Hey folks! Another gap week because, as mentioned last week, I am at the annual meeting for the Society for Military History happening in Arlington. That said, we actually did have a major post this week, my 7,500 word primal cry concerning the current war in Iran. I know that won’t be for everyone – some of you read this to get away from current events – which is why I dropped it ‘off schedule’ midweek rather than having it replace this post.
That said, as I often do with weeks where I am at a conference, let me share the abstract of the paper I am delivering, “Unlearning the Marian Reforms:”
The transformation of the Roman army from the conscription-based citizen militia organized by maniples of the middle republic to the long-service professional army organized by cohorts in the early imperial period remains a topic of intense interest for specialists and non-specialists alike. In recent years, however, the specialist understanding of this transformation has increasingly diverged from a non-specialist generalist vision which remains wedded to the notion of the ‘Marian Reforms.’ The idea of a set of reforms, occurring in the late second or early first century BC, which can be tied particularly or generally to the career of Gaius Marius (cos. 107, 104-100, 86) remains common in popular history and even academic textbooks and so permeates the non-specialist understanding of the Roman army’s transformation. However, as this paper demonstrates, functionally every part of this narrative has come under attack and nearly all parts of it must now be discarded: there were no ‘Marian Reforms,’ ‘so-called’ or otherwise.
Instead, what has emerged from the scholarship is a prolonged process of change beginning far earlier in the second century and not entirely complete until at least the reign of Tiberius (r. 14-37 AD), in which Gaius Marius’ career forms only a single episode and not necessarily a particularly important one. This new understanding of change in the Roman army now dominates the specialist scholarship but has not filtered through to general discussions of either Roman or military history. This paper addresses this gap in understanding, outlining the key elements of the ‘Marian Reforms’ have been undermined and demonstrating that the notion of the ‘Marian Reforms’ as an event in the history of the Roman army is to be abandoned in generalist and textbook treatments, at it has already been in specialist ones.
Now normally this is a case where I have to hem and haw about how conference presentation papers aren’t really ready for publication even on a blog, but this conference paper is in fact a more-or-less direct translation of a blog post we have already had, “The Marian Reforms Weren’t a Thing.” Indeed, whereas my speaking time here (around 20 minutes) limits me to just around 2,800 words, the original post is about three times longer, with significantly more detail than I can fit into a conference paper. So you can in essence, read a longer, even more decompressed form of this argument! So feel free to go and read that if you missed it and to read my Iran War take if you want and didn’t catch it midweek and we’ll be back next week with something different (maybe Carthage themed?).
Our YouTube ACOUP reader AGreatDivorce has also recorded the Marian Reforms post: https://youtu.be/8MZQpXakxMw — and compared to 20 minutes it is indeed 3+ times as long.
Going to refresh my memory of the original post…
Right. I got a setting book about Rome for an RPG called Mythras, and they included the Marian reforms. Hugely ambitious, but they were a little too eager to embrace the ‘decadence of the Late Republic’ story you get from some of the sources. As I understand it, the Late Republic were not noticeably more decadent and immoral than the Middle or Early Republic – would that be fair to say? It’s just that we don’t have sources from those times where they bemoan the collapse of civic morals.
If you want to look at how the Ancient World is represented in Roleplaying games, Mythic Rome would be a pretty good pdf to buy. I would love to see what you make of it.
Thing is, I would argue that the late Republic was more decadent than the Middle and Early Republics, but that the decadence manifested itself less in luxury and sexual hedonism and more in what people were willing to do in order to gain or maintain their political power.
>> As I understand it, the Late Republic were not noticeably more decadent and immoral than the Middle or Early Republic – would that be fair to say?
The question is ill posed because “decadent” doesn’t really mean anything. It’s a vague pejorative that you throw at people who are have more wealth (or spend money more freely) than you think they should; the bar being invariably set at just a little bit more wealthy than you yourself are. This is then rolled up with a general feeling that they must be immoral, because it would be absolutely intolerable if they were both wealthier and more moral than yourself!
But this is not a theory for why the Republic fell, nor how it fell. The decadent argument basically boils down “The Roman elite became bad people who do bad things like fighting civil wars” which is so fundamentally tautological (they’re bad because they fought civil wars, and they fought civil wars because they were bad) that it carries 0 explanatory power. Not to mention that the most cartoonishly decadent figures like Lucius Licinius Lucullus played a far less active role in the civil wars of the period than ascetic figures like Cato the Younger.
That the ancients themselves told this a narrative just tells us that they perceived greater wealth inequality amongst the Rome elite, and didn’t like it. And that is something which actual has a concrete meaning and consequences that can be studied.
To do the disservice of compressing the key ideas in a single paragraph, the Republic fell because the Senatorial elite who had spent the last 3 centuries striving for honour and glory by competing amongst themselves for who could best serve the state, started striving to monopolise the honour and glory and riches obtained by controlling (parts of) the state. Why and how is a multifaceted debate that will never end, but is an interconnected combination of changing customs, changing economy, and changing geopolitical situation that led to the balance-of-power within the Roman senatorial elite breaking down. It didn’t just collapse once, but became so fundamentally unstable that it kept collapsing everyone someone tried to prop it back up. The extraordinary difference of wealth, authority, and power between the top Senators and the average Senator (or even average ex-consul) surely contributed majorly to this, but not simply as a root cause or final consequence, and not because of trite moralising reasoning.
I tend to hold that the moralising reasoning may not have been trite at the time. But without a lot broader understanding of society, including the individual scandals and rumours that simply do not survive outside their summary in the word ‘decadent’, it’s largely uninformative. It may well be true that an increasingly large number of notable social scandals, rumours, and so on, contributed to the fall of the republic, but given we’ve only got a one word summary, it’s really hard to tell how much that contributed.
A good example would be how ‘greedy investors who gambled too much’ is probably an accurate statement of one of the causes of the great depression, but unless you have an in-depth understanding of the economics of the 1920s stock market and the effects of the Smoot-Hawley Tarrifs Act (including ‘knowing anything more than its name’), it’s a far less useful and explanation than ‘drought coupled with poor dryland agricultural practices’ (even though the dustbowl only started happening 5 years after the actual crash), as general awareness of world events means you’re going to pretty much be aware of how both drought and agricultural mismanagement at just about any point. I.e. there is almost certainly somewhere currently experiencing that one, so you can use that for reference, whilst up until last year it’d be hard to have much reference for colossally ill-advised American tariff legislation, and investors are always described as greedy gamblers when they mess up, as ‘gambling with too much money’ is a flipant, but essentially accurate, sumarry of what investment entails.
I see what you’re saying, and there’s definitely some truth in moralising terms serving as a shorthand for a larger, more complex issues. Our sources are also not perfect and we always wish they went into more details and were from more perspectives. But the period from Sulla to Augustus is without a doubt the most well covered by sources in the whole of antiquity. In terms of the narrative we know pretty well what happened, and we have things like Cicero’s letters to shed a light on the political culture and mood. Not perfect of course, but a lot more than the single word “decadent”.
I think “decadent” is a fine term to use, as long as we understand that it’s inherently a normative term and is going to reflect the values and ideology of the person using it (and therefore people from different ideological perspectives aren’t going to agree on what it means). There’s still a place for that, though, we impose our own values on how we interpret history all the time (and I’d say it’s really kind of unavoidable), we should just be aware of the limitations of doing that.
The problem with “decadence” is that it signifies nothing and describes nothing, because there is no genuine criterium by which anybody or anything is being deemed “decadent”.
It’s funny, I do feel as though the perverse incentives created by the amount of wealth provided for the Roman upper classes was a distinct feature in the breakdown of the Republic. It created perverse incentives for the desire to wage war as a state and for the motivation to be the one in the position to actually conduct that war. Sulla’s escalation to the use of force in assuming power and reordering the constitution was rooted heavily in the dispute over who might carry out war against Pontus (expected to be highly lucrative), and Caesar’s conquest of Gaul came a lot from needing the revenue it would generate.
And yet, “decadence” feels like an incorrect way to summarise this, somewhere between unhelpfully reductive and outright inaccurate.
I think it’s not just because the word is very loaded. I think it carries connotations about what they would be motivated to spend the money on, and attributing the failing to that. I would find that the image of widespread excessive and sensationalist luxury was not quite characteristic of the late Republican elite, and that it wouldn’t have mattered very much if it was.
Assuming that people in general have a desire for prosperity, and will frequently seize opportunities for that prosperity to increase, the problem is less about their character than it would have been a systemic issue about how much prosperity was tied to territorial expansion, in combination with the institutions guiding how that expansion would be carried out. It may have been different had there been a separation between the highest elected civil position and the leading general to conduct such wars.
Mythras is a very solid RPG.
If you’re an Antiquities RPG player, I also recommend Jackals, a game that’s *far* closer to the historical Bronze Age (if still a fantasy game) than RuneQuest.
I was almost expecting a “carthago delenda est” at the end
I guess our host won’t have time to answer this, but I have to ask before I forget, and I welcome other people’s answers. How did participants of roman civil war (Caesar, Pompeii, Octavian, Antony) raise new legions in the middle of civil war? If I’m reading my dilectus correctly, it seems like to raise a legion you need to draft roman-cultured people from a city (Rome) and (by this period, late republic) give them some arms. In the middle of civil war, the generals need to recruit (can’t really draft?) people from various disparate cultures (did roman colonies sustain enough roman people to do this already?) and somehow give them arms(?). This seems like it should be a very different system from dilectus that’s already explained here, so I’d like to know how it functions.
I know that Caesar keep his “normal” legion for a long time maybe because he can’t really recruit more for the same quality and maybe that’s why he keeps winning? I think at least Pompeii and Antony have to recruit tons of people from the east and I don’t know how capable they’re as a legion. And I think I’ve read our host’ comment that a lot of other states in that period already tried to raise a “roman” legion but didn’t really succeed, because of something something culture?
There’s a couple things going on:
Roman armies were more institutionalized than their contemporaries and predecessors but they were still far less institutionalized than anything we’d consider an army in the modern period. If a rebelling general could muster enough support to feed and supply an army, they could usually absorb enough surplus labor to field an army because that was their only option.
The more interesting question is why people risked it and the short answer is that it was the only real path to social mobility. Joining a rebellion was a risk, but for many people it was the ONLY way out of their social class.
Social and economic mobility. For generations joining the Legions meant you got a slice of the loot, and since Rome is almost always winning that’s a lot of loot to get a slice of. Which means that (relatively) poor Romans join the Legion and end up as (relatively) much richer Romans when they “muster out.”
This system works well when it’s Romans fighting non-Romans — they can take land and wealth from Greeks or Carthaginians or Gauls or Selucids or Iberians without much risk to Rome. With the civil wars though, two Roman armies are meeting and the victor’s loot can only come from other Romans.
So two Roman armies meet, one wins and gets richer while the other looks and is immiserated. These poor Romans are now looking for a way to get their wealth back, and how do you get rich quick as a middle class Roman? Join the army! Hey look, there’s a general recruiting a new army, let’s join them.
This creates cycles of Romans being on the losing side, ending up poor, and joining up with another rebellion to get wealth back. Part of the reason Augustus stabilizes the empire is that he breaks this cycle by using his own immense personal wealth to pay retiring soldiers a sum of wealth (mostly land) to be retired. Now these soldiers, even if they were on the losing side, have no real reason to join a rebellion against Agusutus — or if they do, it’s in such small numbers that the rebellious general doesn’t dare try to actually raise arms and fight.
I don’t think that tracks. For the Republican side, I think there’s a fault for any explanation that excludes the social significance of being mustered to the legions, the cultural conditioning that holds it as the proper conduct and dignity of citizenship and the stigma (not to mention criminality) of failing to do so. At the same time, there is the apparent trend of people trying not to seem eligible when the wars become less significant to the homeland.
For imperial civil wars, this is a period where joining the legions becomes the commitment of a lifetime (and is reportedly not well paid). I propose that going along with rebellious generals is primarily a matter of them being people you’ve been heavily conditioned to serve without question, with intermittent flashes of the legion as a whole expressing their camaraderie in tangent to society and their dissatisfaction with existing government by nominating their general as emperor (which kind of traps him in the position of following through).
Provisionally I would have a notion based on the fact that politics for several decades prior to the civil war has been concerned with settling decommissioned legionaries on conquered lands throughout the provinces. That it both created a widespread base of people with fighting experience who could be recruited no matter where an actor in the war was situated, and might have been part of the network of loyalty and reciprocal economic and political relationship that is concentrated in many of the civil war’s leaders.
Although even then, with certain sharp limits concerning how sustainable such warfare could really be outside of the established institutions for raising armies.
Caesar writes in his Civil War of arriving in an Italian town and calling men to join his cause. A lot of veterans answered the call.
hearing you bitch about Gaius Marius and Sulla would be a treat for how much of an absolute Diva both of them were. The Grand Daddies of All the other Divas!
Typo in the abstract.
Missing word bolded.
A different possible fix:
This paper addresses this gap in understanding, outlining HOW the key elements of the ‘Marian Reforms’ have been undermined and demonstrating that[…]