Special Episode - The Roman Military with Dr Bret Devereaux

The Partial Historians

This is a very exciting special episode all about the Roman military. We were incredibly fortunate to speak to an expert in the field about the Roman army in the early and middle republic.

Special Episode – The Early Roman Military with Dr Bret Devereaux

Dr Bret Devereaux is a historian specialising in the ancient world and military history. He holds a PhD in ancient history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and an MA in classical civilizations from Florida State University. He teaches at North Carolina State University.

His research interests include the Roman economy and the Roman military. Key to this is considering how the lives of people were shaped by structures of power, violence and wealth and the ways these factors shaped military capacity.

His monograph Why the Romans Always Won: Mobilizing Military Power in the Ancient Mediterranean is under contract with Oxford University Press. We cannot wait to get our hands on a copy, and we’re sure you will want to put this on your wish list too!

Dr Devereaux is an incredibly passionate and eloquent scholar, and he was very generous with his time. In this episode we were able to explore the evolution of Roman warfare from small-scale, localised conflicts to epic clashes with civilisations like the Carthaginians.

Dr Bret Devereaux

Things to Look Out For:

• Lots of issues in our source material! How unusual for us
• War between powerful Roman clans
• The Fabulous Fabians and the Battle of the Cremera
• The sophisticated military system developed by the Romans
• War with King Pyrrhus of Epirus (Pyrrhic Wars)
• The Punic Wars (Rome vs Carthage)
• Discussion of Livy 8.8
• Polybius’ description of the Roman Army

You can follow and support Bret at his blog A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry: A look at history and popular culture. Here you will find fascinating blog posts, book recommendations and collections of resources that you might find useful if you are a teacher.

If you are keen to learn more about the academics mentioned during the interview, you can find a list of the scholars mentioned below:

• Nathan Rosenstein
  • Imperatores Victi: Military Defeat and Aristocratic Competition in the Middle and Late Republic. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. (1990)
  • Rome and the Mediterranean 290 to 146 BC : the Imperial Republic
• Jeremy Armstrong
  • The Consulship of 367 BC and the Evolution of Roman Military Authority
  • Romans at war : soldiers, citizens and society in the Roman Republic
  • Early roman warfare : from the regal period to the first Punic War
• Walter Schiedel
  • The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-First Century (2017)
  • On Human Bondage: After Slavery and Social Death (2017)
  • The Cambridge Companion to the Roman Economy (2012)
• Peter Connolly
  • Greece and Rome at War (1981)
• Lawrence Keppie
  • The making of the Roman Army from Republic to Empire (1984)

Sound Credits

Our music is by the wonderful Bettina Joy de Guzman.

Automated Transcript

Dr Rad 0:12
Welcome to the Partial Historians.

Dr G 0:15
We explore all the details of ancient Rome.

Dr Rad 0:20
Everything from political scandals to love affairs, the battles waged and when citizens turn against each other. I’m Dr. Rad. And

Dr G 0:30
I’m Dr. G. We consider Rome as the Roman saw it by reading different ancient authors and comparing their accounts.

Dr Rad 0:41
Join us as we trace the journey of Rome from the founding of the city.

Dr G 1:03
Hello, and welcome to a brand new episode of the partial historians. I am Dr. G,

Dr Rad 1:11
and I’m Dr Rad

Dr G 1:13
and we are super thrilled to be joined by Dr. Brett Devereaux. Hello.

Dr Bret Devereaux 1:19
Hello. Great to be here.

Dr G 1:21
Thank you so much for joining us. We are going to be talking today all about Roman military things, which I think is a super interesting topic and one that Dr. Rad and myself confess that we know not so much about so we wanted to bring in somebody who was a specialist. So Dr. Brett Devereaux is a historian who specialises in the ancient world and military history. He holds a PhD in ancient history from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and has an MA in classical civilization civilization from Florida State University, and He currently teaches at North Carolina State University. His research interests include the Roman economy and the Roman military. Key to this study is considering how the lives of people were shaped by structures of power. How violence and wealth are factors that influence and shape military capacity. He currently has a monograph under contract with Oxford University Press, which will be entitled Why the Romans Always Won: mobilising military power in the ancient Mediterranean. And he is also very famous online for running the popular blog, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry: A Look at history and popular culture. So this is super exciting. Thank you.

Dr Bret Devereaux 2:43
So I’m excited. Thanks for having me on.

Dr G 2:46
I feel like our first point of controversy is going to be setting up the periods which might be under discussion. So I have said that we’re going to be talking about things possibly from the early republic, likely from the middle Republic, and we might touch on some things from the late Republic. And I feel like if you’re listening to this show, you might be like, Okay, that’s cool. The Republic has different phases. And you will be unsurprised to learn that historians don’t necessarily agree about these. And only some of the dates are on fuzzy. So the early republic, I’m going to say, start in 509 BCE, when they chuck out the kings, and takes us all the way down to around about 264 BCE, which is the start of the First Punic War. But I will defer to you, Brett, what would you say about that?

Dr Bret Devereaux 3:41
I mean, I think that’s a defensible end date. It’s the mark of when Roman military activity begins to push outside of Italy. And the First Punic War is the first moment where we get because our sources are improving over time, we get to see the Roman military machine very clearly. Because we have Polybius all of a sudden, and so I think that’s a defensible date. I would be tempted to push the transition to the middle Republic earlier, probably in the late fourth century, something like 338 340 Because I think the military system is functioning more or less the same way that far back but the evidence is is weaker, but but somewhere in that space. Yeah. And then the middle Republic runs question mark, question mark. 133? 107? 101? Somewhere in there. Before we begin the Late Republic.

Dr Rad 4:34
Somewhere with the Gracchi. And Marius.

Dr G 4:36
Yeah it gets a little bit dicey as soon as Tiberius Gracchus is elected tribune of the plebs. Yeah, so around about 133 anywhere down to about 101 is the bulk of the end of the middle Republic and the start of the late Republic. And then you get into the controversy of when does the late Republic end and that depends on how you feel about Augustus. So you know, I know I know you have some feelings about it. So do I. Strong feelings about Augustus, I’m going to say that I think the late Republic is fully over in 27. When he gets the title Augustus, it’s at that point where it’s like, he basically owns the whole of the Senate and anybody who’s willing to say anything. And at that point, I think we can say that functionally, the Republic is no longer doing its thing. It’s doing something else now.

Dr Bret Devereaux 5:32
But Augustus told me he restored the Republic, are you telling me he lied to me?

Dr G 5:38
This dude that would have guessed this lie? I mean, I wouldn’t want to say yes to that.

Dr Rad 5:44
Brett, I hate to break it to you on this podcast, but never leave believe anything a man says.

Dr Bret Devereaux 5:51
That’s, that’s gonna be my role in this podcast very difficult.

Dr G 5:55
This is gonna get tough as it goes along. Alright, so with that sort of chaos of periodization, somewhat resolved. Let’s jump into the first sort of topic. And we’re going to start broad and hopefully narrow in as we go through. Brett, what does it mean, to talk about military force when it comes to ancient Rome?

Dr Bret Devereaux 6:18
So this is an excitingly open ended question. Obviously, we are, for the most part, talking about armies. But already I think when I use that word, especially when we’re talking about the early Republican, especially when we’re talking about the first century of the early republic, as moderns we are incorporating ideas when we use that word army that we should maybe be sceptical about like we say army, we are imagining a formal military institution with things like regular issue weapons and uniforms and standardised trainings. And oh, boy, are the Romans not doing that this early. Some of these, you know, military forces that we’re going to talk about in the late regnal period in the early republic, are not state run armies, they are clan militias. You know, the whole extended family can go to war with your neighbours. We’re talking about states that are or that dispersed in power. We also are going to get centralised armies, as we’re going to see one of the major debates about the warfare in the early republic is really when can we understand that Rome actually has a centralised army under central leadership? I think at no point in this podcast, will the Romans get a uniform?

Dr G 7:38
This is very disappointing.

Dr Bret Devereaux 7:42
Roman soldiers are expected to acquire and supply their own equipment through the middle Republic and then there is argument as to when exactly in the late Republic, we start to see state issued equipment, you will sometimes see arguement that Gaius Gracchus does this but I would say that the textual support for that is functionally non existent. That is not what Plutarch says. And so no, he doesn’t. And so we don’t know, we know that by the Imperial period, there is state issued equipment, and it is being manufactured by the state, but we don’t know when that starts. So for most of this period, people are bringing their own kit, there are eventually regulations as to what kit they should bring, we’ll get into the arguments about when those regulations are made. Not as early as Livy thinks. So you might like okay, you have to have a shield and has to be kind of like this, but like the shields you bring is like whatever you want, you’ve decorated it how you want maybe you want it a little heavier, a little lighter, a little bigger, a little smaller, that’s fine. On these aren’t uniform like that. And then there’s a whole sort of secondary question of okay, what does that mean for how these guys fight? How tactically uniform are they? Certainly by the time we can see this army, clearly which, you know, I mean, I would say Polybius, I think you could push this back to the Punic Wars, the Romans have a tactical system. And it’s fairly sophisticated, how far back you can push that tricky, as we’ll get into, but also the kinds of military activity they’re engaged with. Our sources are for the most part writing in the first century, we’re talking about the early republic, because we have cut the early republic off 10 seconds before Polybius shows up, which is fair. And those first century sources have a nasty habit of reading the army of their own day into the evidence they have in the army of their day, is a sophisticated, well funded, well equipped, semi professional, centrally controlled force. It is, by ancient standards, a highly sophisticated and centralised army. And so, you know, Livy will read about battles happening in the four hundreds, and he conceives of these as like, Oh, we’re besieging this town for five years and he is thinking of a high intensity cedar, the centralised army and like that could be cattle rustling, that could be raiding. This could be little more than brigandage. The Army may not be this centralised. And it’s clear in some cases that it wasn’t, we’ll get this is going to be a repeated touchstone to the battle of the Cremera. In in 477 Sure major episode that I’m going to come back to over and over again, but like, what the famiIy were clearly doing here was like raids. They’re not he’s like, you know, they’re like laying waste and seizing the place. And like, there’s 300 of them. They’re not doing anything of the sort. There’s like stealing cattle, and like pillaging barns, you know. And so, it becomes really tricky to identify moments of increasing sophistication. Because Livy or, you know, Dionysius or Diodorus, or Cassius Dio, other universal history writers that are even later, like, they read, like the army went here, and they think the army of their day, and you know, so you know, it’s, it’s, there’s a huge range, and it’s, this is a continually changing institution, that we get snapshots up, and then those snapshots are distorted. With lots of blanks.

Dr Rad 11:08
Yeah, it’s very reassuring to hear an expert say that, because I must admit, we’ve been quite shocked to see how much our sources are reading backwards, when they’re talking about the army and the fabulous Fabii.

Dr Bret Devereaux 11:25
Notice how notice how unwilling Livy generally is to give army numbers in his early books, when Livy’s Gonna pop back up right when we Livy’s surge is back to us in 218. And we get that wonderful stretch from 218 to 167, where we have a continuous narrative from Livy’s. And his sources don’t suck, he loves army numbers, and they are precise. He’s like, there were this many men, and every year the legions were filled up and everything and he’s very, and he is nothing like that early on. And that’s a clear signal. He doesn’t have that information. He has no idea how big these armies are. I mean, ironically, the baby’s an exception, he thinks there are 300 of them. Though, that’s a number which should immediately make us sceptical because, of course, there are lots of famous bands of 300 warriors.

Dr Rad 12:15
gonna say that feels like a selective choice.

Dr Bret Devereaux 12:20
right, that’s a number that we should not believe. But it’s clearly been communicated to Livy. And so, yeah, the sources here are, are rough. Livy to his credit, is doing his best. Not fully credulous. He is occasionally sceptical. He occasionally indicates things he doesn’t know. He complains about invented triumphs and consulships. There are points where he is just clearly confused in ways that perhaps a savvy writer would have concealed. But on the other hand, you know, he’s mostly what we have. And, you know, we’re talking about the four hundreds in the three hundreds, the Romans only start writing their history themselves at the end of the third century Ennius and Fabius Pictor are a long way away. And so Livy doesn’t have a lot to work with. And that makes it really hard to know what’s going on.

Dr Rad 13:14
Yeah, it’s kind of like history is Mad Libs.

Dr Bret Devereaux 13:18
And then, and then the sources Livy’s does have, he doesn’t always understand. Or he has sources that don’t understand their sources. And the classic example for this is this battle. This is in book four of Livy. The the capture and then recapture of Fidenae in Latium. Ah, yes, the notes it’s it’s 434 that he’s like, and some analysts say that there was a fight cum classem, between fleets. And he’s like, but that’s ridiculous. There’s no water here. What we know from some of our other sources, what is confused living in his sources? Is that a classis in Livy’s de means a fleet, but in early Latin, it means an army. In particular, it means the whole citizen body is an army, when his sources are trying to tell him is that were once like the central army, the army that is controlled by the consoles or the king like the big army showed up and had a fight with the other guys big army, not just a cattle raid or something. We had a big fight, but live he doesn’t understand that and so he’s like, a battle with fleets like what on this stream? Are you joking? And so he is counted. He’s like, that obviously didn’t happen. This is a made up battle, because he’s misunderstood how the word classes is being used because its meaning has changed. There’s a similar sort of, we can get to the train wreck of Livy’s Eight Eight, and his description of the Roman army, but a similar problem with like, what is you know, what does it mean for someone to be before the spear antepilani? What are the Ordines? What are these units? What the hell are a accensi and what do they do? These were have changed their meanings, in some cases between Livy in his sources, and he is just terribly confused. And you feel bad for the fellow he’s doing his best.

Dr Rad 15:10
You know, and I feel empathy with Livy. Because I feel like that a lot of the time.

Dr Bret Devereaux 15:16
We’re doing our best.

Dr Rad 15:17
So Look, obviously, as as we’ve just hinted out in that conversation there, you know that we’re following the ancient written sources for the early republic, because that’s where we’re at in our episodes right now. So we’re mostly focusing on Livy’s, Dionysios, and Diodorus. And that sort of thing. And we can see that they, they did at least understand that Rome’s rise to world domination was gradual, and that they obviously have to do stuff, you know, to stop and explain some of these military things, as you were saying, without necessarily understanding them fully, or really appreciating how they worked in this early period. One of the things we keep coming up against is this idea of the levee, because this is often used as a weapon in the conflict of the orders, where we have tribunes of the players who are like there’s not going to be a military levy. I don’t care how severe the military situation is, and consuls who are like, Oh, you don’t understand there’s a crisis going on. We have to deal with it. Now. We didn’t have time for this crap. So how do we understand the levy of the soldiers in this very early period and the sixth in the fifth centuries BCE? Right.

Dr Bret Devereaux 16:24
So And here’s one of those are going to be like our sources say, and then I’m going to tell you that they’re full of it. So our sources and this is Dionysius and Livy’s, present the creation of a formal and centrally commanded system for the raising of Roman levy as originating with the semi legendary King Servius Tullius. This is the Servian constitution. I know you’ve discussed it, that would put it in the mid sixth century. We know the Serbian constitution, as described to us cannot date from the mid sixth century. The the most obvious issue is, are the wealth classes based on currency amounts. Now, the good news, this is one of these rare moments of good news, Dionysius, Livy, and Polybius all provide a wealth figure for the cut off for the first class of the infantry in the Roman army. And even better yet, though, they all give it in different currency units. They have given us the same figure, I think Dionysius is in minae, Polybius is in drachma and Livy’s in asses. And you’re like, Wow, a fixed piece of data reported by multiple sources, this must be good. Bad news. The currency conversion only works if Livy is giving it with the sextantal asses, which is the the the as, the bronze Roman currency goes through a long series of permutations. The first bit of bad news is that it straight up doesn’t exist in the fifth in the fifth or sixth century, the Romans developed currency late. But the really bad news is that the currency standard Livy’s Clearly using is the sextantal as, and what must be happening, of course, because the Romans did not lay out their wealth classifications in Greek currency figures, the real number must be an asses that Polybius and Dionysius have converted. But the sextantal asses introduced in 212

Dr G 18:15
are no, that’s nowhere near the sixth century. So this is Livy’s. What do you do unto us?

Dr Bret Devereaux 18:23
What are you doing? And so all three sources, their system, at least their numbers, must date to the Second Punic War. And I think for reasons we don’t need to get into here that Polybius is describing the army of the Second Punic War, which is the army of about 40 to 50 years before he’s writing. And Polybius is savvy enough to know that and tell us that, because he’s occasionally like, they used to do this, and now they do this. But obviously like, then that raises all sorts of questions for the entire system. Does it even make sense, for instance, for Servius Tullius, to lay down a wealth system based on monetary units at all? No, there’s no coinage in Italy at this point. Um, the Greeks have barely adopted coinage. It hasn’t made it this far. Ironically, glanced over at Athens in the same century, and you will see so long crafting wealth classes and not defining them by coinage but by bushels of wheat that your farm produces, which might make a lot more sense. But of course, that’s not what our sources tell us. So the Servian constitution is like, is this later and retrojected? it’s clearly something that the earliest Roman historians believe existed way back then. Are they anachronism, the wealth requirements? Is this later if it’s later, how much later? And so there’s sort of all of these, all of these problems. And here, I’m going to break and I’m going to make this distinction repeatedly. There is a sort of traditional interpretation, and then I’m going to note A specific scholar who has recently taken issue with this, which is Jeremy Armstrong, who is effort to push all of the dates I’m going to be kind of budget Jeremy Armstrong for you all, for most of today. The traditional reading is to Look at the Servian constitution and say, okay, the wealth classes are kind of nonsense. But the equipment described could actually be right for the sixth century, especially the implication that the wealthy who aren’t super rich and on horses, don Greek style equipment, and everybody else has local style equipment. Yeah, that’s what we see in artwork. That’s what we see in elite grave depositions. That makes a lot of sense. And so the traditional view is to say that what Livy and Dionysius have done is they have taken and probably not them, but their predecessors have taken a military system that did exist and embellished it into something more organised, but that there is some kind of central levy that the king is in charge of arguing against this right, Jeremy Armstrong pushes back at this and says, No, what you want to understand here is no centralised army. What there is, is a collection of elite gentes of these clans, and that if there is a centralised Roman army under the Kings, what’s happening here is that the king has gotten the heads of all of the gentes together, and those gentilic armies, which is like these elite patrician families and all of their clients. Those are the compositional units of the army. It is certainly the case that we have evidence in our sources, that Roman army sometimes work like that. I will note that Livy’s certainly doesn’t think the Royal Army works like that. He, for instance, thinks that the Brutus that founds the Republic is a tribune of the Celeres, he thinks that there is an office of cavalry commander, that it is an office that is like a military Tribune and has that title. Interesting because military tributes aren’t going to pop up in Livy’s narrative until much later and under weird circumstances. And what’s also striking is that this unit is called the Celeres, a term that I think it’s a term Dionysius also uses, and which is not the name of a later Roman unit. So Livy is probably not inventing this, there probably really were Celeres, the Swift ones. And that was the name for the cavalry before they were the equites. And so my own view and here I fall somewhere between the traditional view and the kind of Jeremy Armstrong revisionist view, because he’s convinced me on some points, is to imagine a kind of hybrid military under the kings, that there is sometimes this kind of centralised military and the king could appoint officers to it though, evidently, he always appoints them out of these elite patrician gentes who, of course, the leaders of which are the guys in the Senate, and the Senate advises the king. So you can see how these institutions locked together. But we definitely have what we might describe as gentilic warfare, a clan based warfare that is happening in the background that might not involve the king. And we should also keep in mind that the Kings authority here is not maybe as absolute as we think when we hear the word King. It’s worth noting that the semi legendary and legendary Roman kings we have don’t tend to come from the same family. This office isn’t hereditary, they seem to be picked by the aristocracy, they do seem to have the job for life. But that makes the transition from King to elected magistrate a lot less stark. We have gone from the aristocracy picks a war leader for life to the aristocracy picks a world leader for a one year limited term. In either case, he’s drawn from the aristocracy. And he has this set of powers. And in fact, he has this legal power called Imperium, which is the same power, unlike the Greeks who when they kick out there kings, abolish royal power and split up those jobs. The Romans are like you can’t do that. Imperium is indivisible. So theoretically, I think the levy is sort of kind of working this early, at least occasionally. There is the secondary question, how far down does the levy reach? And I think here, the answer cannot be very far. The Romans aren’t paying their soldiers. And we certainly don’t get the sense early on in Livy, that the resource in manpower steamroller of the middle Republic, is in any way in operation. So when we’re imagining this army, under the kings are the early republic, the centralised army, the non gentilin army, we’re probably still imagining a pretty aristocratic institution where the elites roll up with their fancy imported style Greek arms and armour. Their clients have shown up with local italic stuff, and that’s probably it. It is really striking for instance, levy imagines that the Roman census has been conducted continuously from The dawn of the Republic. But then he sheepishly admits this is Livy’s four eight that the censorship is created in 443. And he’s like over the consuls were doing it before then he doesn’t give a census figure before 465. And we know at least in the middle Republic, when our evidence gets better, the census was the vital tool for general conscription, that the Census provided the documents by which the Romans decided who was in the Army this year. So if the census isn’t happening for the first 40 or 50 years of the Republic, this army must be quite narrow indeed, because there’s no way to draw the full body of the citizenry into it.

Dr Rad 25:40
It sounds almost feudal in nature.

Dr G 25:42
Yeah, it does. I mean, it took it does resonate with the sorts of things that we’ve been drawing from what Livy and Dionysius and Diodorus have been suggesting, because it does seem like we’ve got a situation where it’s like it’s family based, that this sort of the conflict of the orders that keeps coming up and dominates the narrative of this early Republic is a bit of a mishmash of various things that we know are going to be happening later on. And this levy sort of allows them to introduce a conflict within the citizen body about the direction of Rome. So it kind of allows for a character development, if you like, like, what are Romans and how the Romans come to the Romans. And I think reading it through that kind of lens is really quite helpful. Now, you said that the they don’t get paid. And then we get this really interesting moment, both Diodorus Siculus and Livy’s mention that they get paid for the first time in 406 BCE. This is a spoiler for any listeners, Justin had to cover it. Because we have literally not recorded that episode yet. So I’m not gonna I’m not gonna say all of my thoughts on 406 BCE yet, but it might be influenced by what you tell us, Brett. This idea that the soldiers get paid, all of a sudden appears and when I came across it and the source materials like, oh, my god, somebody paid them. And I was like, What are the chances. But this is a massive year for the Romans. As far as our annalistic sources are concerned, they’re facing trouble on multiple fronts. This is an issue that Rome seems to be facing a lot during this period, where they’ve got conflict coming up from the south, from the Volscians, and the Aequians, to the more to the east, they’ve also got this pressure coming down from the Etruscans. And that seems to be hotting up again for them. And now all of a sudden, there’s this sense in which they need a large a reasonably large force in order to be able to be on all of those fronts at the same time. But we

Dr Bret Devereaux 27:47
don’t a couple of decades out from having serious Gallic problems.

Dr G 27:56
Just know, people aren’t ready to do that they haven’t watched the whole series.

Dr Bret Devereaux 28:01
Romans aren’t ready for it either. So we’re all on the same boat here.

Dr G 28:05
Definitely not. So I think it is reasonable to assume that 406 is maybe a bit of a furphy of a day. But I am interested about when and how we know that payment of soldiers develops for Rome.

Dr Bret Devereaux 28:21
I mean, so we are, are this substantially reliant on the reports of our sources, but we have this from Livy and Diodorus, and Plutarch. And I mean, like, Plutarch is like a quarter of a source when it comes to these kinds of things. And they all put it on the same date. And so there might be something to it, I think, sort of the traditional scholarship, because I’m gonna get to Jeremy Armstrong in a second. Because I do think that contrast is useful for listeners to hear and it’ll give them a sense of like the range of what we think the traditional scholarship sees 406 Sometimes scholars will get spooked and they’ll just say, circa 400. Ish, but our sources are really clear that it’s 406 that see this as a key moment of development in a process that has probably be gone way back in the 470s. And is going to culminate again, massive spoilers after the Gallic sack of Rome, probably. And, and so if we sort of wind back, right, we want to ask, Okay, where did the gentilic armies go? Because obviously, you don’t need to pay your soldiers if they’re all your family members and clients, right? There’s a relationships are governing this. The traditional answer to this is to point at the Battle of the Cremera and 477, which I know you’ve discussed Livy’s to dot 49 and following where we get like the one point where Livy’s Like, here is some gentilic warfare that is happening. The Fabii go out, start their own war and then lose it catastrophically. And then just to, you know, add on, like the Roman state then intervenes and also does poorly for a number of years. So things are not going well, the traditional view has been to see this sort of catastrophic defeat. And the fact that our sources never mentioned against doing warfare like this ever, again, is to say, this is the moment gentilic warfare stops. And to see this in the context where Look, states and communities in Italy are getting more sophisticated over time. Italy is a rough neighbourhood, the warfare here is is getting increasingly no holds barred. You can sort of see that with the rough way that the nascent Roman Republic treats its flattened neighbours to the south and like we’re going to inflict a pretty unequal treaty on you. Obviously, they’re going to resettle that treaty in the 3340s and 330s, which we’ll get to because that’s going to change the military system, and so to see is like the Fabii go out thinking that it’s still like the 560s. And a single gens can do this kind of warfare, and are rudely informed by Veii that no, you can’t stay. It’s become too centralised, and they get steamrolled by a major state army of Etruscans. And the Romans are like, let’s not do that ever again. Now, what Jeremy Armstrong will point out is that that neat divide is too neat. The Fabii start their war in 479, when it is worth noting that the head of their Gens Caeso Fabius is the consul or praeter, maybe later. So this may have in fact been a Roman war. This Fabian clan army may have been a consular army people can’t see but I’m making sneer quotes to begin with. And so this is sort of this is sort of tricky, and Armstrong uses this in some other evidence to argue that gentilic, warfare may actually be continuing later than this and Livy may just not know it. That said, as noted, shortly thereafter, we start to get census figures from Livy. Notably, compared to our other sources that give us earlier census figures Livy’s census figures do not round off tonight’s neat numbers, his figure for 465 is 104,714. The other convenient thing, you if you Look at the demographic math, you think about the size of the Roman state, that number is possible. That could be a real number. some level of undercounting, surely, presumably the very poor not being counted, it’s definitely only counting men, all those issues. But civium capita tote right which is the formula Livy’s always gives the census figures with that could be the real number. So Livy may not be kidding that the Census is started up at this point, that would suggest a greater desire to expand the army. And we’re of course, seeing that Rome is under a lot of military pressure in this period. And as that pressure intensifies, the Romans reach for manpower, you need to get more guys. And as you know, 406 is a gnarly year, the security situation in Italy is getting rough. And it’s only about to get rougher. And so the Romans may have felt like we need to make this move. And so again, the traditional scholarship sees this as the break point where the army is now beginning to incorporate the plebeians generally, is of course gonna matter for the struggle of the orders, but even poor plebeians, and that certainly fits with when we see the army of the middle Republic. One of the things that is very striking about it is that Roman recruitment clearly reaches very far down the socio economic ladder, while you still have to have some property to qualify for the Roman army. It’s not a lot in the middle Republic, you know, probably somewhere in the neighbourhood of 85 90% of the citizen male body are wealthy enough to be eligible for the army, right, the capite censi those who are too poor to serve seems to be a very small slice of the Roman citizen body. And he Nathan Rosenstein sort of tackle this question, and I think proved it. And so the introduction of pay is kind of a necessary step along this road. Now, of course, immediately Livy’s says they introduce pay the stipendium Militarum. And then he doesn’t give us any details. We know how legionary pay works in the Second Punic War, because Polybius tells us but we’re immediately questions can we retro eject them? In the Second Punic War, we know that Roman soldiers get paid a daily wage, but that the cost of their food and supplies is subtracted from it, if they are missing any equipment or lose any of it that is also docked from their pay. And we can certainly assume the clear implication of the system is described is that most of this pay is is booked pay. It’s being kept in the coop quaestor’s logs, they’re not getting handed money very often. Sometimes. Clearly. When Rome sends armies they feel the need to send coinage with them at that late date. They certainly can’t be doing it in 406 because they don’t have any coinage yet. So once again, how are they paying these eyes, it could be interesting grain. What Livy’s may understand is military pay may just be the state now feeds you.

It could be something that simple, and therefore the poor can come along. Because they don’t need to bring an allowance in may be something that simple. Conveniently for us, like the reason we can be sure that Polybius isn’t blowing smoke about the Roman pay system is that the Roman pay system continues to work exactly that way into the imperial period, when the Romans politely send soldiers to Egypt, where their pay stubs written on papyrus can survive. And so we can read them and we can be like, Oh, that’s how they did the accounting, which is really, which is really fun. And you see the same deductions, deductions for food deductions for clothes. This guy wore out his sandals like minus 15 denarii there, that kind of thing. But is it working that way? In 406? Is it that sophisticated God, I’d be shocked if it was. I mean, it would be startling because again, this is not yet really a coinage society. This early Jeremy Armstrong would I think except most of what I just said, but he would kind of push the dating of the implications further back and he would want to see like the incorporation of poor plebeians eeehhhhhh. Let’s Let’s date that a little later. He sees the formation of a kind of centralised Roman Army as a process as he puts it that runs the incorporation of the plebs that runs from 450, all the way out to 390. And a little bit further. Whereas I think traditional scholarship is like 406, like, dot dot done. And I’m pretty sympathetic with Jeremy’s arguments here, that this is perhaps a longer process, but it’s still an important breakpoint. And it’s setting the groundwork for what is what is to come. I would also know here, there are a bunch of other really interesting things that are happening in the late fifth and early fourth century when it comes to warfare in Italy. And here, I will note an extraordinary frustration created by the Romans. It is the case that we’re ever the Romans expand, starting in the three hundreds at least. So as they begin to pull Italy under their control, wherever they go. Warrior burials and elite warrior artwork stop. This is extraordinarily obnoxious, like you get the third Samnite war, Samnium is finally Roman territory and like boom, the Samnites are not burying aristocrats with their armour anymore. And so Rome is this creeping gap in our evidence. Nevertheless, from what evidence survives, we can see that the early three hundreds are evidently a period of pretty radical, tactical and equipment change, whereas elite equipment prior to this, the wealthiest guys are mostly using Greek style stuff, which is both the big Greek shield the Aspis, Greek style body armour, both Greek style helmets and then also like local interesting variations of Greek style helmet, he had some really wacky looking like apulo Corinthian helmets, some of which I doubt that anyone ever actually wore. I mean, some of them really do Look like display pieces rather than real armour. Always something to be worried about. Armies create parade equipment in all periods. Folks who know the Roman army somewhat later may be familiar with Imperial period cavalry masks where you get these helmets that has like a full face mask on no one wore that to fight that was that was for parade that was not a battlefield piece of equipment that was that was you know,

Dr G 38:36
you don’t you don’t want to you don’t want to see things when you’re on the battle field. No. Madness

Dr Rad 38:42
It would help me go into battle if I couldn’t see what was laying ahead. That’s true.

Dr Bret Devereaux 38:47
But so we have that sort of system. And what we see in the three hundreds is the clear in blocks of a lot of external we might say military material culture, the the round Greek style aspis drops away. Livy explicitly says that this happens with the introduction of military pay, it is replaced by the cheap guys shields, which are these larger rectangular shields. We know from artwork that rectangular central boss shields like this existed in Italy earlier, but it’s also pretty clear from the structure of the Roman shield once we can see clearly later that the Romans have borrowed design elements from the Latin shield the Gallic or Celtic shield from the north. So this is a sort of a fusion of an Italian shield shape, with design elements that are Gallic to create a kind of distinctly Italian riff on the Latin oval shield. At the same time we get Greek sword forms, the corpus and the syphilis begin to vanish, replaced by our evidence is really thin, but it seems like Gallic Sword forms. We have one really neat sword from this period that God bless it is inscribed. And it Smith has said, I made this in Rome. Nice, beautiful Look after that.

Dr G 40:17
offer a better piece of evidence really.

Dr Bret Devereaux 40:19
I know it’s beautiful. And then someone deposited it in a sanctuary so that we can have it. What’s striking is its form. If the inscription wasn’t on it, we would have said this is an early Latin sword. A Latin one sword and so we’re like, okay, so the Romans have picked up a Gallic style shield. They’re picking up a Gallic style sword. This is not yet the Gladius to be clear, or let me rephrase. This is not yet the Gladius Hispaniensis it’s not the famous Gladius Gladius itself is not a native Latin word that looks to be a Celtic word. The Romans have imported a word to describe the sorts they’re picking up. Latin has its own perfectly serviceable word for sword Ensis which becomes poetic and very archaic, and no one uses it. In addition, at the same time, we see some of these fancier Greek style helmets beginning to get pushed out by the montefortino helmet type, which is also an Italian take on a Gallic helmet, and by the First Punic War, montefortino was replastered. This is just what the Romans were all of them everywhere. You can tell when the Romans have shown up because suddenly you have a tonne of montefortinos in the archaeological record and every other helmets vanishes.

Dr G 41:35
Look, it sounds like they learnt a lot from whatever happened when they lost to the Gallic when they

Dr Bret Devereaux 41:41
deed, and so, so you have a number of things that are happening. I should note also the pilum, the Roman heavy javelins seems to be adopted in this period too. And I think Jeremy Armstrong is right to say probably also from the Gauls. The Romans think it’s from the Samnites. And Jeremy thinks they’re wrong. And I think he’s right, that they’re wrong. It’s probably from the Gauls. And so you have military pay is introduced in 406. The Romans lose badly to the Gauls in 390. By 338, Livy’s Describing a military system that has begun to Look like the one we’ll see later, although again, Livy’s terribly confused. And it is predicated on a lot of Gallic kit. And it does now seem fully centralised state run based on a mass conscript, levy. So this seems to be the critical period where the sort of Polybian Roman army that we know and love is coming into being. Now, the great news is, hey, we finally know what’s going on. The bad news is, suddenly, we have to question any retro rejection of any of these things earlier than this point. Because they’re like, Wait, there’s clearly from like, for tannish to like, 380 ish, a period of significant change, not just in, in how they’re paid in who serves in how they’re organised and how they fight in the stuff they use to fight. So what can we know before that? And Jeremy argues that actually, the Servian constitution probably dates to this period. He is a break from older scholarship in this regard. But you can see why that argument would be seductive, but it would render us even more blind to what’s happening in the earlier four hundreds.

Dr G 43:28
Now, now, we’re missing a whole 100 years where we don’t know anything.

Dr Rad 43:33
And not saying anything is actually

Dr Bret Devereaux 43:37
right. No exact exactly what I’m seeing is Roman history starts in 264. And I mean, really, like you guys are a myths podcast.

Dr G 43:43
New tagline, mythology brought to you by

Dr Rad 43:51
Let’s end the interview now.

Dr Bret Devereaux 43:54
I know right now, I’m never getting invited back.

Dr Rad 43:58
The next question I’m about to ask you seems like a really stupid question, given what you’ve just said. I mean, obviously, when people are writing about these sorts of periods, they have to come up with some numbers sometimes to get an idea of, you know, the scale of the battles and all of that kind of stuff. And given everything you’ve just said, that seems nigh on impossible. But can you give us any idea about the size of the army? Like how big do you think it would have been in the early republic? How big is it in, you know, where we get to the more of the reliable periods like later on in the middle Republic? And even maybe, how on earth do you get to this? This is just so terrible,

Dr Bret Devereaux 44:40
right? And so for the early republic, like any answer has to lead with, we don’t know. You know, as noted, we only get census figures that I think are remotely reliable in 465. And even then, I think a lot of scholars would not trust anything before the 300 census wise, but with it, you know, if the Romans do enforce 65 have a citizen body of like 100,000 adult males, well, not all of those are going to be some of those are going to be old people. So, you know, that’s a pretty limited manpower pool, you’re not calling all those guys out all at once. Or if you are, then you can’t keep them out. Because they somebody needs to form. And so I mean, that implies a Roman army that is radically smaller, I would be shocked if the Roman army of the four hundreds could feel more than five or 10,000 men at a time. It is really striking that when our sources start talking about the Legion, it sure seems like there must have been a point where there was just one legion and the etymology of the Legion, literally the people picked out sure sounds like there’s just one of them. And then later, they have multiples. And the Legion standard size later is around 5000. And the Romans stick to that standard size throughout their whole history. And so one wonders if like the early Republican Army was a legion. Like, here’s like, 5000. Guys, this is about what we have. Now, of course, that suggests something a lot more regular than than we should probably imagine. But maybe that kind of scale. But the broader answer is we don’t know. And so much of this military activity must have been much smaller scale cattle rating and and pillage. It

Dr Rad 46:17
does sound like that. There’s a lot of mention of they raided us we raided them, they stole some cows.

Dr Bret Devereaux 46:23
Right? Well, and there’s a lot of there’s a lot of battles where it’s like there was a battle, and the Romans were utterly cut to pieces. And then next year, it’s like nothing happened. Yeah, like, well, that couldn’t have been that big.

Dr Rad 46:34
Yeah, that’s what we find. We find these dramatic statements like the Volscians were wiped from the face of the earth. And then it’s like, and the next year, the Volscians are fielding an army. Right?

Dr Bret Devereaux 46:44
And you’re wondering if what your sources are looking at is like, there was a fight between maybe a few 100 Volscians and few 100 Romans and the Romans utterly crushed those guys. But that this is just one episode in a larger conflict. And then Livy comes to this description. And all Livy has is some sources, we met the Volscians. And we killed all of them. Yeah. And so Livy is imagining huge army, he’s imagining like second Punic War 80,000 Man armies wiping each other out. And it has not occurred to him that like that cannot be the case. As we move into the three hundreds, the Roman citizen body is getting bigger, in part because Roman territory is expanding. And as noted, we’re imagining they’re reaching a lot further down into into the sort of manpower pool. We might by this point beginning to something like the system we’re eventually going to have where each console normally raises two legions. I mean, conveniently 367 is when we’re finally gonna get to the point where we get to consoles every year with any regularity mean like God only knows how the army when you had military tribunes with consular powers how that was even structured, like we don’t know live, he doesn’t know. Chaos, I say, yeah. But, but you might have something like that if each consul has two legions that would imply maybe about 20,000 troops. The Romans in the early three hundreds, the Roman alliance system doesn’t really exist yet. So the enormous resource advantages that it provides it probably not kicked in. The Romans sort of have control over relation. But the Latins are still at this early point understood as like quasi independent allies, they fight under their own armies and have their own leaders, that’s going to change in the 340s and the 330s. The Romans gonna have another Latin war, we’re not told. But the general assumption is that this is the point where the Romans shift and I believe he actually does kind of say this, that this is the point where the Romans choose to shift from their old system of alliances, which federal leagues and alliances like this were very common in Italy, to the souci system that we’re gonna see them conquer the world with where all of the allies only have a bilateral treaty with Rome. They are required to supply soldiers to Rome’s armies, those soldiers serve in small units under their own officers, but those are just attached straight to the Legion. And the number of Allied troops is roughly equal to the number of Roman troops in Scenario Okay, so if both consoles are out, it’s not 20,000 men. It’s like 40,000, man. And now you’re starting to get like the beefier Roman armies as we move into the two hundreds and uses sort of armies and then sometimes the Romans double up these armies, so maybe you put both consoles in one place, you know, before you 1000 man field army. Right, that’s quite sizable by ancient standards. That’s about as large as Alexander the Great’s army invading Persia, that sizable, and that might be the kind of thing that the Romans are throwing around in, say, the second and third Samnite wars as we get into the Punic Wars. And then of course, when we get into the Punic Wars, we watched the Romans deploy absolutely still aggroing mobilizations estimates I think the peak mobilisation for the Romans in 214. I think it is, is 185,000 men under arms in a single year. Wow. Which is and what I would just stress is, you do not want to imagine that the early republic can do something like the Romans can do something like that because they’ve constructed a system to draw the resources of all of Italy together. For more about this, see my book project in a year or two. Because this is what I’m, this is what I work on. You can hear me get excited. But that system is coming into being in the three hundreds, and we probably want to imagine it as an even longer process of state centralization pulling the plebeians into the army, probably Rich will be in first, poor plebeians later, through the four hundreds into the early three hundreds are motivated by increasing security pressures. And we’re certainly seeing in Italy increasing security pressures, the Etruscans are cooperating more, they will eventually make one big alliance to try to contain the Romans in the third Samnite war. The Samnites are forming tribal confederacies that seem to work together, even the Greek states and my god to get Greeks to cooperate. But even the Greek states seem to be occasionally working together. And then you have the Gallic threat, which obviously, post 400 is clearly intense, occasionally large armies of golds from Northern Italy rolling and wreck everyone’s afternoon. And that’s going to remain a threat, right? The Romans are going to subdue Cisalpine Gaul in the 220s. And then Hannibal is going to roll over the Alps in 2 8. And unsubdue Cisalpine Gaul, and then the Romans are going to spend the next two decades re subduing Cialpine Gaul before the sort of Gallic threat kind of finally recedes, although it’s going to explode back into focus at the end of the first century with the Cimbians, the Teutones. So those those tricksy goals are never gone. They’re just they’re just over the Alps, with their dastardly oval shields and long, long swords waiting. Your day. Just

Dr Rad 52:11
makes me long for written material from them so badly.

Dr Bret Devereaux 52:14
God, you have no idea how much I wish we knew more about their about their society. I mean, the fact that their societies only described from the outside our most sustained description is from Julius Caesar while he’s genocide. And you’re like, yeah, that’s, that’s not great. Okay. Yeah, similar frustrations about how little we know about what’s happening in pre Roman Spain. But that’s sort of neither here nor there. For this, I come back for the Punic Wars. And then we talk about paying for,

Dr G 52:45
I think, what you’ve set up with thinking about, like, you know, there’s this kind of influx over time of Roman expansion, the way that Rome brings other peoples underneath it sort of ages, and then start to draw upon those resources for its own ends. This is something that is increasing in pressure over time. And I think you’ve touched on this already. But I’m interested in some of the sort of details, the size and composition of the Legion in the early and middle republics, if we can even talk about it in early, you’re saying about 5000 is probably where it sits. And he was like,

Dr Bret Devereaux 53:25
wild guesstimate there. Mm, right. Right. I mean, it’s based on almost nothing.

Dr Rad 53:31
Welcome to our podcast.

Dr G 53:34
Welcome to history, where it’s like, we’ve just got gaps, and we’re trying to figure out what to do with them. And but the Roman legion becomes hugely famous, for many reasons, particularly because of its success, I would say,

Dr Bret Devereaux 53:48
I was gonna say it does a lot of winning, it does a lot of winning. And

Dr G 53:51
people really hold on to that. And I, it turns into this whole sort of modern masculinity element as well, where people see that kind of like victory element, and they accrue that to themselves, which I think is really fascinating. But maybe a bit odd as well.

Dr Bret Devereaux 54:05
Often they accrue it to themselves in ways that would be utterly alien to the Romans. It’s very, it’s very striking. There

Dr G 54:15
are there are many byways that this conversation could go there right now, and I’m gonna resist those. But is there anything that we can say about the internal organisation of a legion? And when might we be able to say that at its earliest point, do you think?

Dr Bret Devereaux 54:30
Yeah, so looking back to the Servian constitution, although remember question marks about when that suggests a kind of army in in what we might say, it’s like three tactical components. You have really rich guys on horses and there aren’t very many of them. You have the regular elite on foot equipped as hoplites older historians assumed that they also fought like Late Archaic Greek hoplites that has come under a lot of question now. The kid does not require the fighting style, so this may not be a failing Thanks. And and Lord knows, like arguing about what a phalanx even is this early as a tar pit. And so we can just not go there.

Dr G 55:08
I was gonna say let’s, let’s resist that too,

Dr Bret Devereaux 55:11
which is certainly an equipment that implies that this is what we would call a shock formation these guys expect to march into Spears reach and stab you up close and personal. By contrast the lighter infantry of the poor guys, they certainly seem to pick up javelins really quickly. That fits with what we see in artwork and archaeology across Italy. We see lots of of infantry with javelins, so you’ll have a shield and a sword and maybe a spear and then one or two javelins also. And so you could imagine these guys, you could put them in close combat, and they have that big shield for a reason. But probably they’re also peppering each other with javelins. And so that’s a lighter infantry component. And if we understand the army of say the four hundreds as they think we should, as a predominantly aristocratic element, then we should probably imagine that the guys with the Greek style stuff are the centrepiece and that the poor soldiers are a screening and supporting element, though again, how much this is guesswork? Certainly, we get no indication and livie that cavalry is ever central to the Roman way of warfare. So the really rich guys on horses never accomplish a whole lot unless they devote themselves and die gloriously so that the infantry can win.

Dr Rad 56:29
And they get to charge Yeah, and you know, unexpectedly

Dr G 56:31
makes Lucius Tarquinius’ rise to power through his leadership of the cavalry somewhat questionable now,

Dr Bret Devereaux 56:38
well, but of course, the cavalry are the wealthiest in the most elite are the social upper crust. But tactically are they the most important guys? Of course, in the regnal period? Who the hell knows? Maybe But, but by the four hundreds? No, I mean, warfare in Italy really does seem to be an infantry first military system. Similar to what we see in Greece, were also the very rich in Greece right into battle sometimes, but like, nobody expects the cavalry to win battles, unless your Thessalians. As we sort of move forward, the as I noted, the first moment where we get an organisational description of the Roman army is Livy’s, eight, eight, which he places in 338, though he’s not saying that this organisation is created in that moment, he’s just like, This is what the Army looks like in 338. So it may have looked like that for a while. The equipment that makes that army function the way it does, has been around for several decades by this point. Livy thinks the shield has been around since 406. So maybe it’s been this way for a while. The traditional Yes, is that the military reform happens in the immediate aftermath of 391 tells us this, so it is a guess, put no weight on that leg. It’s plausible, though. The army that Livy describes in 338 clearly does not derive from the Servian Constitution. It is a heavy infantry based force. There are three key lines in heavy infantry, they are hastatii, principes, and triarii. And we’re like, ah, we know those from Polybius. The hastatii may have already lost their spears, but they clearly must have had them because they’re hastitii and the hastis is a spear. The hastis is a spear. So they’re they’re naming spearmen. And yet, the moment they’re visible to us, historically, they no longer have spears, which tells you they once did. And then there are other kinds of troops in this picture that confuse Livy’s There are rorarii, he doesn’t know what they are, and neither do we. And then there are the accensi. Livy’s imagines the accensi, as like he’s trying to fit them into like the battlefield deployment of the Army, that would probably mean something like attendance. And we generally assess that these guys are non combat. It’s your butler, you brought your butler to the battlefield, this guy carries your stuff, or they’re the cook or the carpenter or what have you. And we know, the later comitia centuriata, gives the accensi their own century, grouped with the musicians and the artisans, as groups that don’t serve as combat soldiers in the army, but do get their own century. So they’re not all slammed into the century, the very poor, suggesting that these maybe are like professional, non combat support personnel, something like this attendance.

Dr G 59:27
I love this though. You’re on the battlefield, you’ve just hit somebody with a sword. You’re like, I need a drink. Somebody

Dr Bret Devereaux 59:32
named me my friend, you’re probably so I must say you’re probably not doing that the cancer you’re probably hanging back at the camp when you’re actually fighting the battle. And in some of these battle narratives, and of course, I don’t have the citation to hand for this. When the camp comes under attack, it seems like then the Kensi may fight and defend the camp. So they’re not frontline guys, but maybe they’re like logistics troops. Yeah, they know how to hold Livy’s Battle narratives also attack us two guys that he describes as low as militates, light troops. And if those of you who know the later Roman army are like, Why aren’t you just calling these guys will lead hates? That’s what Polybius calls them, because the elites don’t exist until 212. When Livi actually stops to tell us that this body of troops called will the tasers come into existence. The general kind of consensus of the scholarship is to imagine that the rivalry II probably are the lowest militates the light troops, probably drawn from the lowest classes in Rome that still have enough property to fight and that they probably have a similar role to the willie tastes. And then the question becomes, what exactly is the reorganisation that leads to the name change? And the answer is we don’t know. irritatingly Livy does not tell us how the rorarii are equipped, which would answer a lot of questions. But he doesn’t give it to us.

Dr G 1:00:55
But no wonder he’s confused and he doesn’t know what they’re holding. So he can’t come up with a way

Dr Bret Devereaux 1:01:01
to do it. didn’t exist by the time his sources did. So he’s like, these guys are there.

Dr Rad 1:01:09
I imagine it’s their job to go RARRRR.

Dr G 1:01:15
That whole job? Yeah, to be scary. Luckily.

Dr Bret Devereaux 1:01:18
There’s been some arguments about the etymology of rorarii and maybe like what this word means and that, that maybe it’s it’s a word that kind of indicates like, essentially, like something little more than a mob, just like you’ve grabbed some peasants with their pitchforks and you’re going at it.

Dr Rad 1:01:34
I think I just settled that debate.

Dr Bret Devereaux 1:01:36
The guys that go RARRR right. And now I just want to note because I realised I haven’t given this caveat. But I’ve spent the last five minutes talking about Livy’s, eight, eight, the amount of confidence we can put on the Livy eight eight is not great, generally speaking, so. So there are layers of problems here. I’ve already indicated Livy doesn’t understand his sources. You know, he has Polybius. He clearly has some other sources. He seems like he might be trying to harmonise sources that do not harmonise, because he’s got maniples and ordines, antepilani, and he does not know how these units fit together. And it may be because they don’t. The other problem with Livy’s eight eight, because you know why not? Is that the text is also clearly corrupted points. This is a case where there are clear scribal errors in the text that we have, which just adds so Livi is confused. And then we don’t even really have a perfect sense of what Livy’s wrote. As a results. Most scholars will put Livy’s eight eight and say apart from like really general information. Even this form of the Roman army is beyond salvage. Roman military history really begins with Polybius and Polybius dates his army to 216. And obviously by then we’re we’re really late. I think the last person I can think of who made the sort of sportsman like effort to salvage Livy, as Peter Connolly tried back in the 1980s. Lawrence Keppie, by contrast, looks at Livy’s eight eight and is like no, cannot be done. And most scholars have have sort of discretion is the better part of valour. No we can’t know very much about about this source. But there are a few things we can say the three lines of Roman heavy infantry exist, that speaks to a different tactical system. If you’ve got your Servian constitution then you probably have one body of heavy contact infantry and Greek style equipment in one line. That’s you know, probably like six 8, 12 Men deep something like that. By contrast, by Livy’s eight eight we have a Roman army in a triplex acies in the three Roman battle lines that we see layer later. That presumably means that the manoeuvre method of changing out one battle line for the next exists, which is attested in our later sources, that probably means that the Romans are fighting in smaller units with intervals between them, because that’s how they do that interchange later. So the implication is that the Romans have, by the late three hundreds discovered the tactical system, that they will then ruin everybody else’s day with and interestingly living notes. The Latins opposite the Romans for the battle is about to happen. He says fight exactly the same way with exactly the same kit. Lord knows this will be true later, the Roman allies the souci fight exactly the way the Romans do, they are tactically indistinguishable. And so this process of convergence of homogenization seems to be well underway at this point. And the archaeological evidence seems to back that up that the sort of what becomes whatever becomes the standard Roman equipment pushes out all other forms, and those forms vanish. And so that that seems to be seems to be happening there, but more broadly for organisation, I mean, it’s hard to say the organisational element Of the Livy eight eight is the part that is the worst of a mess. I mean his math doesn’t work he’s like there’s this many guys in this many guys and this many guys and that leads to this many guys hold on like Livy, I added your numbers together, and they don’t give me that number.

Dr G 1:05:18
Dammit, the math doesn’t work.

Dr Bret Devereaux 1:05:20
And the question is, has Livy’s made a math error possible? Or has a scribe made a math error because we know the text is damaged. And so you know, Lord only knows. Presumably this army is commanded by consuls. Now, if you if you read Livy’s somewhat on a surface level, which I know we don’t do here, you’re gonna be like, Oh, the moment the Republic is formed, we have two consoles in the very first year. This is great. If you read a little bit more closely Livy’s admits and our other sources note that the earliest Roman officials were not consuls but prateors. But then Livy turns around and says the praetorship is established in 367.

Dr G 1:05:58
So it does create some confusion, I will have

Dr Bret Devereaux 1:06:01
some confusion. And of course, you’ve also been working through already the problem that the Romans start deciding to also have years where they don’t have consoles, but they have a variable number of military tribunes with consular powers. The name is almost wholly obscure. Yeah, and then dictators as well. And dictators, yes, we have dictators flying, you know, working around to. Um, so the Romans have like at least three different speeds for Chief Magistrate that they seem to pick almost at random on a year to year basis. What we know about the military tribunes is that after 367, they stopped getting consular powers. Interestingly, the standard number of them the most common number seems to be six. When we get to Polybius, we are told every Legion has six military Tribune’s assigned to it. And so that’s suggestive like is this, the Republic has one legion in this early point, and it is either led by a consul, or if we don’t have a consul, then his power devolves onto the six military tribunes he would have had otherwise. That’s how it works later. Is that how it works earlier? In any case, you later on these military tribunes, they do come in sixes though, of course, six is not a consistent number in the Livy and you have years and years with three and years with nine and like, it’s usually six. And this is another case where we’re confused Livy’s confused the consular fausti is confused, right? The Fasti Capitolini, which proudly lists consuls in those first years when we know they must be praetors. Yeah. And so like it’s one of these cases where like, we know our sources are wrong and and undermines what we can tell. And

Dr Rad 1:07:47
then the military tribunes with consular power, so often represented as being selected as an option because of internal politics. They’re very rarely connected to the military stuff and your like.

You said, not some connection, perhaps some to some of the time. What

Dr Bret Devereaux 1:08:08
you wonder is a situation or these guys, just Tribunes, that is, tribal officers. Yeah, yeah, exactly. And after 367 When Rome is off, Roman officer will then becomes regularised. These tribal officers pick up that military nature. And there’s also a need to distinguish them from the other tribal officers that from the interviews. Yeah. And so you start calling the military tribunes? Are they even called that this early? Or are they tribal officers? Because remember, we also had a tribal officer for the celers in the last days of the kingdom. So you can have a lot of different kinds of tribunes? And the and the answer here again, is we don’t know. The The other question I always want to throw out here because we mentioned dictators, that I just want to say the other problem out is living in our sources understand the dictatorship. And thing to understand is, the Romans have the dictatorship from between 501 and 202. The Romans have, I think, 85 dictatorships, involving about 70 individuals some excitement and trying to figure out when they’re the same guy or when they’re not. After two between 201 and 84, the Romans appoint zero dictators, the office ceases to exist. Sulla then reinvents the dictatorship and it is a completely different bag. It is clear that it functions radically differently. Sulla has way more powers he has the ability to legislate by fiat which dictators don’t seem to have earlier on. He can’t be countermanded by attribute which dictators do seem even people in the first century seem to have been aware that dictators should be the tillable by attribute but Sulla is not. And so and the appointment process is completely wrong too. So Sulla recreates the dictatorship as a much more absolute, much more powerful office. And that’s the dictatorship that Livy knows. Because of course, Caesar uses it again then subsequently, but it is almost unrecognisable from what we see earlier on. And so every time you see a dictator, you also have to ask, is this position anywhere near as powerful as Livy thinks it is. Because the image of the dictator he has in his head, or these late Republican figures where it’s a very different institution, separated by more than a century, from what I term, the customary dictatorship, as I like there’s, there’s a mos maiorum dictatorship, the customary dictatorship, and then there’s the Civil War, dictatorship, the sort of late Republican dictatorship, and we should think about these as separate institutions, but the Romans definitely don’t. And so you have to ask, how much anachronism Are you getting out of that, too,

Dr Rad 1:11:01
I kind of love the early dictatorships and Livy, because he’ll describe, you know, the amazing things that they managed to accomplish, and then he’ll be like, and seven days after being appointed dictator he laid down his house, you’re like, that was seven days.

Dr Bret Devereaux 1:11:15
Right? Well, remember, it’s a much smaller community. I know. And as it’s funny, is much more tightly entwined, it seems around around the elites around a handful of elite families. So yeah, I mean, like, when there are like 30 families that matter in this society, and you’re one of them, and you’re given the other 29 gives you absolute power, and everybody can meet on a soccer pitch. Yeah, you can get everything done really quickly. Yeah.

Dr Rad 1:11:41
Bob, it’s you for the next few weeks, and then you’re done.

Dr Bret Devereaux 1:11:45
And the military crisis that you have to resolve is maybe that there are like 600 Guys from that town over there that had been stealing cattle. And so you roll out and you beat them up? And then you’re like, and Look what I’ve done, you know, right, levy again, levy imagines this as major wars, but they aren’t necessarily major wars.

Dr Rad 1:12:05
I don’t know if you’ll get this reference. And I apologise because I’m not sure how familiar American audiences are with Blackadder. Uh, but whenever I talk, okay, good, excellent. Whenever we talk about some of these conflicts, I always imagine that scene in Blackadder are where they have the chunk of turf in the office, and they’re like, this is how much territory we won today. What’s the scale? 1:1

Dr Bret Devereaux 1:12:26
Yes. No, I mean, and and, I mean, it has to be because Rome is fighting these wars and winning them and losing them and what have you. But the radical Roman expansion doesn’t happen until the three hundreds, right? Yeah, Rome, in 406 is not much stronger, wider, more controlling than Rome was in 509. And so like, these conflicts cannot have been very decisive, or there would be no one left.

Dr G 1:12:58
Yeah, this is one of those things where it’s like, there’s there’s must be this bootie exchange going on, where it’s like you do some writing, you pick up the stuff that you lost last year? And you’re like, Yeah, we got our stuff back. And then they come and raid you. And they steal stuff. Again, you’re like, Oh, no. And so this is sort of perpetual, inter neighbour warfare that is going on. So Rome is really small on the Mediterranean stage at this point, that’s really clear. And there are some big players, and they are not one of them. But and I think this

Dr Bret Devereaux 1:13:26
moments, the big players are far away. Yes.

Dr G 1:13:29
Yeah. And they’re not interested in them.

Dr Rad 1:13:33
Tiny area?

Dr G 1:13:35
Well, I think they they actually want to be big in their tiny area. That’s what’s clear, but they’re not like they’re constantly having issues from their literal next door, neighbours. It’s not even the guys like one tribe over the hill away. It’s the guy on the hill, who’s looking down at me

Dr Bret Devereaux 1:13:51
is right there. Exactly. Veii is inside the urban boundaries of the city of Rome as it exists today. Yeah. And like, it’s not particularly close. Yeah, Rome is the leading city of Leishan, but lation is not like the hub of Italy. So, you know, Rome is like, you know, we’re like, the biggest town in like the third largest region.

Dr G 1:14:16
Wow, guys. Wow.

Dr Bret Devereaux 1:14:19
Right. Like, yeah, the real action is clearly either in the Greek states clinging to the southern coast, or the Etruscans. To the north, you know, at this early point, and, and there actually had been, I should note efforts to sort of understand like the early Roman Army as a sort of imitation Etruscan army. This is certainly the lens. I mentioned, Peter Connelly’s the lens Peter Connelly takes Jeremy pushes back a little bit on this, which is fair, but the Etruscan influence is clearly not nothing. And it’s like well, yeah, their cities are bigger than you and they’re stronger than you, like the Etruscans at this point, are telling the Greeks in the Carthaginians to piss off out of their waters pardon my language. and something the Romans are doing, and won’t be doing for a while.

Dr G 1:15:04
Yeah. And I think that the idea that somehow Rome is somehow unique, even though it’s sitting directly on this sort of southern tip of a curio and a trust and influence. And there’s clearly inter crossovers and cultural exchange going on. And if a trust and warfare is something that is happening in a way that they’re getting to win, obviously, you’re going to adopt that kind of style and tactics in order to combat that.

Dr Bret Devereaux 1:15:34
Yeah, it’s clear, one thing that we have in in Italy is what the fancy political scientists will call convergence under conditions of interstate anarchy. When you have a whole lot of states that are all fighting in a kind of winner take all brawl. They’re in a kind of arms race of militarism, where every successful military innovation is almost immediately copied by all of your neighbours. If folks want to think about more, more recent period, like think, early modern Europe, for this kind of like cockpit of fighting, where like, if that guy now has cannon, you need cannon, and you needed them yesterday, and part of what we see and we see this borne out in Livy’s narrative, and I think we may be questioning the particulars, I suspect we can trust the theme is that the Romans are repeatedly put under conditions of military duress, and forced to alter significant social structures to maximise military potential. Yeah, we’ll say if there was one genius of the Roman Republic, it is that the Roman ruling class seems never to have missed an opportunity to develop military power. When their neighbours have good weapons, they adopt them. If you need to see it, a little bit of power to the plebeians in order to get their guys in your army. You do that, when the Romans do begin expanding in Italy, what’s really striking is most empires conquer their neighbours, and are like, I’m going to get rich by imposing tribute on you, I’m going to put taxes on you. And then I’m going to spend lavishly. And the Romans are like, actually, we’re not going to do that we’re going to keep our very minimal state budget, we’re going to continue funding our own army through our own land tax. So like nothing empires do. Instead, what we want from you is troops, and we want them to arrive equipped, and we would like you to pay them so that you handle all of that. So what we’re asking for is like a unit of military power, pre processed for us so that we can use it immediately. And as the Romans expand in Italy, they repeatedly make this decision to structure their arrangements internally and externally in ways that maximise military potential. And in the end, of course, produce the preposterous Roman war machine of the middle Republic that becomes absolutely unstoppable and the Romans bowled over the other great powers. With the exception of Carthage, it ends up looking almost effortless, like only the Carthaginians put up a halfway decent fight. You know, when it comes down to it, outside of Italy, obviously like Paris can get some credit here too. But all of the Romans just like they just drown Paris, in men and equipment, there’s like we will keep losing armies until you lose interest. And we we will definitely you will definitely run out of interest before we run out of armies. And I do want to stress because iron arms and armors guide do not think about those kinds of decisions purely in terms of manpower and men. It’s not just people, they’re throwing out this. It is money. It is equipment, it is animals, horses and Pack Mules. It is supplies for these camps. They are mobilising economic resources on a preposterously staggering scale. But that is all the product of 100 100 decisions, most of which are invisible to us, often presented to us in like these Livy’s. And just so stories about Roman virtues that we probably shouldn’t trust. But I think the underlying process is clearly happening. And it’s a strikingly different decision making process than many other states made. I mean, my mind always jumps to when the Athenians found themselves in possession of an empire. They taxed it and built really big temples in Athens and created social welfare programmes like jury pay. When the Romans find themselves in possession of an empire, their first question is, how can I turn this into more armies to get more empire? Which comes down, of course, I think, to the political motivations. If you’re the console, you don’t get a triumph for bringing in tax revenue, you get a triumph for winning battles. So your question, whatever resources you have is like, How can I turn these into winning battles? Because that is what my political system rewards and

Dr Rad 1:19:40
even has to be even certain types of battles, right, like ones that are going to be in glory. Like if like, if you’re like Crassus and fighting a bunch of slaves, they’re like, Oh, good. Thanks for taking care of that.

Dr G 1:19:53
triumph for that one.

Dr Bret Devereaux 1:19:54
And the other thing I would note is that by all indication, Rome in Italy is not unique in this militarism race, everybody else is doing this too. And Rome’s last big shattering wars before it completes his conquest of the peninsula are against giant federal entities like it the Etruscans all band together to try and stop the Romans, they get a whole bunch of Gauls and Samnites in their coalition to try and contain the Romans. And the moment the Romans are done with that all of the Greek cities pool together invite Pyrrhus of Epirus over and also make a kind of combined effort. Because the same pressures that are working on Rome are working on everybody else. Rome just happened to be the state that mastered the system. But I’m not sure if it had been an interest in state, if it had been another Latin state, if it had been a Samnite. State, I’m not actually sure the system would have looked very different. The one thing I will say is probably unique about the Romans is precisely because they sit on this meeting point of cultures with Latins and Sabines and Etruscans. They do seem to be better at handling Multicultural Alliance systems than just about anybody else. And I suspect that cultural competence comes from their geographic position. Hmm, interesting,

Dr G 1:21:10
interesting. So I think this taps in nicely to the idea that you’ve touched on, which is the logistics side of things. So one of the things that happens in this early Republican period that we’re navigating is they they talk about the way that drawing people out into the Army is maybe a recipe for leaving the fields, which need to be tended by somebody open to becoming fallow to not being harvested properly. And the consequence down the line in the first year is that you don’t get a great crop. But the consequence in the second year is that you haven’t grown anything at all. And feeding an army is obviously a massive undertaking, as Rome gets bigger and bigger. But these early periods suggests that maybe this is a lesson that they’re learning gradually as they go along.

Dr Bret Devereaux 1:21:59
Yeah. Although, of course, we also want to be on guard against our sources. This idea of manpower shortage and of leaving the fields on tended, or at least untended by free labour is a major theme in our late authors. And so one wonders is Livy reading the civil wars into his sources and like, well, they’re going to war all the time. So clearly, the fields must be empty, this must be the problem. On the other hand, if you’re going to war all the time, yeah, you may be straining your labour reserves. And now an army on the march is not supplied from home. Usually in this period. The problem is what I refer to as the tyranny of the waggon equation, although the Romans aren’t using waggons. For this, they’re using mules, anything in the ancient or indeed, anything in the pre 1800s ad world that moves food eats food, except for sailboats. And so at some point of distance, your army you can’t ship food from base to supply them, at least not without tremendous expense. You have to set up magazines and relays and it’s a whole thing. And the Romans certainly aren’t doing that yet. They will later. The Romans you know, again, by the middle Republic, the Romans are shipping grain across the Mediterranean to support military operations, their logistics become staggeringly sophisticated, not this early though. So instead your armies you can carry a bit of food with you, but not a lot. Who does heavy. So what you do is you pillage the farmlands, you’re moving over, you take their food, we know that by the middle Republic. Again, the Roman legion is incredibly sophisticated in this regard that the Roman legion can do the entire wheat processing cycle within it. Um, the Roman soldiers, they carry threshing tools and sickles and portable mills and these are hand Mills there. They are hand mills in my hand.

Dr G 1:23:51
Yeah, it’s a bit like a coffee grinder with you. Yes,

Dr Bret Devereaux 1:23:55
it’s about a 50 pound stone object though you keep it on the mule. And so Roman army can turn a field of enemy grain into bread on its own. Which is a remarkable logistics advantage. And that capability is clearly central the Roman army and it had to have emerged at some point, would you have needed it to fight ve in 406? No, because you can just bring a lunch. I was gonna say rather than

Dr G 1:24:24
a day’s walk away, there’ll be fine

Dr Rad 1:24:27
Crunch and sip as you go.

Dr Bret Devereaux 1:24:28
But clearly is Roman warfare spreads out the logistical sophistication builds. On the flip side, especially if you’re trading raids back and forth with Veii over and over again. You raid their fields, they raid your fields, you’re both pulling people out of the fields, and at the same time, you’re both wrecking each other’s farming. You can see how this would produce food shortages, and I can believe that it did it it is it is worth noting this is a really long standing argument mostly in Greek historiography. That is the story of ancient Greece not the historiography. be written in modern Greek, it is really hard to permanently damage ancient farms. But it is really easy to disrupt them for a year. And so you can absolutely see how this kind of warfare when its high intensity would become disruptive enough to become inconvenient, though, again, having doubts about Livi reading manpower shortages, when these armies may not be large enough to pull that many men, most societies can’t get enough people into an army to cause leader labour shortages. The Romans certainly can by the Second Punic War, and that’s shocking. But most societies can’t. They’re simply there, they, they’re not well organised enough to recruit that hard. Well, and

Dr Rad 1:25:43
as you highlighted, again, as far as we can tell, from the references we get in source material, slavery was a thing, you know, from very early on, and so the slaves wouldn’t necessarily obviously been going off to fight rather not. And so if you’re leaving them behind, presumably, Daikon tend to feel?

Dr Bret Devereaux 1:26:02
Yeah, though, of course, awkward questions about how many are exactly? Generally speaking, so one, straight up before like, 225? We don’t know. But But generally speaking, and here, there’s a lot of scepticism, but I’m Walter Scheidel, and a few arguments kind of laid out like here’s got to be what the range is. Italy is, weirdly enough, it seems in in the middle Republic, it is definitely a slave society, but it is perhaps less so than Greece, we might assume maybe about a third of people in Greece are enslaved versus maybe 10 15%, in Rome, in Italy. So you can imagine that not being enough to keep the economy running, that figure will rise dramatically as a result of Roman conquests to something like maybe even 20% 25% By the early Empire, which is probably the peak and then the figure then would begin to fall again, we think, but yes, this is definitely a slave society. And so you do have, you do have labourers who are viewed as unfit for military service. And this is a clear theme for the Romans. If in a crisis, you want to put slaves in the army, you must free them first. Which is really interesting, because you have a lot of other societies that will enrol slaves in the army with the promise of freedom at the end of the campaign. And the Romans are like, no, no, no, no, no. Before you hand, anybody a weapon, they have to be a free person. You cannot have enslaved people in the Army or the Navy, you have to free them first. And you know, that’s a sort of striking Roman cultural quirk that probably fits with I mean, the Romans are also a more Manumission slave society than most they be more slaves than most, though, again, so that people don’t get the wrong idea, ancient slavery saw, and I just, I don’t want people to walk away with too rosy a picture of what was a very ugly institution. Oh, definitely.

Dr Rad 1:27:55
Yeah. All right. Well, this has been absolutely fascinating. I have learned so much, and I do believe you. So just when I say that, to wrap up, we thought it might be a good idea for you to tell us maybe like your top three misconceptions about the early Roman military that you’d love for people to have a more accurate view of,

Dr Bret Devereaux 1:28:20
I’m actually I’m gonna I’m going to have consuls rather than military tribunes with consular powers. Because I think there’s sort of twin pitfalls for the Roman army in almost every period. And it’s even more true when your evidence is weak. And to the right, the pitfall is excessive modernism, it is the assumption that the Roman army looks like modern armies, and has the values of modern armies. And you get a lot of popular facing stuff, both supposedly nonfiction, but also a lot of historical fiction that reads into like, well, the Romans were basically like Marines, right? Like they had the values of like the US military. I’m going to call it an offer Steven Pressfield. Books are awful for this. Um, he does it to the Greeks too. And it’s nonsense. The man has very little grasp on ancient value systems, I’m afraid I’m sorry if you enjoy his books. So that’s sort of one pitfall is assuming excessive modernity uniform equipment, that they have values like modern soldiers, as I have been arguing about lately that they view gender issues the way moderns do. And then of course, the other danger is excessive primitivism. That is that falls off on the other side is like, well, these are just kind of like disorganised warrior bands and like no, I mean, these are intelligent thinking human beings who are trying to organise armies and win battles and not die, and they are doing their best to organise that and, you know, at least by the time we get to the middle Republic, the level of sophistication here is significant and it has been developing for some time. And so you I want to resist the idea that these guys are just banging rocks together. And so I mean, I sort of see those as like the twin pitfalls. And then the question is, how do you navigate the difficult space in the middle? And the answer is, I think, to let the sources guide you as much as they can, albeit with your healthy dose of scepticism. Away always.

Dr G 1:30:23
Look, thank you so much for taking the time to sit down with us. Oh, thanks

Dr Bret Devereaux 1:30:28
for thanks for having me. This

Dr G 1:30:29
was great. This was a real pleasure. And yeah, it’s one of these areas, which it is so full of information on the one hand, and so full of questions on the other, that it obviously has this propels a sense of curiosity about like, how do these people live their lives, how is the Roman world really working, and it becomes such an increasing part of what they do and what they ended up having leaving as a legacy. So to be able to understand it better to see where these gaps are emerging? To know what we don’t know, I think is really, really, really useful. So thank you so much, again, for coming on the show. Well, and

Dr Bret Devereaux 1:31:08
I don’t know, in another 10 or 15 years, when you guys get to the middle Republic, I can come back and talk about that army.

Dr G 1:31:15
Yeah, we’ll be so confused by them. They’ll be like, oh, man, another battle.

Dr Rad 1:31:22
Talking about like troop movements, my eyes just like glaze over.

Dr G 1:31:26
I think it’s pretty clear that from where we’re coming from, like our background is more like social history. And and Fiona’s is reception. And so thinking about how this really intricate and really sophisticated, important element of the Roman world operates is really useful. So yeah, it’s been great.

Dr Bret Devereaux 1:31:47
And, and as I as I repeat over and over again, when I talk about military and when I teach military history, social history and military history are not separate, because no army can help but recreate the structures of its societies on the battlefield. Every army does it. Ours, there’s all of them. So you have to understand both.

Dr Rad 1:32:09
No, that’s a very good point. You made me may be more inspired to learn about military history. I am going to preorder your book

Dr G 1:32:20
Oxford University Press, please put me on your waiting list.

Dr Bret Devereaux 1:32:26
I have to get them a manuscript first. Easy peasy, right? Just a simple thing Yeah.

Dr Rad 1:32:39
Thank you for listening to this episode of the partial historians. You can find our sources, sound credits and an automated transcript in our show notes. Our music is by Bettina Joy de Guzman, you too can support our show and help us to produce more engaging content about the ancient world by becoming a Patreon. In return you receive exclusive early access to our special episodes. If monthly patronage is just not your style, we also have merch, a book or you can buy us a coffee on Ko-fi. However, if your Imperial coffers do not overfloweth, one of the easiest and most important ways to help us is to tell someone about the show or give us a five star review. Why not both? Until next time, we are yours in ancient Rome.

Transcribed by https://otter.ai