new regime is going to take its place. I’m just noting that “new” (or newly independent) monarchies seem to be fairly unstable too, just like new republican or new party-state regimes are.
I don’t know about that. If you look at the Middle East, the monarchies (Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the UAE) tend to be more stable than the republics (Iraq, Syria, Egypt), even though they were all established at around the same time. Looking across to North Africa, Morocco has been more stable since gaining independence than Algeria, Tunisia, or Libya.
I don’t know about that. If you look at the Middle East, the monarchies (Jordan, Saudi Arabia, the UAE) tend to be more stable than the republics (Iraq, Syria, Egypt), even though they were all established at around the same time. Looking across to North Africa, Morocco has been more stable since gaining independence than Algeria, Tunisia, or Libya.
Libya, Iraq, Egypt and Tunisia were all monarchies right after achiving independence- the fact that they’re not anymore indicates that the monarchies weren’t that stable.
Libya, Iraq, Egypt and Tunisia were all monarchies right after achiving independence- the fact that they’re not anymore indicates that the monarchies weren’t that stable.
None of the states in the area were particularly stable after achieving independence, but those that kept their monarchies seem to have done a better job stabilising themselves than those that became republics.
“Whereas once Parliament really took over in 1688, the history of the English monarchy suddenly gets _really boring_”
There were *four* Jacobite rebellions in the next 60 years, and that’s not counting the four-year war in Ireland (1689-1692) between Williamites and Jacobites.
Your scholarship is the best in explaining the rise of Rome. This post , along with your post on Dilectus are a must read for any Roman history enthusiast. I am looking forward to reading your dissertation next!
Question:
What caused the Romans to come up with this almost perfect system?
Do you agree with my hypothesis that it was the fear of the Gauls?
Roman society seems to have dramatically changed after the sack of Rome.
I think when Romans were looking at the north, they were terrified by the seemingly endless “strategic depth” of the Gallic people. Add to that the Gaul’s prowess in war and their excellent craftsmanship and Roman elite were compelled to come up with such a system.
I think this all changed after the end of Gallic threat in the early 2nd century and Roman Elite looked more and more to enrich themselves at the expense of the middle class.
“Note that the Romans do pay taxes, most notably the tributum, a variable annual land tax. But at citizens of the state whose military activity they support and vote for, the Romans could count on a lot of active compliance with this regime (indeed, the wealth that made one liable for tributum was self-reported!). That’s very different from a system of imperial extraction where discriminated subject peoples are forced to pay for their ruler’s lavish lifestyle and see few benefits!”
I’m struggling to parse your meaning out of this footnote. The second sentence in particular. Is the idea that the Romans were sufficiently consistently in favor of the things the government did with their tax-money, getting sufficiently much benefit from how it ended up being reinvested, that they were generally happy to go along with the taxes even in the absence of substantial top-down coercion? That’s the most coherent interpretation I’ve managed to generate of the footnote, but it’s not one I’m at all confident in, and I’d find it surprising if it were true. So I figure it’s worth asking for clarification on the intended meaning here.
That’s basically how I take it, yes. Roman citizens were, on the whole, happy enough to pay taxes without needing major enforcement of the taxes. Part of that is each individual Roman family largely decided for themselves how much of the tributum they wanted to pay; but paying more (and thus being sorted in the richer gens, see OGH’s series on how the Roman Republic was governed for more on that) was a big prestige deal and so it seems that Roman families eagerly volunteered to pay more!
Further, the footnote is explaining a difference between the taxes a Roman citizen pays and the taxes an imperial subject of a non-Roman state pays (I don’t know about non-citizen subjects of the Roman Empire). A Roman citizen could vote on where he wanted his money to go, either directly or indirectly by electing certain officials. An imperial subject watched their money taken away to be spent on whatever their imperial overlord felt like. Thus Romans had more investment in the system and seemed to support it more vigorously.
Not only was it prestigious to pay more taxes, it also translated into greater political power — each property class had the same voting weight, but the richer classes had fewer people, so each invidiual rich man’s vote counted for more.
The more i read the articles the more im convinced that it’s not so much roman empire as it’s Italian empire, just like mongol empire was… Mongol empire, not borjigin empire. A militarily superior culture (economy?) in a region didnt expand because they are scattered and fight among themselves. Then a faction is able to unite all of them and suddenly, they conquer the world.
> one perennial soldier’s complaint, about insufficient or insufferable food, does not appear in our sources.
I am **shocked** by the Anglo-centric bias on display here. Complaints about legionary food are well documented in Goscinny & Uderzo X, AUC 2719 (“Astérix légionnaire”), from legionaries originating throughout the Republic and even outside, with the telling exception of a Briton.
I’m starting to see where the U.S. Founding Father’s idea for having a national volunteer militia in lieu of a standing army came from. As per the Second Amendment to the U.S. Constitution: “A well regulated Militia, being necessary to the security of a free State, the right of the people to keep and bear Arms, shall not be infringed.” [emphasis mine]. Seems to me
I wonder as to what was the fundamental change that made the ancient Roman system unworkable for the early U.S. military system, especially during the War of 1812. Was it some sort of ability for the British to raise and ship equal amounts of mass conscripts through some other, modern system, that earlier historic states did not have?
Britain didn’t have mass conscription during this period, so whatever the answer is, it’s not that.
They weren’t constantly raising and deploying the militia in a cycle, so it didn’t have combat experience.
I’m wondering if 1812 was partly an attempt to start up this cycle.
Certainly it was started by the States. They saw Britain occupied by Napoleon and decided this was a good time to bite off some of their territory.
I suspect not; the USA, especially in its early period, had a big emphasis on individual freedom and limited government, which doesn’t really fit well with the idea of making large numbers of your citizens join the army as a matter of course.
The government as organized by the constitution went into effect in 1789. This government passed an act compelling every free white man between the ages of 18 and 45 to join the militia in 1792. 13,000 militia were mobilized in 1794 which would have been about 2% of the military eligible population.
So no, they did not have any hesitation to compel military service as a matter of course.
The Fathers were drawing on well-established British attitudes – that a standing army was a menace to a liberal state (the great example was, of course, the New Model Army, but also the efforts of Charles II and James II and the absolutist monarchies of Europe). In Britain, the army required annual authorisation by Parliament, and the militias were under the control of the local aristocrats. They took this and adapted it their new form.
A few things I realized while reading this post (alongside rereading the Logistics series):
1) In contrast to a LOT of pre-industrial societies, being reincarnated into Roman Italy would actually have a really good chance of you NOT being a subsistence farmer just barely scraping by. Thanks, military incentives pushing a large “middle class”!
2) Not only does drawing your soldiers from your “middle class” mean that you can credibly ask them to BYOG, it also theoretically means that you can support having a larger portion of your population under arms at one time, since a “middle class” farm can handle losing labor better than one that’s just scraping by.
3) Footnote 16 made me think about how incredibly practical the big famous feats of Roman engineering are — despite having some more “normal” monumental architecture, they’re more famous for their road network and plumbing.
4) Rome’s success is honestly a great argument for why we’re living in a simulation — clearly we’re just living in the aftermath of an EU-style grand strategy game where the player picked Rome. :p
> is futile because then we should see vastly more republics and vastly less monarchies and that’s not the case.
I think that’s invalid; what happened to a lot of republics was getting _conquered_, not couped internally into monarchy. Scaling problems rather than stability problems.
But what really makes a binary “monarchy vs. republic” debate futile is that there are different kinds of republics. Narrow oligarchy rather than approximately democratic. Mercenary, professional military, broad conscription. Direct democratic vs. representative vs. hybrid (if democratic at all.) In the modern world we have ideas of full vs. partial or flawed democracies. Full ones are pretty stable; partial or new democracies, emerging out of colonial regions, a lot less so.
The Middle Republic unified its military and voting classes, and was coup-resistant; the Late Republic didn’t, and wasn’t. Athenian democracy was robust to Sparta conquering it, installing oligarchs, and leaving, with the democracy springing back afterwards; it wasn’t robust to getting permanently conquered by Macedonians let alone Romans. A Renaissance republic run by a a handful of rich people is not very similar to Middle Rome or 400s BC Athens or to Renaissance Swiss cantons or to the 1800 AD USA.
Hey Dr. Devereaux, given the subject of many of the comments I’ve seen on this current series, it might be helpful to link back to this older article of yours:
https://acoup.blog/2022/06/24/collections-total-generalship-commanding-pre-modern-armies-part-iiib-officers/
“Etruscans do thinks” – things.
From the future: “This is (at last!) the seventh and final part of a seven-part series (I, II, III, Interlude I, IV, Va, Vb, Methodological Note, Vc, Interlude II, VIa, Extended Footnote I, VIb, Extended Footnote II, VIc, Extended Footnote III, VId, Extended Footnote IV, VIe1, VIe2, Extended Footnote Va, Extended Footnote Vb, Interlude III, Extended Footnote Vc, Extended Footnote Vd, Extended Footnote Ve, Extended Footnote Vf, VIf1, Extended Footnote VI, VIf2, Extended Footnote VII, VIf3, Extended Footnote VIII, VIf4, Extended Footnote IX, VIf5, Extended Footnote X, VIf6, VII, Bibliography, Retrospective, Followup Series I, Followup Series II)”
This makes it sound like life for the average Roman was pretty miserable. Is that fair to say? Let’s count the ways.
-*seven* years of mandatory military service. Most countries with a draft just do one or two years.
-*non continuous*. Normally you do your military service and get it over with, unless you want to be full career military. But for the Romans, it sounds like they were constantly getting called up for just 1 year. That would really screw up any other job you had. Like, how are you supposed to run a farm if you keep getting drafted right before it’s time to harvest?
-*unpredictable*. Same as above. It can happen any time from age 17 to 45? That would be a huge threat just looming over you almost your entire life.
-*expensive*. So you have to buy your own equipment, and this military gear is some of the most expensive stuff you could buy in society. I know you said they only took people with some money, but even so, how did they pay for it? Did they get loans, like how people now take student loans? Imagine getting drafted to the army, and then also being forced to take a huge loan to pay for your equipment.
-*dangerous*. The service wasn’t just peacetime service, but continuous warfare, with a lot of marching, hauling gear, and building fortifications. Even if they don’t die in battle, I imagine a lot of them would develop terrible back pain and other injuries from that kind of lifestyle.
-*politically toxic*. So the only people who could change the system were high-ranking politicians, and it was pretty much impossible to get to that level without having a prestigious military career. Even the super rich people were not able to obtain the highest levels of office, only former generals. That sounds like a military dictatorship. And then those generals kept the system running, with continuous warfare to justify endless military spending and expansion.
But maybe I’m being unfair and life in general was just terrible *everywhere* in the pre-modern world. Thoughts?
Well, remember that wars had to be approved by the assembly, so the idea of going on wars of conquest (and thus getting loot) was evidently pretty popular with the voting public.
Maybe for the very poor, our host said they weren’t in this army system anyway. For a middle-class Roman, it doesn’t make sense to march across the continent to try and loot some Gauls or Visigoths. It makes more sense the other way, for the barbarians to loot Rome.
No, the evidence from ancient culture universally disagrees with this. People everywhere wanted to be in the soldiering class because that’s where the money was at.
It wasn’t exactly a bundle of roses by modern standards, but I think there’s a number of key misconceptions (probably at least partially from taking a very modern view of the subject). Some thoughts on a few specific points.
> *seven* years of mandatory military service. Most countries with a draft just do one or two years.
Seven _seasons_, not years. That’s more like 3.5-4 years of actual time you’re spending in service. And agricultural life is more cyclical – it’s less of a problem to spend a season out every few years, compared to something like a modern office job where you’ve got career progression and projects and so on.
> Like, how are you supposed to run a farm if you keep getting drafted right before it’s time to harvest?
That isn’t how the draft works. It is a regularly scheduled process, occurring in the winter to campaign from early spring.
Go read this: https://acoup.blog/2023/06/16/collections-how-to-raise-a-roman-army-the-dilectus/
Remember also that you’re part of a family and a community. If you’re a son, then your father and brothers can keep running the farm while you’re away on service for a season. Or conversely, if you’re the father, your eldest son and his brothers can run the farm. Or your own brother can manage it while your slaves and servants do the day to day work, or whatever.
> So you have to buy your own equipment, and this military gear is some of the most expensive stuff you could buy in society. I know you said they only took people with some money, but even so, how did they pay for it?
Addressed previously. The draft is economically stratified – you’re assigned into a category of soldier based on your wealth, and the equipment you’re required to bring matches that. Think of it less like “take out a student loan” and more like “use your own car to commute to work”. Furthermore, you’re still part of a family and a community. You can take turns using the helmet, mail shirt and sword, each of you bringing it out when it’s your turn for service.
And one more from below:
> For a middle-class Roman, it doesn’t make sense to march across the continent to try and loot some Gauls or Visigoths.
On the contrary – loot is phenomenally lucrative. All that expensive military equipment you were bemoaning the requirement for above can be captured and sold (for fat stacks of cash); along with other forms of movable wealth: money; luxury goods; slaves.
A key part of the way you’re likely to move up the military ladder from skirmishing to line infantry is through the profits of loot on your first campaigning season.
“You can take turns using the helmet, mail shirt and sword, each of you bringing it out when it’s your turn for service.”
I imagine the patronage system played a role in this as well. If I’m your patron and I can do so, I’m probably going to loan you some bit of kit to remember me by (or so that your father remembers me, etc). That way, if you come home with a bunch of loot you’re likely to give your old friend a gift or two when you come back (and if not your dad owes me a favor). And if I’m your client and had a helmet or shield in good repair that my family wasn’t using, or an ass I’d otherwise sell, and I know your son is on his way to the army, I may ask if you’d accept this in partial repayment of a loan. And either way, if you or your son do happen to rise high in society, you’re more likely to remember your friends who helped you at at the start, which helps me.
This would be considered crass at best, illegal at worst in our society, but in Rome such things (at least in the books and letters I’ve read) were common and accepted parts of society.
“On the contrary – loot is phenomenally lucrative. All that expensive military equipment you were bemoaning the requirement for above can be captured and sold (for fat stacks of cash); along with other forms of movable wealth: money; luxury goods; slaves.
A key part of the way you’re likely to move up the military ladder from skirmishing to line infantry is through the profits of loot on your first campaigning season.”
That might be true for a select few who get lucky. But how can that possibly work for the army as a whole?
Maybe I have the wrong idea, but I just don’t think of most of Rome’s opponents as having much physical wealth to loot. Maybe the Carthaginians? but most of them I think of as being an agricultural economy with very little physical wealth to steal.
Could they loot the enemy weapons/armor and sell it? i guess, but it seems like that would be strictly inferior to Roman armor? That would be like the US invading Iraq to take their tanks and sell them on the black market. Probably not a net profit.
The slaves though… yeah, that sounds plausible. I took a quick read over wikipedia about Roman slavery and it sounds pretty bad. Sentences caught my eye like this:
“During the Republican era (509–27 BC), warfare was arguably the greatest source of slaves,[167] and certainly accounted for the marked increase in the number of slaves held by Romans during the Middle and Late Republic.[168] A major battle might result in captives numbering in the hundreds to the tens of thousands.[169][170] The newly enslaved were bought wholesale by dealers who followed the Roman legions.[171] Once during the Gallic Wars, after his siege of the walled town of the Aduatuci, Julius Caesar sold the entire population, numbering 53,000 people, to slave dealers on the spot.[172]”
and this:
“In the Republican era, a punishment that slaves feared was hard labor in chains at mill and bakery operations (pistrina) or work farms (ergastula).[442] In an early example of condemnation to hard labor, enslaved captives from the war with Hannibal were chained and sent to work in a quarry after they rebelled in 198 BC”
That makes it sound like the Romans were heavily relying on a slave economy. Beating their neighbors in war, enslaving them, sending the slaves to the mines, and using that slave-mined metal to make better weapons that they used to go conquer more slaves.
> That might be true for a select few who get lucky. But how can that possibly work for the army as a whole?
Systematic collection of loot; organised sale; distribution of the spoils throughout the army. This is what we know the Romans did.
> Could they loot the enemy weapons/armor and sell it? i guess, but it seems like that would be strictly inferior to Roman armor? That would be like the US invading Iraq to take their tanks and sell them on the black market. Probably not a net profit.
Except for the critical difference that there is no real military technology difference between the Romans and their adversaries. A mail shirt is a mail shirt, whether it’s made by a Roman or a Gaul. Every mail shirt you capture is a mail shirt someone in your society doesn’t have to make – and a mail shirt that someone can buy to armour themselves up for their next round of service.
You’re projecting modern values onto the ancient world.
For example, the military service. For you or me, this would be a massive disruption to our lives and an out-of-context set of requirements and expenses. But if I’m a Roman middle-class farm boy, it’s totally different. My father served, and taught me the basics. My brothers served. My friends are serving, or just got back, or are training with me when we have time. My father’s patron served, as did his clients. My father (or grandfather) has been saving or borrowing money for my kit. For the Roman lad military service wasn’t conscription, it was more akin to college for us–a right of passage, a milestone in life, the nearly-universal transition (at least among my peers) between childhood and adulthood.
As for disconinuous service, this was extremely common in the past. Even in the Long 18th Century it was common for career military men to spend as much time at home as they did on campaign. There are real benefits to this sort of system. Remember, you’re a farmer in this scenario; you sort of want to make sure the farm is doing well. You also need to keep in touch with your/your father’s patron and your clients (who will understand military service, but get surly if you ignore them–I’ve read translations of the letters). It also gives you the opportunity to sire little Romans, who are necessary for future campaigns.
Same with this system being politically toxic. Sure, by today’s standards it was. However, by the standards of the Romans, today’s system would be. Further, it’s worth noting that the Senators and higher-level people weren’t JUST generals. They were lawyers as much as (if not more than) military men. It’s important to remember the concept of imperium here; the Romans didn’t think about power and authority the way we do.
If you or I grew up in this system, we’d have been content with it, even actively happy with it. We know this to be true, because the people who lived under it largely were (this is a necessary precondition for continuation of a society).
Republics can be durable. I think of Venice, which lasted from (at least) 810 to 1797.
Venice is a huge outlier. Most states, of whatever constitution, don’t last for anywhere near that duration.
Whoa, I’ve not read all of this but one thing strikes me: You’ve previously argued that Sparta conceptualized itself in military terms, and historians have called it “a standing army with an attached city-state”, but that Sparta was never that successful militarily. OTOH, the impression I get from this article is that Rome was (accidentally or deliberately) organized around being an effective military system: A substantial majority of the male population was subject to conscription and most of them served several years in the army. The only road to political power was through military offices. And Rome was a very effective military system. Yet, my impression is that Rome never *conceptualized itself* as being fundamentally a military power.