As I continue to post QotD entries drawn from Bret Devereaux’s fascinating historical blog A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry (with Dr. Devereaux’s kind permission, I hasten to add), the number of specialized terms from the Roman Republic and Empire also expands. As some of these terms pop up in my shorter excerpts without immediate context, I think that a glossary for Rome is called for (similar to the Spartan glossary, as there’s a lot more Roman content coming up, it being Dr. Devereaux’s area of academic specialization) to help explain the terms that I think may need expansion in these excerpts from his longer posts. As usual, most of the information is drawn directly from ACOUP (often from more than one original post) and where I’ve felt the need to interpolate any additional information it will be enclosed in square brackets. Errors and misinterpretations of his original work are purely mine.

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Aedile.
[Wiki]
[On the cursus honorum,] after the quaestorship, aspirants for higher office had a few options. One option was the office of aedile; there were after 367 BC four of these fellows. Two were plebeian aediles and were not open to patricians, while the two more prestigious spots were the curule aediles, open to both patricians and plebeians. The other option at this stage for plebeian political hopefuls was to seek election as a tribune of the plebs, of which there were ten annually. […] The name probably comes from the fact that one of their core functions was the maintenance of temple buildings (aedes), though our sources suggest the office began as a pair of assistants to the tribunes of the plebs. According to Livy (6.42.12-14) in 367 as part of the shaking out of the struggle of the order, two patrician aediles were added. We call these two patrician aediles “curule” aediles because they were permitted the the use of the curule chair (the sella curulis), a mark of a magistrate’s authority not extended to the original two plebeian aediles. The two plebeian aediles were elected in the concilium plebis, whereas the two curule aediles were elected by the comitia tributa. While the plebeian aedileships were restricted to plebeians, it doesn’t seem that the curule aediles had to be patricians (much the same way that while post-367 one of the consuls had to be a plebeian but the other did not have to be a patrician). While technically magistrates, the curule aediles seem to have lacked a lot of the prerogatives typical of magistrates – they couldn’t convene assemblies, give orders to citizens (coercitio), nor were they immune from prosecution during their term of office, though they could publish edicts related to their duties. The aediles had a range of public duties at Rome related to the upkeep of the city and its public structures. They were to ensure that the streets were clean and clear, that the water and grain supplies were steady, that temples and markets were maintained and that certain key festivals occurred. Of the festivals, the curule aediles seem to have handled the ludi Romani and the Megalensia, while the plebeian aediles managed the ludi plebeii, the Floralia and cerealia. One thing they do not do is act as police; in rare circumstances they are involved with the keeping of order in the city but their role is minimal and they do not have lictors (lictores) the way magistrates with imperium do. […] While the aediles likely had public funds for at least some of these jobs, it was expected that aediles would dip into their own private funds to help fund their public works, renovations, games and festivals. Serving as aedile was thus a really useful stepping stone on the way up the cursus honorum because it gave the holder of the office – assuming they were very wealthy – an opportunity to pose as a high profile public benefactor, building goodwill among the Roman voters by putting on extravagant games or spending lavishly on public works. Of course the lavishness of a typical aedileship is going to depend on the wealth of the Roman elite, which is rising rapidly during this period. We may thus assume that the expenditures of aediles in the third century were probably pretty tame compared to the attested astonishing lavishness of some aediles in the first century.
[Historia Civilis did a short video on this.

Ager Romanus.
[Wiki]
Outside of the pomerium was the ager Romanus, “the Roman field”, a term which designated the territory directly controlled by Rome and inhabited by Roman citizens in Italy. By the third century, this was no small amount of territory but encompassed around a third of peninsular Italy, as the Romans tended, when they won wars, to strip defeated communities of some of their land, annexing it into the ager Romanus. Much of this territory was relatively close to Rome but some of it was not. Often the Romans founded colonies of Roman citizens in restive parts of Italy to serve effectively as garrisons or security bulwarks; some of these colonies retained Roman citizenship, while in others the colonists instead took citizenship in the new community and status as “Latins” in Rome (thus leading to the situation that, by the late second century, most of the “Latin colonies” are in fact transplanted Romans, not Latins, which goes some way to explaining their loyalty to Rome in a crisis). There were also municipia [towns] cum suffragio, that is towns that were locally self-governing but whose citizens were also Roman citizens and could participate in Roman governance.

Agrippa, or more formally Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa.
[Wiki. Born c. 63 BC, Consul 37 BC, died 12 BC. The most trusted subordinate and ally of Augustus, victor at the battle of Actium.]

Ala (Republican allied military unit).
[Wiki] [Before the Social War, each legion would ideally have an ala (pl. alae) of socii troops attached, similar in size and organization to the legion it accompanied.]
Italian military equipment seems to be converging, so by the second century if not earlier, the equipment of the socii seems little different than that of the Romans and units of socii are effectively interchangeable with Roman legions. Once again, the most plausible solution is that the socii do what the Romans do: restrict recruitment to men of means who are expected to purchase their own equipment. If there are “grades” of equipment sets – like the velites and three ranks of the Roman heavy infantry – within the socii (entirely plausible!) we do not near about them. Likewise, elites among the socii presumably serve in the cavalry and provide their own horses; Rome tends to have more socii than citizen cavalry, though Polybius’ suggestion (6.26.7) of a fixed ratio is clearly a simplification of a general rule. The one thing Rome administers in the logistics is the food supply: the socii receive their rations as a “free gift” from the Roman people (Polyb. 6.39.14). I doubt this is generosity, but rather a desire for logistical simplification, as doing things this way lets the army keep a single stock of food supplies. If the quaestor wanted to charge the socii for the food, they’d have to coordinate with a dozen different socii paymasters to do it; far easier to just call it a free gift and move on (whereas since the quaestor handles the pay of Roman soldiers directly it is easy enough just to deduct the cost of their rations from their pay, which is what was done). Indeed, it is hard not to note that the entire system maximizes simplicity for the quaestor: pay deductions in camp for Romans keeps the movement of money entirely notional, reducing the amount of raw specie the army has to carry to make out pay, while the entire administrative burden of keeping track of the socii is offloaded on to their own leaders.

Annona civilis.
[Wiki]
Egyptian grain was the foundation for the imperial era annona civilis, the distribution of free grain to select citizens in the city of Rome itself. That meant a massive, continuous state-organized transfer of grain, specifically wheat, from Egypt to Rome. Some of that grain was taxed in kind, but much of it seems to have been purchased in Egypt; in either case transport was essentially subcontracted by the state. Egypt was hardly the only source of grain for the annona (the province of Africa, modern Tunisia, was another major source), but few provinces likely saw the scale of state-organized goods transfer that Egypt did. And it’s striking that attested Egyptian agriculture is quite heavily dominated by wheat farming, rather more than we might normally expect, which both speak to the high yields the Nile could offer but also Egypt’s role as the breadbasket of the Roman Empire.

Mark Antony, or more properly, Marcus Antonius.
[Wiki] [Born, 14 January 83 BC. Died 1 August 30 BC. Consul, 44 BC and 34 BC. Caesar‘s magister equitum (after Lepidus) and part of the second triumvirate with Octavian and Lepidus after Caesar’s assassination. Lepidus was fairly quickly sidelined, leaving Octavian in charge of most of the western provinciae while Antony took control of the east. He and Cleopatra formed a personal alliance and after his defeat by Octavian’s forces at Actium, retreated to Egypt where both he and Cleopatra committed suicide.
Historia Civilis did a video on Antony’s invasion of Parthia and on the death of Antony and Cleopatra. ]

Aquila (the legionary Eagle standard).
[Wiki]
The aquila, the legionary eagle, became a key standard for the Roman legions. Pliny the Elder notes that before Marius it was merely the foremost of five standards, the others being the wolf, minotaur, horse and boar. But even a brief glance at legionary standards into the early empire shows that bulls, boars and wolves remained pretty common legionary emblems (alongside the eagle) into the empire. The eagle seems to have been something of a personal totem for Marius (e.g. Plut. Mar. 36.5-6) so it is hardly surprising he’d have emphasized it, the same way that legions founded by Caesar – or which wanted to be seen as founded by Caesar – adopted the bull emblem, quite a lot. But this is a weak accomplishment, since Pliny already notes that the eagle was, even before Marius, already prima cum quattuor aliis (“first among four others”), and so it remained: first among a range of other emblems and standards.

Astrology.
[Wiki]
Perhaps the most influential form of divination to arrive in the Roman world from the East. Systems for divining the will of the gods and the course of the future emerged in both Egypt and Mesopotamia c. 2000 B.C. and were thus both very ancient when Alexander the Great conquered both in the late fourth century. From there, astrology, practiced by professional experts, moved into the Greek and then Roman world, though Roman elites were often deeply ambivalent about this foreign method of divination; both Cato and Cicero express doubts (of course, the Roman practice of haruspicy was also foreign in that it was Etruscan, but this adoption had been sanctified by long use in Roman tradition and was thus mostly beyond reproach). Nevertheless, it is clear that this form of divination become common, with the writer, geographer and astronomer Ptolemy (c. 100-170 A.D.) even producing a long explication of the practice of astrology in his Tetrabiblos.

Auctoritas.
[Wiki]
Roman political speech is full of words to express authority without violence. Most obviously is the word auctoritas, from which we get authority. J.E. Lendon (in Empire of Honor: The Art of Government in the Roman World), expresses the complex interaction whereby the past performance of virtus (“strength, worth, bravery, excellence, skill, capacity”, which might be military, but it might also be virtus demonstrated in civilian fields like speaking, writing, court-room excellence, etc.) produced honor which in turn invested an individual with dignitas (“worth, merit”), a legitimate claim to certain forms of deferential behavior from others (including peers; two individuals both with dignitas might owe mutual deference to each other). Such an individual, when acting or especially speaking was said to have gravitas (“weight”), an effort by the Romans to describe the feeling of emotional pressure that the dignitas of such a person demanded; a person speaking who had dignitas must be listened to seriously and respected, even if disagreed with in the end. An individual with tremendous honor might be described as having a super-charged dignitas such that not merely was some polite but serious deference, but active compliance, such was the force of their considerable honor; this was called auctoritas. As documented by Carlin Barton (in Roman Honor: Fire in the Bones), the Romans felt these weights keenly and have a robust language describing the emotional impact such feelings had.

Augury.
[Wiki]
Along with haruspicy, another key system for divining the will of the gods in Rome was augury, the reading of the flights of birds (mostly, there are actually other categories of auspicia); doing so is called “taking the auspices“, and the men who do so are the augurs. Augurs were particularly important in political matters, taking the auspices for elections and the like. Unfavorable auspices could invalidate even a consular election: the gods get a vote too. The rituals involved in divination follow many of the same rules as sacrifice in terms of the importance of precise performance. For augury, a platform would need to be set up so that the sections of the sky could be fixed relative to the viewer in four sections (right, left, front and back): it mattered if a sign occurred in a favorable space (typically rightward) or an unfavorable one (left). […] The animals and signs watched for in augury were often associated with the gods. Over time, a sort of hierarchy of signs within augury emerged, with signs “ex caelo” (from the sky) like lightning or thunder being the most important, followed by signs “ex avibus” from birds in flight, both of which were more important than other signs that might be observed in an augury. Of course many different types of birds were particularly sacred to this or that god – the eagle, particular to Jupiter, was also important for such portents – but also the flight of birds, like lightning, thunder (and the movement of celestial bodies) put them in the sky, closer to the gods above. […] Moreover, in a crisis, the gods might act outside of the typical channels (in Latin, these were called auspicia oblativa, auspices thrust upon the viewer, as opposed to auspicia impretrativa, auspices sought out in ritual fashion). In Roman divination, this might take the form of prodigies, unusual, strange events which were taken of signs of severe divine displeasure. These could be stellar phenomena like eclipses or comets, but also things like the animals or children born with – to the Romans – strange and inexplicable conditions (like conjoined twins or individuals with intersex characteristics). Inopportune thunder or lightning, for the Romans, was often a sign of divine displeasure a whatever was happening – a sign that an election should be stopped, or a piece of legislation dropped, or a chance for battle refused. Such omens and portents might be meant for the whole community, but they might also be meant merely for an individual (the Roman term for this is auspicia privata – private auspices).

Augustus, originally Gaius Octavius or Octavian.
[Wiki] [Born 23 September 63 BC. Died 19 August 14 AD. Member of the second Triumvirate with Mark Antony and Lepidus, 43-27 BC. Consul 43, 33, 31-23, 5, 2 BC. Adopted the honorific Augustus on 16 January 27 BC. The first Roman Emperor and founder of the Julio-Claudian dynasty. Augustus came to power “to restore the republic” (res publica restituta) although his very position was an innovation not seen before.] Augustus made substantial changes (even if one looked past his creation of an entire shadow-office of emperor!) to Roman governance on the justification that this was necessary to “restore” the Republic; exactly what is preserved tells you a lot about what elements of the Roman (unwritten) constitution were thought to be essential to the Republic by the people that mattered (the elites). And Augustus was hardly the first; Sulla crippled the tribunate, doubled the size of the Senate and made substantial reforms to the laws claiming that he was restoring things to the way they had been – that is, restoring the Senate to its position of prominence.
[Historia Civilis has several videos on the career of Augustus. Sean Gabb also did a video on Augustus.]

Auxilia.
[Wiki]
There had always been non-Romans fighting alongside Roman citizens in the army, for as long as we have reliable records to judge the point. In the Republic (until the 80s BC) these had consisted mostly of the socii, Rome’s Italian allies. These were supplemented by troops from whatever allies Rome might have at the time, but there was a key difference in that the socii were integrated permanently into the Roman army’s structure, with an established place in the “org. chart”, compared to the forces of allies who might fight under their own leaders with an ad hoc relationship to the Roman army they were fighting with. The end of the Social War (91-87BC) brought the Italians into the Roman citizen body and thus their soldiers into the legions themselves; it marked the effective end of the socii system, which hadn’t been expanded outside of Italy in any case. But almost immediately we see the emergence of a new system for incorporating non-Romans, this time provincial non-Romans, into the Roman army. These troops, called auxilia (literally, “helpers”) first appear in the Civil Wars, particularly with Caesar‘s heavy reliance on Gallic cavalry to support his legions (which at this time seem not to have featured their own integrated cavalry support, as they had earlier in the republic and as they would later in the empire). The system is at this point very ad hoc and the auxiliaries here are a fairly small part of Roman armies. But when Augustus sets out to institutionalize and stabilize the Roman army after the Battle of Actium (31 BC) and the end of the civil wars, the auxilia emerge as a permanent, institutional part of the Roman army. Clearly, they were vastly expanded; by 23 AD they made up half of the total strength of the Roman army (Tac. Ann. 4.5) a rough equivalence that seems to persist at least as far as the Constitutio Antoniniana in 212 AD. […] And most importantly, eventually the auxilia began to receive a special grant of citizenship on finishing that tour of duty, one which covered the soldier, and any children he might have had by his subsequent spouse (including children had, it seems, before he left the army; Roman soldiers in this period were legally barred from contracting legal marriages while serving, so the grant is framed so that it retroactively legitimizes any children produced in a quasi-marriage when the tour of service is completed). Consequently, whereas a soldier being dragooned or hired as a mercenary into other multi-ethnic imperial armies might end his service and go back to being an oppressed subject, the Roman auxiliary, by virtue of his service, became Roman and thus essentially joined the ruling class at least in ethnic status. [Not to be confused with Foederati, non-Roman military units serving under their own leaders after the Crisis of the Third Century who eventually greatly contributed the demise of the western empire.]
[Epimetheus did a video on the military effectiveness, equipment, and organization of the Auxilia

Bandits.
Roman armies do not seek to conceal themselves in the civilian population, for instance and the taking and holding of territory is a meaningful difference as well. But rather that we’re not looking at a “bright line” between what big state armies do in battles and sieges and what smaller forces do in raids, ambushes, banditry or resistance. It’s a continuum of grey. And that problem is made harder by a consistent rhetoric turn in a lot of our sources, which of course tend to be written by the literate, wealthy administrators of these big empires: the rhetorical turn to represent any resistance or opposition for anything that isn’t a peer big empire as just “banditry” (e.g. Latin, latrocinium). You can see the propaganda value of this as such a label inherently delegitimizes what might be popular movements by re-classifying something like resistance simply as “crime” (though we should be quick to note that there was plenty of actual banditry in antiquity as well!). But I think it was also often a sincere (but motivated) position for military aristocrats who wanted to separate the thing they did – honorably wield violence on behalf of the state – from the thing others did – dishonorably wield violence without the sanction of the state. That said, our aristocratic sources are also perfectly happy to classify local resistance as “banditry” too, even when the targets of this “banditry” are traditional military targets in warfare in this period, like raids against forts or garrisons, or violence against state officials like tax collectors, or efforts to seize population centers. That said, this tendency to reduce almost any form of non-state violence (or of non-recognized state violence) to “banditry” can have adverse impacts on our understanding of warfare. A good example of this is in how generations of scholars have regarded Roman fighting in Spain. For a long time, the native Spaniards (Iberians, Celtiberians, Lusitanians, etc. etc.) were often regarded as “irregulars” or “guerrilas” in part because our sources keep calling them bandits and in part, I suspect, from the long shadow that actual Spanish guerillas fighting Napoleon in the Peninsular War (1807-1814) cast. Scholars looked at these “bandits” in their sources and said, “ah yes, the venerable ‘Spanish guerilla’ from antiquity to today.” Except – as Fernando Quesada Sanz has been pointing out now in his lonely crusade for roughly two decades – these “guerilla” armies of “bandits” in fact often fought in pitched battles! When they fight the Romans, they aren’t usually skirmishing or ambushing, but forming into main battle lines or resisting the Romans in sieges (like that at Numantia, famously). Absolutely, these armies also engage in raiding, but so do the Romans and one man’s raid is another’s “foraging operation”.

Caesar, or more formally, Gaius Julius Caesar.
[Wiki] [Born 12 July 100 BC. Assassinated 15 March 44 BC. Pontifex Maximus 64-44 BC, Consul 59, 48, 46-44 BC, Proconsul 58-49 BC, Dictator perpetuo 44 BC.]
Caesar utilized the same procedure [as Sulla had done]. M. Aemilius Lepidus (later to be triumvir with Octavian and Antony), a praetor in 49, put forward the legislative measure – rather than through the normal process – to make Caesar dictator for that year, with the same sweeping powers to legislate by fiat that Sulla had. One of the first things Caesar did was openly threaten the tribunes with violence if they interfered with him; the tribune’s powers were not at the discretion of the dictator in the customary system and tribunes were held to be sacrosanct and thus legally immune to any kind of coercion by other magistrates, so this too represented a continuation of Sulla’s massive increase in the dictator’s absolute authority. Caesar’s dictatorship, rather than initially being without time limit, was renewed, presumably every six months, from 49 through February 44, when Caesar had himself instead appointed dictator perpetuo rei publicae constieundae causa, “Dictator forever for the reformation of the Republic”, at this point (if not earlier) reusing Sulla’s made-up causa and now making explicit his intention to hold the office for life. He was assassinated a month later, on March 15, 44 BC, so perpetuo turned out to not be so perpetual. Caesar is sometimes given a rosy glow in modern teaching materials, in part because he got such a glow from the ancient sources (one could hardly do otherwise writing under the reign of his grand-nephew, Augustus, who had him deified). That was often reinforced by (early) modern writers writing with one eye towards their monarch – Shakespeare, for instance. I think a fair assessment of Caesar strips away most of this glow (especially his “man of the people” reputation), except for his reputation as a gifted general, which is beyond dispute. Julius Caesar’s career was a net negative for nearly everyone he encountered, with the lone exception of Augustus.
[Historia Civilis did a short video on Caesar’s first consulship and several others covering his career. Sean Gabb did a video on the Triumph of Caesar.]

Caligula or more properly Gaius Caesar Augustus Germanicus.
[Wiki] [Born 31 August 12 AD. Assassinated 24 January 41 AD. Acclaimed as Emperor by the Senate, 18 March 37 AD. The third emperor of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, grand-nephew and adopted son of Tiberius. “Caligula” (“little boot” or “bootikins”) is a nickname given to him as a young child, where he accompanied his parents (Germanicus Julius Caesar and Agrippina The Elder) to frontier posts and became a kind of mascot to the soldiers under his father’s command. They reportedly made him a child-sized set of legionary gear including the caligae (military sandals).
Thersites the Historian did a video on Caligula. Sean Gabb also did a video on Caligula: The First Insane Tyrant.]

Campania.
[Wiki]
Oscan speakers, the Campanians settled in Campania at some early point (perhaps around 1000-900 BC) and by the fifth century were living in urban communities politically more similar to Latium and Etruria (or Greece) than their fellow Oscan speakers in the hills above, to the point that the Campanians turned to Rome to aid them against the also-Oscan-speaking Samnites. The leading city of the Campanians was Capua, but as Michael Fronda notes [In Between Rome and Carthage], they were meaningful divisions among them; Capua’s very prominence meant that many of the other Campanians were aligned against it, a division the Romans exploited. The Oscans struggled for territory in Southern Italy with the Greeks [who] founded colonies along the southern part of Italy, expelling or merging with the local inhabitants beginning in the seventh century BC. These Greek colonies have distinctive material culture (though the Italic peoples around them often adopted elements of it they found useful), their own language (Greek), and their own religion. I want to stress here that Greek religion is not equivalent to Roman religion, to the point that the Romans are sticklers about which gods are worshiped with Roman rites and which are worshiped with the ritus graecus (“Greek rites”) which, while not a point-for-point reconstruction of Greek rituals, did involve different dress, different interpretations of omens, and so on.

Campus Martius (Field of Mars).
[Wiki] [The field of Mars, just outside the legal border of the city of Rome in the Republican period.]
Moving the process [of assembling newly raised troops] outside the ritual boundary of the city, the pomerium, would have been important, because the power of certain Roman magistrates to command armies (imperium) only exists fully outside this boundary. It also keeps them from being hassled by the Tribunes of the Plebs (a distinct and entirely different office from the military tribunes), whose powers don’t exist outside the pomerium. It was also where the Roman census took place. It was also a big, open assembly place and so as Rome grew larger, the most complex of Rome’s voting assemblies, the comitia centuriata, moves out into this space because it no longer really fit in the forum. In the Late Republic this space, no longer as essential as a military muster point, begins to be the site of building, both of temples and eventually private residences; in the imperial period it is wholly built up. But during the Middle Republic, this is mostly an open space, with just a few major structures.

Carbo, or more properly Gnaeus Papierius Carbo.
[Wiki] [Born c. 129 BC, Consul 85, 84, and 82 BC, died 82 BC. A leader of the Marian faction after the death of Cinna, proscribed by Sulla and executed by Pompey in Sicily.
Thersites the Historian did a video on Carbo.]

Caroballista.
[Wiki]
The carroballista first appears in the second century AD, is also sometimes described as being like an ancient “tank”. Saying anything about the carroballista is complicated by the scarceness in the sources; it is mentioned in a grand total of two texts, both of them late: Vegetius’ Epitoma Rei Militaris 2.25 and the anonymous De Rebis Bellicis. Were it not for the fact that carroballistae are also clearly depicted on the Columns of Trajan and Marcus Aurelius, scholars might well doubt this was ever a real military device. Nevertheless they are so depicted, multiple times and so it seems that the carroballista was a very real thing and used fairly regularly; Vegetius, for what it is worth, claims each legion would have had 55 of them. The structure of the carroballista was generally a two-wheeled cart pulled by a pair of mules or horses with a two-armed torsion arrow-throwing catapult (the ballista) mounted on the cart. This was a crew-operated weapon as Vegetius notes, with each carroballista having a contubernium – a unit of eight soldiers – assigned to it, though on the Columns of Trajan and Marcus the weapon itself seems to be worked by a two-man team.

Catiline, or more formally, Lucius Sergius Catilina.
[Wiki] [Born c. 108 BC. Died January 62 BC. Best known for his failed attempt to overthrow the Republic in the Catilinarian conspiracy. He was a supporter of Sulla and got great financial benefits from the purges of Sulla’s opponents. He served as praetor in Africa, but was defeated in his attempt to become consul in 64 and again in 63 BC. Rather than try again, he gathered other politicians who resented their respective losses and angry rural plebs to force his way into the consulship. He was discovered by Crassus who provided Cicero with the information he needed to denounce Catiline before the senate. After fleeing Rome, he was defeated in arms at Pistoria.]

Cato the Censor, or more formally, Marcus Porcius Cato, the Elder.
[Wiki] [Born 234 BC. Died 149 BC. Consul 195 BC and Censor 184 BC. He was renowned for his staunch defence of the mos maiorum and to denounce the cultural influence of the Greeks. Perhaps best remembered for his habit of ending every speech in the Senate with a warning that Carthage was a danger and must be destroyed (“Carthago delenda est“).]

Marcus Porcius Cato, the Younger.
[Wiki] [Born 95 BC. Died by suicide 46 BC. A prominent member of the Senate despite never having been elected Consul, largely because of his (priggish) morality and — like his great-grandfather Cato the Censor, a strong advocate for Roman traditions (the mos maiorum). Bitter opponent of Caesar, he killed himself rather than accepting a pardon from Caesar.
Historia Civilis did a short video on Cato’s year as tribune of the plebs.]

Censor.
[Wiki]
There is one office after the cursus honorum and that is the censorship. Two are elected every five years for an 18 month term in which they carry out the census. Election to the censorship generally goes to senior former consuls and is one way to mark a particularly successful political career. That said, Romans tend to dream about the consulship, not the censorship and if you had a choice between being censor once or holding the consulship two or three times, the latter was more prestigious. […] The censors are odd magistrates. They don’t have imperium and thus no lictors, but they wear the toga praetexta of a senior magistrate, and sit in the curule chair of a senior magistrate. They could not convene any assembly. Odder still, the censors are immune to the veto of the consuls, though they could block each other (thus the selection in pairs, each a check on the other) and could still be disrupted by the intercessio of a tribune. Once elected, the censors set up shop in the campus Martius in a building called the villa publica; they had a staff of apparatores (professional functionaries) to assist them and given the scale of their task the staff was likely to be considerable. Citizens – or more correctly heads of households, meaning patres familias as well as (probably!) women who were sui iuris – were required to show up and register, making a declaration of the members of their household as well as their property. The censors were then responsible for assigning citizen households to census classes (as used in the assembly voting) and of course this was also the process that made an individual liable for conscription in the dilectus. The censors also as part of the process updated the rolls of the Senate, inducting new members – those who had held the quaestorship or other senior magistracies in the previous years – as well as establishing the precedent order, which determined the order in which senators spoke in debate. […] The censors had some power to punish failure to declare or for simple moral turpitude either by seizing and auctioning off the person’s property or by degrading their citizenship; it’s unclear if this would mean revoking it or merely reassigning the individual into one of the less favored urban tribes. In the case of senators, since the censors kept the Senate’s rolls, they could strike senators off of the list, generally for what was considered flagrant immoral behavior.

Centurion.
[Wiki]
In modern military structures, a second lieutenant, the lowest commissioned officer, typically commands a platoon of c. 40 soldiers while a sergeant typically leads a squad or section (around 10 soldiers). By contrast in the Roman army, the centurion – a senior NCO like the sergeant promoted from the common soldiers – led a century of 60-80 soldiers; more senior centurions (the primi ordines) commanded an entire cohort (480 soldiers). […] [When a legion is being formed,] each class (except the velites) elect ten senior centurions and ten junior centurions, with the very first fellow elected being the primus pilus, the most senior centurion of the legion. Centurions then handpick their supporting officers (the optio). We are given no clues as to how this election would be accomplished, but the numbers here we’re now dealing with are fairly small (1200 infantry per type, except just 600 triarii), so the procedures here don’t have to be that complex. The centurions then assist the [military] tribunes in breaking up each class into maniples (120 men) and centuries (60 men), with the velites being attached to the maniples of the heavy infantry rather than getting their own, because they’re a supporting force. Meanwhile, the cavalry is being divided as well into ten squadrons, each with three officers (decuriones), who have their own optiones.
[Metatron did a video on What is a Roman Centurion?.]

Cicero, or more formally, Marcus Tullius Cicero.
[Wiki] [Born 3 January 106 BC. Died 7 December 43 BC. Consul 63 BC, Proconsul 51-50 and 49-47 BC.]
Marcus Tullius Cicero was one of the most gifted and successful politicians of his day. Unlike nearly all of his peers in the Roman Senate, his family had not been in Roman politics for generations on generations, but rather was new to it. Cicero’s family was a wealthy one, but hailed from the town of Arpinum, about 60 miles from Rome, making Cicero an outsider to elite Roman politics. He made his name as a legal advocate, rather than (in more typical Roman fashion) as a military man. He was the first of his family to enter the Roman Senate (making him a consulship (the highest Roman office) in thirty years, which should give some sense of the magnitude of that achievement. Moreover, Cicero had managed to get elected in the first year he was eligible, which would have been a banner achievement even for a member of Rome’s traditional upper-class. During that consulship (63 B.C.), he further distinguished himself by foiling a planned coup centered around the influential figure of Catiline (L. Sergius Catilina). […] While many of Cicero’s contemporaries and readers down to the modern era have been impressed by Cicero’s thinking and eloquence, I feel confident in asserting no one – alive or dead – will ever be more impressed by Cicero than Cicero was impressed by himself.
[Historia Civilis did a short video on Cicero’s consulship and on Cicero’s finest hour.]

Cinna, or more properly, Lucius Cornelius Cinna.
[Wiki] [Born c. 130 BC, Consul 87-84 BC, died 84 BC. Ally of Marius against Sulla, and also against his own Consular colleague, Gnaeus Octavius. Defeating Octavius, he held office for four continuous years and orchestrated an extrajudicial purge of his political and personal enemies until his death in office. ]

Cisalpine Gaul.
[Wiki]
The Romans called the region south of the Alps but north of the Rubicon River Cisalpine Gaul and while we think of it as part of Italy, the Romans did not.

Claudius, or more formally Tiberius Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus.
[Wiki] [Born 1 August 10 BC, died 13 October 54 AD. Consul 37 AD, Emperor 41 AD. Fourth emperor of the Julio-Claudian dynasty. Uncle of Caligula. Perhaps best known to modern audiences as the protagonist of Robert Graves’ novels I, Claudius and Claudius The God, later dramatized as a mini-series on British TV.
Thersites the Historian did a video on Claudius. Sean Gabb did a video on Claudius: The First Normal Emperor.]

Cleopatra VII Philopator.
[Wiki]
Cleopatra was born in 69 BC, the middle of three daughters of Ptolemy XII Auletes. In 58 BC her father, by all accounts an incompetent ruler, was briefly overthrown and his eldest daughter (Berenice IV) made queen; Cleopatra went into exile with her father. In 55 BC, with Roman support, Ptolemy XII returned to power and executed Berenice. Ptolemy XII then died in 51, leaving two sons (Ptolemy XIII and XIV, 11 and 9 years old respectively) and his two daughters; his will made Cleopatra queen as joint ruler-wife with Ptolemy XIII (a normal enough arrangement for the Ptolemies). Cleopatra and Ptolemy XIII were at odds, both trying to assert themselves as sole monarch, though by 49 Ptolemy XIII’s faction had largely sidelined Cleopatra in what had become a civil war. Cleopatra traveled to Syria to gather an army and invades Egypt with it in 48, but fails. She is able, however, to ally with Julius Caesar (lately arrived looking for Pompey, who supporters of Ptolemy XIII had killed, to Caesar’s great irritation). Caesar’s army – Cleopatra’s military force is clearly a non-factor by this point – defeats Ptolemy XIII in 47. Caesar appoints Cleopatra as joint ruler with her youngest brother, Ptolemy XIV (he’s 12) and Cleopatra bears Caesar’s son, Ptolemy XV Caesar in 47, who we generally call “Caesarion”. Cleopatra then journeys to Rome late in 46 and seems to have stayed in Rome until after Caesar’s assassination (March 44) and the reading of Caesar’s will (April 44). Ptolemy XIV (the brother) also dies in this year and Cleopatra then co-rules with her son, Caesarion. Cleopatra returned to Egypt, attempted to dispatch troops to aid the Caesarian cause against Brutus and Cassius, but fails and loses all of the troops in 43. She is saved from being almost certainly steamrolled by Brutus and Cassius by their defeat in 42 at Philippi. Cleopatra meets with Marcus Antonius in 41 and they form an alliance, as well as (at some point) a romantic relationship. Cleopatra had three children by Antonius: Cleopatra Selene and Alexander Helios (twins, born in 40) and Ptolemy Philadelphus (born in 36). With Cleopatra’s resources, Antonius [invaded] Parthia in 38 BC [and retreats] back to Roman territory by 36. In 34, Antonius embarks on a massive reorganization of the Roman East, handing over massive portions of Rome’s eastern territory – in name at least – to Cleopatra’s children, a move which infuriated the Roman public and cleared the way politically for Octavian to move against him. Through 33 and 32, both sides prepare for war which breaks out in 31. Cleopatra opts to go with Antonius’ combined land-sea military force and on the 2nd of September 31 BC, solidly outmaneuvered at Actium, she and Antonius are soundly defeated. They flee back to Egypt but don’t raise a new army and both die by suicide when Octavian invades in the following year.
[For a full treatment of Cleopatra’s reign and its impact on Egypt, Dr. Devereaux did a blog post on that. Historia Civilis did a video on the death of Antony and Cleopatra.]

Client and Patron system (Clientela and Patrocinium).
[Wiki]
At Rome as in many societies it was common for less wealthy, less influential citizens to entrust themselves to the protection of more powerful families in a reciprocal exchange. These sorts of patronage relationships were common in many societies, but they often carried a strong social stigma (as in Greece, for instance). In Roman Italy, however, patronage relationships of this sort were much less stigmatized and even elite Romans might, early in their career, be the clients of older, more established Roman politicians. The basic exchange was as followed: the cliens agreed to support their patronus politically (to vote and canvass for him) and militarily (to volunteer to serve when he commanded an army if he needed trustworthy men) and in exchange the patronus agreed to protect his cliens legally (representing him in court, using his influence) and financially (being a source of emergency loans). There were social expectations too: clientes were expected to visit their patronus in the morning at least some of the time and might accompany him to the forum, so the patronus would benefit from the status gained by his crowd of clientes. At the same time, neither cliens nor patronus will call the relationship that in public unless the status divide between them is extremely wide: instead they will insist they are amici (“friends”) whose relationship is amicitia (“friendship”), politely disguising an obviously hierarchical relationship as an equal one to avoid injuring anyone’s honor.

Clodius, or more formally, Publius Clodius Pulcher.
[Wiki] [Born 93 BC, died 52 BC. Clodius was born into a patrician family, but was adopted by a plebeian to be eligible to run for the office of Tribune of the Plebs, which he did for the year 58 BC. He was tried for sacrilege (a capital crime) for intruding into the women-only rituals of the goddess Bona Dea, and was murdered by Milo‘s bodyguards. ]
[Historia Civilis did a short video on Clodius.]

Cohors amicorum.
[Wiki] [The military retinue of a Roman general. This may have been one of the more important ways for young would-be politicians to gain the required ten years of military experience before attempting to rise through the cursus honorum, given that Roman citizens were not normally eligible for conscription until age 17.]

Cohort (Legionary sub-unit).
[Wiki] [Legions began to replace the 120-man maniple with the larger 480-man-cohort as the basic maneuver unit during the second century BC.]
The term “cohort” (κοόρτις, many thanks to Polybius for transliterating this word) first shows up in Polybius, describing a maneuver of Scipio‘s at Ilipa in 206 (Polyb. 11.23.1). But cohorts seem to have been around among the socii for longer than this, as an administrative division – socii were recruited and commanded in cohorts, even if they fought in maniples. When the Romans recruited the socii, they evidently wanted them in bigger batches with their own officer commanding each batch, so the socii organizationally were attached to the legions organized into cohorts with a socius commander, the praefectus cohortis and a paymaster. How this proceeds towards the citizen-legion of cohorts [in Caesar‘s army] is a tricky question, but the old theory that it was Marius has been essentially wholly abandoned by historians. At present the orthodox view is that advanced by M.J.V. Bell in 1965, that the cohort as a tactical unit incubated in Rome’s many wars in Spain over the second century. Our sources do mention cohorts in describing those wars, in passages that were previously dismissed by scholars before Bell as anachronisms by ancient authors writing in the “cohort era” (like Livy, writing in the late first century) and back-projecting that organization. And to be fair, that kind of anachronism is something our sources do a lot. Still, our sources are our sources and Livy is stalwart in talking cohorts in Spain and it would be surprising if he made a mistake on that point. Appian and Frontinus, both less reliable, seem to offer a fair bit of support to Livy’s use of cohorts in that context.

Comitatenses.
[Wiki] [Instituted in the reforms of Constantine, mobile armies of the middle and late empire. They were intended to be moved to back up the stationary limitanei border troops in case of significant enemy incursion into imperial territory, or, y’know, stage a coup or six.]

Comitia Centuriata (Centuriate Assembly).
[Wiki]
The oldest and most important of Rome’s functioning assemblies in [the Middle Republic] was the comitia centuriata or centuriate assembly. Of all of the assemblies the comitia centuriata was the most powerful, capable of doing the most things, but also the slowest and most cumbersome and as a result generally convened only to do the very important things no other assembly could do. At its core, the comitia centuriata assembles the Roman citizenry as an army for the purpose of voting; it is the army-as-voting-body and thus retains unique competence over military issues. Indeed, occasionally the comitia centuriata was referred to as the exercitus, “the army”. In particular, the comitia centuriata elected magistrates with imperium (consuls and praetors) who could thus command armies. It is also the only assembly which can declare war or ratify peace treaties. The comitia centuriata can also pass laws like the other assemblies, but doesn’t seem to have been regularly used for this because its voting procedure is so cumbersome. Still even limited to its exclusive jobs will have meant that this assembly met a few times every year. The comitia centuriata is odd in another respect: evidently its large number of voting units (and higher than normal attendance?) required it to be moved out of the comitium where other assemblies were held on to the campus Martius just outside of Rome. What made the comitia centuriata so cumbersome was its structure: citizens were divided (in the census conducted every five years) into 193 voting blocks called centuries. At some early point, these probably mapped on to military centuries, but by our period that is long past. These centuries were broken down by wealth and age and because they voted as units, with each century effectively awarding one “point” to the winner of its internal vote, this system made some voters more powerful than others. [The power to elect the consuls was passed to the Senate by Augustus in 27BC and became non-elective appointments from that time onward.]

Comitia Curiata (Curiate Assembly).
[Wiki]
Rome’s oldest voting assembly, which was responsible for conferring imperium (the power to command armies and organize law courts; essentially “the power of the kings”) on magistrates. This assembly had been important in the regal period, but by the period of the republic, nearly all of its real powers had been absorbed into other assemblies and it existed in, as Lintott notes, “only in a symbolic and ritualized form”. Technically the comitia curiata was required to approve all grants of imperium to elected magistrates, including dictators; in practice this was a rubber-stamp. Likewise the comitia curiata had a role in ratifying wills and formalizing a certain form of adoption (adrogatio), but this too was mostly a rubber stamp.

Comitia Tributa (Tribal Assembly).
[Wiki]
The comitia tributa was the workhorse of the Roman assemblies, used for the bulk of legislation, because it was less cumbersome. The comitia tributa, like the comitia centuriata could be convened by either a praetor or a consul. It assembled in the comitium, a space in the Roman forum directly outside the Senate house, a location that is going to have some substantial implications. The only “special” competence this assembly had was that it elected curule aediles and quaestors, but in practice it was the regular assemblies that consuls and praetors used to pass legislation. While laws (technically plebiscita, rather than leges, though the Romans are not always careful about these technical terms) passed by the tribunes through the concilium plebis tend to get a lot more focus (because of the remarkable tribunates of the Gracchi, mostly), most legislation was proposed by consuls and praetors – consuls in particular for major legislation – and so was mostly passed through this body. The comitia tributa was called that because the Roman citizens voted here in units called “tribes” (tribus). These tribes were not really tribal units so much as voting districts, with each section of the ager Romanus assigned to a tribe for voting purposes. Census registration was in turn done by tribe-of-residence, which will have created the voter rolls. Originally there had been four urban tribes and just fifteen or sixteen rural tribes (then called pagi, “rural district”). As the ager Romanus expanded, so too did the number of tribes, reaching its full count of 35 in 241 BC. After this point, new land was apportioned into the existing rural tribes rather than assigned to new tribes, with the result that fairly quickly most “tribes” consisted of several disconnected districts. Consequently, for the Middle Republic, there were 35 tribes: four for residents of the city itself and 31 “rural” tribes which covered the countryside (including smaller urban settlements of Roman citizens in that countryside).

Concilium Plebis or Comitia plebis tributa (Plebeian Council).
[Wiki]
The concilium plebis has the same tribal voting structure of four urban and 31 rural tribes, meets in the comitium just like the comitia tributa and votes by tribes in an order selected by lot, just like the comitia tributa. You may then ask why have this assembly if it is going to function almost exactly like the comitia tributa and the answer is that, like many elements of the res publica, it emerged as an ad hoc solution to a problem that then continued to exist afterwards, after the problem had largely faded from prominence. The problem was the “Struggle of the Orders”, a series of political crises running from 494 BC to 287 BC in which the plebeians (particularly wealthy, influential plebeians) pushed for a greater role in the state. In 494 they extracted a compromise from the Senate (at that point, exclusively patrician) that the plebeians would get their own magistrates, the tribunes of the plebs (tribuni plebis) to organize them within the republic and act as a counter-balance to the patrician magistrates (Livy 2.33). Initially, we are told, there were five tribunes, but the number is eventually expanded to ten and one of the powers these tribunes evidently had was the ability to summon their fellow plebeians to an assembly by tribes. Those assemblies could then pass laws for the plebeians only, called plebiscita, which of course fits with the tribune’s role as the magistrates for the plebeians (while the patrician magistrates spoke, in theory, for the entire community). Naturally, the assembly those tribunes call, which of course is the concilium plebis, also elects new tribunes as well as the two plebeian aediles (the matching plebeian pair to the two curule aediles).

Constantine the Great, or more properly, Flavius Constantinus.
[Wiki] [Born 27 February 272 AD. Emperor 25 July 306 AD. Died 22 May 337 AD.]
Constantine is famous for declaring the toleration of Christianity in the empire and being the first emperor to convert to Christianity (only on on his death-bed). What is less well known is that, having selected Christianity as his favored religion, Constantine – seeking unity – promptly set out to unify his new favored religion, by force if necessary. A schism arose as a consequence of Diocletian‘s persecution and – now that Christianity was in the good graces of the emperor – both sides sought Constantine’s aid in suppressing the other in what became known as the Donatism controversy, as the side which was eventually branded heretical supported a Christian bishop named Donatus. Constantine, after failing to get the two groups to agree settled on persecuting one of them (the Donatists) out of existence (which didn’t work either).

Constitutio Antoniniana.
[Wiki]
The Constitutio Antoniniana (212), which extended Roman citizenship to all free persons in the empire, in turn had the effect of wiping out all of the local law codes and instead extending Roman law to cover everyone [in the empire].

Consul.
[Wiki]
Our sources are happy to call Rome’s first magistrates in the early years “consuls”, but in fact we know that the first chief magistrates were in fact praetors. Then there is a break in the mid-400s where the chief executive is vested briefly in a board of ten patricians, the decemviri. This goes poorly and so there is a return to consuls, soon intermixed from 444 with years in which tribuni militares consulari potestate, “military tribunes with consular powers”, were elected instead (the last of these show up in 367 BC, after which the consular sequence becomes regular). [After serving terms as quaestor, aedile, and praetor] comes the consulship, the chief magistrate of the Roman Republic, who also carried Sulla) the consuls led Rome’s primary field armies and were also the movers of major legislation. Achieving the consulship was the goal of every Roman embarking on a political career. This is the only office that gets “repeats”. […] Each consul would also command a major field army. The Romans do not do army-command-by-committee, so under normal circumstances the consuls each had independent command over their own army. The standard strength of a consular army was two legions (8,400 infantry, 600 cavalry) plus two alae of socii (varies but roughly the same size, with somewhat more cavalry), meaning that each consul in the Middle Republic goes to war with a chunky c. 20,000 man army. It was only in rare circumstances that these armies would be combined and such combined “double consular” armies often caused problems if the consuls couldn’t get along or agree on a strategic vision [*cough* Cannae *cough*]. That said, how many troops a consul might have and where he would be expected to take them was largely determined by the Senate. The Senate assigns provincia (think “jobs” not “provinces”) – even to the consuls – and it also directs the quaestors on how resources are to be allocated. That includes conscription (the dilectus) and we see repeatedly that consuls do not feel they can hold a dilectus without the consent of the Senate; they can take volunteers without senatorial approval, but a draft, no. Likewise, unless they can find volunteer funding, they are reliant on quaestors releasing funds, quaestors who are always going to do what the Senate tells them to do. [In the early Imperial period, it became common for consuls to serve only part of their term in office, to be replaced by a consul suffectus as it gave the Emperor a highly valued yet economically inconsequential way to bestow honours on Roman notables.]
[Historia Civilis did a short video on the role of the consul.]

Consular Army (Middle Republic).
[Wiki] [In the Middle Republic, if a consul was assigned a military province, he would usually also be given an army to employ.]
A Roman consular army was a complex machine. It was composed of an infantry line of two legions (in the center) and two socii “wings” (alae) to each side, along with cavalry detachments covering the flanks. Each of those infantry blocks (two legions, two alae) in turn was broken down into thirty separate maneuvering units (called maniples, generally consisting of 120 men; half as many for the triarii), which were in turn subdivided into centuries, but centuries didn’t really maneuver independently. In front of this was a light infantry screening force (the velites). So notionally there were in the heavy infantry of a standard two-legion consular army something like 120 different “chess pieces” that the general could move around on their own and thus the legion was capable of fairly complex tactical maneuvers. You may have noted that word “notionally” because now we get into the limits of drill and synchronized discipline, because this isn’t a system for limitless tactical flexibility of the sort one gets in video games.

Consular Years.
[Wiki]
The Romans counted years two ways. The more common way was to refer to consular years, “In the year of the consulship of X and Y.” Thus the Battle of Cannae happened, “in the year of the consulship of Varro and Paullus”, 216 BC. In the empire, you sometimes also see events referenced by the year of a given emperor. Conveniently for us, we can reconstruct a complete list of all of the consular years and we know rel=”noopener”>all of the emperors, so back-converting a date rendered like this is fairly easy. More rarely, the Romans might date with an absolute chronology, ab urbe condita (AUC) – “from the founding of the city”, which they imagined to have happened in in 753 BC. Since we know that date, this also is a fairly easy conversion.

Consular veto.
[Wiki]
With such sweeping powers the Romans were naturally concerned that the consuls might usurp the state, so they instituted a few basic checks on this. One of these checks is simply the existence of the plebeian tribunes. But also it was clearly established that there must always be two consuls. Not one, not three. Two. If one consul dies, another must be immediately elected; this replacement consul was called a consul suffectus (the year was still dated from the two consuls elected at the beginning, the consules ordinarii). Because only a consul had the authority to hold a consular election, you needed a system to handle situations where both consuls were indisposed at once (either both dead or one dead and one abroad with the army); the solution was a rare official, the interrex, who only had the authority to hold an election for the consulship. Once you’ve ensured there are always two consuls, the next trick is to make sure they can check each other. To ensure that, consuls were given some substantial powers. The most famous of these was veto, Latin for “I forbid!” Just by saying the word, a consul could block any action by any other magistrate, including the other consul. The power had to be exercised in person, which limited it: if you really wanted to prevent your colleague from doing something he really wanted to do, you best be prepared to follow him around in person every day to keep vetoing it. A supercharged form of veto consuls could also exercise was iustitium, declaring a stop to all state business; this could be used to stop any meeting of a popular assembly or of the Senate so long as the assembly had not dispersed into voting groups.

Contubernium.
[Wiki] [A “tent group” of six-to-eight legionaries commanded by a decanus.]

Conubium (Roman marriage).
[Wiki]
Conubium wasn’t a right held by an individual, but a status between two individuals (though Roman citizens could always marry other Roman citizens). In the event that a marriage was lawfully contracted, the children followed the legal status of their father; if no lawfully contracted marriage existed, the child followed the status of their mother. […] Consequently the children of a Roman citizen male in a legal marriage would be Roman citizens and the children of a Roman citizen female out of wedlock would (in most cases; again, there are some quirks) be Roman citizens. Since the most common way for the parentage of a child to be certain is for the child to be born in a legal marriage and the vast majority of legal marriages are going to involve a citizen male husband, the practical result of that system is something very close to, but not quite exactly the same as, a “one parent” rule (in contrast to Athens’ two-parent rule). Notably, the bastard children of Roman women inherited their mother’s citizenship (though in some cases, it would be necessarily, legally, to conceal the status of the father for this to happen), where in Athens, such a child would have been born a nothos and thus a metic – resident non-citizen foreigner. The Romans might extend the right of conubium with Roman citizens to friendly non-citizen populations; Roselaar argues this wasn’t a blanket right, but rather made on a community-by-community basis, but on a fairly large scale – e.g. extended to all of the Campanians in 188 BC. Importantly, Roman colonial settlements in Italy seem to pretty much have always had this right, making it possible for those families to marry back into the citizen body, even in cases where setting up their own community had caused them to lose all or part of their Roman citizenship (in exchange for citizenship in the new community).

Corsica et Sardinia.
[Wiki] [Rome’s second province outside peninsular Italy after Sicily.] In 238 BC, Rome took advantage of Carthaginian distraction (they were at war with their own mercenaries and subjects in North Africa) to seize Corsica and Sardinia. These required fewer troops and so generally got a single commander and thus end up as a single provincia (still understood as an assignment, later to be a province), Corsica et Sardinia.

Crassus, or more formally, Marcus Licinius Crassus.
[Wiki] [Born 115 BC. Died 53 BC at Carrhae during an abortive invasion of Parthia. Consul 70 and 55 BC. Proscribed by Cinna for his support of Sulla, he eventually became one of Sulla’s most trusted lieutenants, using his position to amass a huge fortune from the properties of those proscribed by Sulla. Instrumental in crushing the servile insurrection led by Spartacus, resented Pompey’s attempts to get credit for what he considered his own success. Crassus became even more rich through his control of the informal fire insurance business in Rome itself: his slaves would arrive at the site of the fire but only work to put it out if the owner had already paid the “insurance” or force a sale to Crassus at a vast discount Fires in the crowded conditions of Republican Rome were very frequent indeed. Joined with Caesar and Pompey in the First Triumvirate.]
Crassus famously quipped “no one was truly rich who could not support an army at his own expense” (Plut. Cras. 2.7).

Crisis of the Third Century.
[Wiki]
Beginning in 238, the Roman Empire suffered a long series of crippling civil wars and succession crises collectively known as the Crisis of the Third Century (238-284). At one point, the empire was de facto split into three, with one emperor in Britain and Gaul, another in Italy, and the client kingdom of Palmyra essentially running the Eastern half of the empire under their queen Zenobia. Empires do not usually survive those kinds of catastrophes, but the Roman Empire survived the Crisis, recovered all of its territory (save Dacia) and even enjoyed a period of relative peace afterwards, before trouble started up again.

Curiales.
[Wiki] City governments [outside Rome], which also administered their rural countryside, were run by a town council which consisted of the wealthiest notables of the town – the curiales – in much the same way that the Roman upper-class had dominated the running of the city during the Republic. Roman authority generally protected the curiales and their wealth from the sorts of popular uprisings that tempered many Greek oligarchies in the classical period and in return the curiales managed the population and the collection of taxes for the Romans. The curiales both managed the town affairs and were also expected to use their own wealth to fund public activity and works: maintain temples and baths, fund religious rituals and festivals, and so on. Through the first and second century, that process was mostly responsible for providing the cities of the Roman Empire with the impressive collection of often still-visible public works they boasted: baths, theaters, amphitheaters, aqueducts, temples, courthouses, public spaces and so on. While some of these structures were little more than the public posturing of the elites, many of them were open to the general public and will have represented, in as much as anything before the industrial revolution could, meaningful improvements in the lives of regular people.

Cursus honorum.
[Wiki]
The Romans had a whole system of elected magistrates, a progression of offices in a “career path” they called the cursus honorum. Much like many (but not all) Greek magistracies, these are not boards of officials but rather each official is fully empowered to act in his own sphere during his time in office. The high magistracies of the res publica were (in ascending order of importance) the quaestors (treasury officials), the aediles (public works officials), the tribunes of the plebs, the praetors (mostly handling courts) and the consuls. The praetors and the consuls (and dictators) had a power called imperium, which is what is the vast authority that leads Polybius to say they are nearly monarchs. Imperium – literally the power of command – is the power to use legitimate violence on behalf of the state, either in the form of raising armies (external violence) or organizing courts (internal violence). While the imperium of a consul was superior to that of a praetor (so one could order the other), imperium itself was indivisible: you could not be a court official without also being able to command armies and vice-versa. These were powers that most poleis split up, but in Rome they come together, stuck together by the fact that to the Romans this was one power. That made the consuls – of which there were always two, each with the power to block the actions of the other – very powerful magistrates, almost absurdly so, compared to most Greek magistrates. […] The cursus honorum was, for most of its history, a customary thing, a part of the mos maiorum, rather than a matter of law. But of course the Romans, especially the Roman aristocracy, take both the formal and informal rules of this “game” very seriously. While unusual or spectacular figures could occasionally bend the rules, for most of the third and second century, political careers followed the rough outlines of the cursus honorum, with occasional efforts to codify parts of the process in law during the second century, beginning with the Lex Villia in 180 BC, but we ought to understand that law and others of the sort as mostly attempting to codify and spell out what were traditional practices, like the generally understood minimum ages for the offices, or the interval between holding the same office twice. […] One thing I want to note at the outset is the “elimination contest” structure of the cursus honorum. To take the situation as it stands from 197 to 82, there are dozens and dozens of military tribunes, but just eight quaestors and just six praetors and then just two consuls. At each stage there was thus likely to be increasingly stiff competition to move forward. To achieve an office in the first year of eligibility (in suo anno, “in his own year”) was a major achievement; many aspiring politicians might require multiple attempts to win elections. But of course these are all annual offices, so someone trying again for the second or third time for the consulship is now also competing against multiple years of other failed aspirants plus this new year’s candidates in suo anno. I wanted to note that even given the relatively small(ish) size of Rome’s aristocracy, these offices are fiercely competitive as one gets higher up.
[Historia Civilis did a short video on the cursus honorum.]

Cybele, known to the Romans as Magna Mater.
[Wiki]
The Romans were open about importing gods from Greece and make a clear distinction between gods worshiped in traditional Roman manner and those imported from Greece (a quite small number) and thus whose rituals followed ritus graecus – rituals in Greek fashion. In other cases, the foreign practice was modified to fit the culture it arrived in. The Romans adopted the cult of Cybele, an Anatolian goddess, during the dark days of the Second Punic War (the Senate made that decision based on a consultation with the Sibylline books, a written source of oracular prophecy). Cybele was called Magna Mater (“Great Mother”) in Rome, and it seems made some modifications to her rituals, in particular possibly limiting the role of the Galli (eunuch priests) whose rituals and style seemed decidedly “unRoman” (though I should note that the scholarship here is contested and the issue and evidence complex). The normal technical term for this kind of religious borrowing is syncretism, and it is a sort of interweaving of religious traditions that polytheisms both ancient and modern are exceptionally capable of. It is simply not hard to add one more god or one more ritual into a religious system that already assumes the existence of innumerable gods.

Dacia.
[Wiki] [One of the last areas of expansion of the Roman Empire, Dacia was an independent kingdom on the border of the Empire, conquered by Trajan in 106 AD, and remained within the empire until the mid 270s. Modern day Romania occupies most of the territory of the former kingdom and province.]

Decemviri.
[Wiki]
[O]ur sources tend to retroject the cursus honorum back to the origins of the republic in 509BC, but it’s fairly clear in those early years that the Romans are still working out the structure of their government. For instance our sources are happy to call Rome’s first magistrates in the early years “consuls“, but in fact we know that the first chief magistrates were in fact praetors. Then there is a break in the mid-400s where the chief executive is vested briefly in a board of ten patricians, the decemviri. This goes poorly and so there is a return to consuls, soon intermixed from 444 with years in which tribuni militares consulari potestate, “military tribunes with consular powers”, were elected instead (the last of these show up in 367 BC, after which the consular sequence becomes regular).

Deification of the Emperor (the Imperial Cult).
[Wiki]
Nothing in ancient religion strikes my students as so utterly strange and foreign as [divinized kings and emperors]. The usual first response of the modern student is to treat the thing like a sham – surely the king knows he is not divine or invested with some mystical power, so this most all be a con-job aimed at shoring up the legitimacy of the king. But the line between great humans and minor gods is blurry, and it is possible to cross that line. It is not necessary to assume that it was all an intentional sham. […] To be clear, Roman emperors were not divinized while they were alive. Augustus had his adoptive father, Julius Caesar divinized (this practice would repeat for future emperors divinizing their predecessors), but not himself; the emperor Vespasian, on his deathbed, famously made fun of this by declaring as a joke, “Alas! I think I’m becoming a god” (Suet. Vesp. 23.4). And yet, at the same time, outside of Rome, even Augustus – the first emperor – received cult and divine honors, either to his person or to his genius (remember, that’s not how smart he is, but the divine spirit that protects him and his family). I think it is common for us, sitting outside of these systems, to view this sort of two-step dance, “I’m not a god, but you can give me divine honors in the provinces and call me a god, just don’t do it too loudly” as fundamentally cynical – and so some degree it might have been; Augustus was capable of immense cynicism. […] The fundamental ingredient in the relationship between humans and gods in these religions is one of an imbalance in power: the gods have it and we don’t. That power is expressed in the numen, the sort of influence to change the world – in large ways or in small ones – through merely a will, or a whim, or (literally) a nod. Ritual – through do ut des exchange – provides the means by which humans might manage that power imbalance and even persuade the gods to use some of their power for our benefit. Now think about people in the provinces. The emperor is remote and distant, much like a god, and his power is vast. Augustus (the first emperor and thus the model for imperial cult) could with a nod destroy your town, or greatly improve your life. An order from him might double your taxes – or cancel them. It might raise your town up in status, or order it razed or relocated. For someone in the provinces, facing that vast power imbalance and the same sort of ineffable with-a-nod kind of influence over human affairs, applying the rubric of cult observance isn’t a huge leap of logic to make. After all, if it works with other Powers-That-Be, why not with Augustus? […] It is important to note that the emperor doesn’t suddenly rise to the level of one of the great gods. Indeed, much of imperial cult recognizes the sort of “borderline” nature of the emperor’s nodding-power by directing the cult not to the person of the emperor, but to the genius which watches over him. When an emperor dies – or “becomes a god” in Vespasian’s phrasing – that power, which had been temporal, becomes spiritual and thus the emperor becomes a god. […] Much of the apparent silliness of the idea of a divine emperor is resolved by remembering that no one thought he suddenly gained the ability to throw thunderbolts. Why then is imperial cult so pervasive? Well, it gets to the immediateness of imperial power. Household gods were very small gods – but their cult was pervasive because they were so close to you, even though they were limited in scope. Likewise, though the emperor was not a god on the order of Jupiter or Mars, he was also not distant like Jupiter or Mars – you could write a letter to him, and be reasonably sure that you’d receive a formal response (there was an office for this, the office ab epistulis (lit “for letters”) in both Greek and Latin).

Dictator (customary, 501-202BC).
[Wiki]
The dictator was a special official, appointed only in times of crisis (typically a military crisis [and typically for only six months or until the causa was dealt with]), who could direct the immediate solution to that crisis. Rome’s government was in many ways unlike a modern government; in most modern governments the activities of the government are carried out by a large professional bureaucracy which typically reports to a single executive, be that a Prime Minister or a President or what have you. By contrast, the Roman Republic divided the various major tasks between a bunch of different magistrates, each of whom was directly elected and notionally had full authority to carry out their duties within that sphere, independent of any of the other magistrates. Notionally, the more senior magistrates (particularly the consuls) could command more junior magistrates, but this wasn’t a “direct-report” sort of relationship, but rather an unusual imposition of a more senior magistrate on a less senior one, governed as much by the informal auctoritas of the consul as by law. In that context, you can see the value, when rapid action was required, of consolidating the direction of a given crisis into a single individual. The dictator was appointed to respond to a specific issue or causa, the formula for which are occasionally recorded in our sources. The most common was rei gerundae causa, “for the business to be done” which in practice meant a military campaign or crisis. In cases where the consuls were absent (out on campaign), a dictator might also be nominated comitiorum habendorum causa, “for having an assembly”, that is, to preside over elections for the next year’s consuls, so that neither of the current consuls had to rush back to the city to do it. Dictators might also be appointed to do a few religious tasks which required someone with imperium. Less commonly but still significantly, a dictator might be appointed seditionis sedenae causa, “to quell sedition”. Of the roughly 85 dictatorships in the “customary” period from 501 to 202, 0% of them seized control of the state, led or participated in a major violent insurrection.

Dictator (irregular, 202-44BC).
[Wiki] [The last two dictators of the Roman Republic, Sulla and Caesar, both attempted to change (that is, vastly enlarge) the powers and duration of the dictatorship to benefit their own goals. Sulla’s changes didn’t even out-last him, although he had laid down the office by then, and Caesar’s move to be appointed on a permanent basis lasted a month before he was assassinated. The office was formally banned by Antony as sole Consul shortly after Caesar’s assassination, and Augustus refused the title when it was offered to him by the Senate in 22BC.] Between 501 and 202 BC, the Romans appointed roughly 70 different men as dictator for about 85 terms (some dictators served more than once) through a regular customary process. Then, between 201 and 83 BC, a period of 118 years, the Romans appoint no dictators; the office dies out. Then, from 82-79 and from 49 to 44, two dictators are appointed, decidedly not in keeping with the old customary process (but taking the old customary name of dictator) and exercising a level of power not traditionally associated with the older dictators. It is effectively a new office, wearing the name of an old office.

Dilectus.
[Link]
The dilectus was a regular [military conscription] process [in the Republic] which happened every year at a regular time [in the winter, to allow most recruit candidates to attend]. The Romans did have a system to rapidly raise new troops in an emergency (it was called a tumultus), where the main officials, the consuls, could just grab any citizen into their army in a major emergency. But emergencies like that were very rare; for the most part the Roman army was filled out by the regular process of the dilectus, which happened annually in tune with Rome’s political calendar. That regularity is going to be important to understand how this process is able to move so many people around: because it is regular, people could adapt their schedules and make provisions for a process that happened every year.

Diocletian, or more formally, Gaius Aurelius Valerius Diocletianus.
[Wiki] [Born 22 December 242 AD. Emperor 20 November 284 AD to retirement on 1 May 305. Died 3 December 311 AD. His Edict on Maximum Prices in 301 was an economic disaster but the details about prices in the edict have been very useful to economic historians.]
Diocletian had opted to reform the empire’s administration with a much more intensive, top-down, bureaucratic approach, which imposed further costs. Taxes had become heavy (although elites were increasingly allowed to dodge them), the economy was weak and revenues were short. (I feel the need to note that I increasingly regard Diocletian (r. 284-305) as a ruinous emperor, even though he lacked the normal moralizing character flaws of “bad emperors”. While he was active, dedicated and focused, almost all of his reforms turned out to be quite bad ideas in the long run even before one gets to the Great Persecution. His currency reforms were catastrophic, his administrative reforms were top-heavy, his tax plan depended on a regular census which was never regular and the tetrarchy was doomed from its inception. Diocletian was pretty much a living, “Well, You Tried” meme. [Under Diocletian (r. 284-305)], the emperor was set visually apart, ruling from palaces in special regalia and wearing crowns, while at the same time the provinces were reorganized into smaller units that could be ruled much more directly. Diocletian intervened in the daily life of the empire in a way that emperors before largely had not. When his plan to reform the Roman currency failed, sparking hyper-inflation (whoops!), Diocletian responded with his Edict on Maximum Prices, an effort to fix the prices of many goods empire wide. Now previous emperors were not averse to price fixing, mind you, but such efforts had almost always been restricted to staple goods (mostly wheat) in Rome itself or in Italy (typically in response to food shortages). Diocletian attempted to enforce religious unity by persecuting Christians [and] Diocletian planned a tax system based on assessments of individual landholders based on a regular census; when actually performing a regular census proved difficult, Constantine responded by mandating that coloni – the tenant farmers and sharecroppers of the empire – must stay on the land they had been farming so that their landlords would be able to pay the taxes, casually abrogating a traditional freedom of Roman citizens for millions of farmers out of administrative convenience. Of course all of this centralized direction demanded bureaucrats and the bureaucracy during this period swelled to probably around 35,000 officials (compared to the few hundred under Augustus!).]

Disciplina.
[Wiki on the minor goddess who was the personification of this Roman virtue]
The “constraining virtues” which channel virtus are things which can be learned or trained – they are products of discipline (Latin: disciplina), both self-discipline and discipline imposed from without. Indeed, in a military context, the Romans understand virtus and disciplina (“courage” and then “military discipline”) to be forever in tension in the good soldier: the fiery desire to be at the enemy restrained by the need to follow orders. The best Roman soldier is like an attack dog, straining at the edge of his leash – that disciplina – waiting for the general (the older man with that sapientia) to let go at the right moment. In civilian life, these qualities – fairness, justice, prudence, temperance, self-restraint – are precisely what the bonae artes are supposed to teach, while in military life, they’re taught by (and also become) disciplina.

Divination.
[Wiki]
Divination is often casually defined in English as “seeing into the future”, but the root of the word gives a sense of its true meaning: divinare shares the same root as the word “divine” (divinus, meaning “something of, pertaining or belonging to a god”); divination is more rightly the act of channeling the divine. If that gives a glimpse of the future, it is because the gods are thought to see that future more clearly. But that distinction is crucial, because what you are actually doing in a ritual involving divination is not asking questions about the future, but asking questions of the gods. Divination is not an exercise in seeing, but in hearing – that is, it is a communication, a conversation, with the divine.

Dominate (the late Roman Empire).
[Wiki] [The late Roman Empire, generally noted as beginning with the reign of Diocletian (284-305 AD) and his creation of the Tetrarchy, with the empire divided into east and west, each having its own emperor (the “Augustus“) and each emperor having a designated junior Caesar successor.]

Donativum.
[Wiki] [Upon the death of the current emperor, it became customary for the new emperor (in peaceful times) or the ambitious would-be emperor to provide “gifts” of money to the army and/or the Praetorian Guard.]

Do ut des (“I give, so that you might give”).
Do ut des is Latin and it means, “I give, so that you might give.” A working car has many parts, but only one engine: everything else (the wheels, the transmission, the radiator) is there to facilitate the engine, which generates the power. In the same way, a polytheistic ritual has many parts, but only one engine. All of the smaller parts are important – your car will not run long without a radiator or at all without wheels – but it is the engine that provides the power. This interaction – I give, so that you might give – is the engine of the ritual. Now, I don’t want you to get too wrapped up in the tense of that Latin phrase: the order is fluid. I might promise to give tomorrow if the god gives today (that’s a form of vow), or I might promise to give today if the god gives tomorrow, or I even give today for something the god did for me last week, unasked for, just to make sure we’re square. So my giving and the gods giving, either can be in the past, present or future. The tense is negotiable. The key here is the concept of exchange. The core of religious practice is thus a sort of bargain, where the human offers or promises something and (hopefully) the god responds in kind, in order to effect a specific outcome on the world.

Epicureanism.
[Wiki]
True atheism was extremely rare in the pre-modern world – the closest ancient philosophy gets to is Epicureanism, which posits that the gods absolutely do exist, but they simply do not care about you (the fancy theological term here is immanence (the state of being manifest in the material world). Epicureans believed the gods existed, but were not immanent, that they did not care about and were little involved with the daily functioning of the world we inhabit). But the existence of the gods was self-evident in the natural phenomena of the world. Belief was never at issue.

Equites or Equestrian Order.
[Wiki] [The “in-between” class of patricians who were not of senatorial rank. Under Augustus, the patricians were formally divided by wealth into the “senatorial order” and the “equestrian order”, but this was likely a regularization of something that had been customary for quite some time.]

Etruria.
[Wiki]
Etruscan communities – independent cities joined together in defensive confederations before being [forcibly] converted into allies of the Romans – clustered on north-western coast of Italy. They had a language entirely unrelated to Latin – or indeed, any other known language – and their own unique religion and culture. The Romans adopted some portions of that culture (in particular the religious practices) but the Etruscans remained distinct well into the first century. While a number of Etruscan communities backed the Samnites in the Third Samnite War (298-290 BC) culminating in the Battle of Sentinum (295) as a last-ditch effort to prevent Roman hegemony over the peninsula, the Etruscans subsequently remained quite loyal to Rome, holding with the Romans in both the Second Punic and Social Wars. It is important to keep in mind that while we tend to talk about “the Etruscans” (as the Romans sometimes do) they would have thought of themselves first through their civic identity, as Perusines, Clusians, Populinians and so on (much like their Greek contemporaries).
[Thersites the Historian did a video on Etruscan cities and civilization.]

Fasces.
[Wiki]
One of the ways that legal power was visually communicated in Rome was through lictors, attendants to the magistrates who carried the fasces, a bundle of rods (with an axe inserted when outside the sacred bounds of the city, called the pomerium). [The number of lictors indicated the relative power of the office-holder: 12 lictors for consuls, six lictors for praetors, one less for pro-magistrates of each degree. The axe indicated the power of the magistrate to impose capital punishment outside the pomerium.]

“Fall” of the Roman Empire.
[Wiki]
This vision of the collapse of Roman political authority in the West may seem a bit strange to readers who grew up on the popular narrative which still imagines the “Fall of Rome” as a great tide of “barbarians” sweeping over the empire destroying everything in their wake. It’s a vision that remains dominant in popular culture (indulged, for instance, in games like Total War: Attila; strategy games in particular tend to embrace this a-historical annihilation-and-replacement model of conquest). But actually culture is one of the areas where the “change and continuity” crowd have their strongest arguments: finding evidence for continuity in late Roman culture into the early Middle Ages is almost trivially easy. The collapse of Roman authority did not mark a clean cultural break from the past, but rather another stage in a process of cultural fusion and assimilation which had been in process for some time. […] There really is a very strong argument to be made that the “Romans” and indeed Roman culture never left Rome’s lost western provinces – the collapse of the political order did not bring with it the collapse of the Roman linguistic or cultural sphere, even if it did fragment it. […] There is continuity here, as new kings mostly established regimes that used the visual language, court procedure and to a degree legal and bureaucratic frameworks of Late Roman imperial rule. On the other hand, those new kingdoms fairly clearly lacked the resources, even with respect to their smaller territories, to engage in the kind of state activity that the Late Roman state had, for instance, towards the end of the fourth century. Instead, central administration largely failed in the West, with the countryside gradually becoming subject to local rural magnates (who might then be attached to the king) rather than civic or central government.

Fides.
[Wiki]
This is “faith, trustworthiness”. Fundamentally it is the quality of keeping one’s word and bargains – important in a Roman culture that runs on the reciprocal obligations of patrons and clients. The Romans talked so much about fides in their diplomacy that it sometimes annoyed the Greeks (Diod. Sic. 23.1.2), but this was a core value too which restrained virtus: sometimes the rush to action must be restrained by the need to keep one’s word.

Flamen.
[Wiki] [A flamen was a priest of one of the eighteen official religious orders in Rome. Three of these were flamines maiores for the most important deities, Jupiter, Mars, and Quirinus, and the rest were considered flamines minores. Flamines had many restrictions on their behaviour, including things like not leaving the pomerium, riding horses, or touching metal. Julius Caesar was appointed flamen dialis, high priest of the cult of Jupiter but forced to resign during Sulla‘s dictatorship.]

Foederati.
[Wiki]
After the Constitutio Antoniniana, there was no longer much need for the auxilia, as all [free adult male] persons in the empire were citizens, and so the structure distinction between the legions and other formations fades away (part of this is also the tendency of the legions in this period to be progressively split up into smaller units called vexillationes, meaning that the unit-sizes wouldn’t have been so different). But during the fourth century, with frontier pressures building, the Romans again looked for ways to utilize the manpower and fighting skill of non-Romans. What is striking here is that whereas in some ways […] the auxilia had represented almost a revival of the attitudes which had informed the system for the socii, the new system that emerged for using foreign troops, called foederati (“treaty men”) did not draw on the previously successful auxilia-system (which, to be clear, by this point had been effectively gone for more than a century). Instead, the Romans signed treaties with Germanic-speaking kings, exchanging chunks of (often depopulated, war-torn frontier) land in exchange for military service. Since these troops were bound by treaty (foedus) they were called foederati. They served in their own units, under their own leaders, up to their kings. Consequently, all of the mechanisms that encouraged the auxilia to adopt Roman practices and identify with the Roman Empire were lost; these men might view Rome as a friendly ally (at times) but they were never encouraged to think of themselves as Roman. […] Never fully incorporated into the Roman army and under the command of their own kings, they proved deeply unreliable allies. Pitting one set of foederati against the next could work in the short-term, but in the long term, without any plan to permanently incorporate the foederati into Roman society, fragmentation was inevitable. The Roman abandonment of the successful older systems for managing diverse armies turned the foederati from a potential source of vital manpower into the central cause of imperial collapse in the West.

Forum Romanum.
[Wiki]
There is no clear evidence of any archaeological discontinuity between the old settlements on the hills and the newly forming city; these seem to have been the same people. The Palatine hill, which is “chosen” by Romulus in the legend and would be the site of the houses of Rome’s most important and affluent citizens during the historical period, seems to have been the most prominent of these settlements even at this early stage. A key event in this merging comes in the mid-600s, when these hill-communities begin draining the small valley that lay between the Capitoline and Palatine hills; this valley would naturally have been marshy and quite useless but once drained, it formed a vital meeting place at the center of these hill communities – what would become the Forum Romanum. That public works project – credited by the Romans to the semi-legendary king Tarquinius Priscus (Plin. Natural History 36.104ff) – is remarkably telling, both because it signals that there was enough of a political authority in Rome to marshal the resources to see it done (suggesting somewhat more centralized government, perhaps early kings) and because the new forum formed the meeting place and political center for these communities, quite literally binding them together into a single polity. It is at this point that we can really begin speaking of Rome and Romans with confidence.

Galea (helmet).
[Wiki.
The galea was originally a leather helmet, while a cassis was a metal one. Later helmets could be referred to by either name.] Roman infantry wore several different types of helmet over the centuries, including the Montefortino (4th century BC to at least the first century AD), Coolus (3rd century BC to at least the first century AD), Gallic (first century BC to at least the early second century AD), Italic (late first century BC to at least the early third century AD), and Ridge styles (earliest appearance is on coins of Constantine).
[Metatron did a video on Roman helmets – Montefortino, Coolus and Imperial.]

Genius (“little” gods).
[Wiki]
There were other forms of little gods [than the Lares and Penates] – gods of places, for instance. The distinction between a place and the god of that same place is often not strong – when Achilles enrages the god of the river Scamander (Iliad 20), the river itself rises up against him; both the river and the god share a name. The Romans cover many small gods under the idea of the genius (pronounced gen-e-us, with the “g” hard like the g in gadget); a genius might protect an individual or family (we’ll discuss the genius of the emperor in a moment) or even a place (called a genius locus). Water spirits, governing bodies of water great and humble, are particularly common – the fifty Nereids of Greek practice, or the Germanic Nixe or Neck. Other gods might not be particular to a place, but to a very specific activity, or even moment. Thus Arculus, the god of strongboxes, or Vagitanus who gives the newborn its first cry or Forculus, god of doors (distinct from Janus and Limentinus who oversaw thresholds and Cardea, who oversaw hinges). All of these are what I tend to call small gods: gods with small powers over small domains, because – just as there are hierarchies of humans, there are hierarchies of gods. Fortunately for the practitioner, bargaining for the aid of these smaller gods was often quite a lot cheaper than the big ones. A Jupiter or Neptune might demand sacrifices in things like bulls or the dedication of grand temples – prohibitively expensive animals for any common Roman or Greek – but the Lares and Penates might be befriended with only a regular gift of grain or a libation of wine. A small treat, like a bowl of milk, is enough to propitiate a brownie. Many rituals to gods of small places amount to little more than acknowledging them and their authority, and paying the proper respect.

Gladius Hispaniensis (infantry short sword).
[Wiki]
For the curious, the Romans will, probably in the very late third century [BC], change out those La Tène swords for a Spanish sword – the famed gladius Hispaniensis – which was itself a variant of early La Tène swords. So the Romans trade an Italian variant of the early La Tène sword for a Spanish variant of the early La Tène sword (while in the actual La Tène material culture sphere, they’ve moved on to what we call the Middle La Tène sword, a longer, parallel-edged variation of the earlier design). And the best part is, if you wait long enough (well into the imperial period) the Romans are eventually going to adopt the spatha (which had been in use among Roman auxiliaries for a long time) which seems to be yet another variant of the La Tène sword (though in this case, of the late La Tène sword), which in turn becomes the ancestor of the lion’s share of the European sword tradition. So it’s basically all La Tène swords, all the way down.
[ScholaGladiatoria did several videos on the gladius, including: development of Roman swords from the gladius to the spatha, Is The Roman Gladius (Sword) Really That Good?, Roman Gladius Hispaniensis sword (and importance of the Scutum), and The Roman Gladius (Short Sword) in its correct Historical Context.]

Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus (often referred to as “The Gracchi”).
[Wiki] [Tiberius, born c. 160, died 133 BC. Gaius, born c. 154, died 121 BC. Controversial Tribunes of the Plebs (Tiberius in 133 and Gaius in 122-121 BC) who were both killed in street violence after championing social reforms. The effectiveness of their proposed changes were less than hoped-for, according to more recent scholarship, due to an apparent misdiagnosis of the actual cause of the observed social problems:]
[Nathan Rosenstein] begins by demonstrating that based on what we know the issue with the structure of agriculture in Roman Italy was not, strictly speaking “low productivity” so much as inefficient labor allocation (a note you will have seen me come back to a lot): farms too small for the families – as units of labor – which farmed them. That is a very interesting observation generally, but his point in reaching it is to show that this is why Roman can conscript these fellows so aggressively: this is mostly surplus labor so pulling it out of the countryside does not undermine these households (usually). But that pulls a major pillar – that heavy Roman conscription undermined small freeholders in Italy in the Second Century – out of the traditional reading of the land reforms. Instead, Rosenstein then moves on to modeling Roman military mortality, arguing that, based on what we know, the real problem is that Rome spends the second century winning a lot. As a result, lots of young men who normally might have died in war – certainly in the massive wars of the third century (Pyrrhic and Punic) – survived their military service, but remained surplus to the labor needs of the countryside and thus a strain on their small households. These fellows then started to accumulate. Meanwhile, the nature of the Roman census (self-reported on the honor system) and late second century Roman military service (often unprofitable and dangerous in Spain, but not with the sort of massive armies of the previous centuries which might cause demographically significant losses) meant that more Romans might have been dodging the draft by under-reporting in the census. Which leads to his conclusion: when Tiberius Gracchus looks out, he sees both large numbers of landless Romans accumulating in Rome (and angry) and also falling census rolls for the Roman smallholder class and assumes that the Roman peasantry is being economically devastated by expanding slave estates and his solution is land reform. But what is actually happening is population growth combined with falling census registration, which in turn explains why the land reform program doesn’t produce nearly as much change as you’d expect, despite being more or less implemented.

Gravitas.
[Wiki]
Roman political speech is full of words to express authority without violence. Most obviously is the word auctoritas, from which we get authority. J.E. Lendon (in Empire of Honor: The Art of Government in the Roman World (1997)), expresses the complex interaction whereby the past performance of virtus (“strength, worth, bravery, excellence, skill, capacity”, which might be military, but it might also be virtus demonstrated in civilian fields like speaking, writing, court-room excellence, etc.) produced honor which in turn invested an individual with dignitas (“worth, merit”), a legitimate claim to certain forms of deferential behavior from others (including peers; two individuals both with dignitas might owe mutual deference to each other). Such an individual, when acting or especially speaking was said to have gravitas (“weight”), an effort by the Romans to describe the feeling of emotional pressure that the dignitas of such a person demanded; a person speaking who had dignitas must be listened to seriously and respected, even if disagreed with in the end.

Haruspicy.
[Wiki]
Perhaps the most important form of divination in Rome was haruspicy [originally adopted from the Etruscans]. Performed by a haruspex, haruspicy was the art of determining the will of the gods by examining the entrails of animals – particularly sacrificed animals and most commonly (but not exclusively) the liver. The most common thing haruspicy might tell you is if the sacrifice was accepted: a malformed or otherwise ill-omened liver might indicate that the ritual had failed and that the god had refused the sacrifice. Remember that the do ut des system is essentially one of bargaining with the gods, and the god you are bargaining with always has the option of simply refusing the bargain. This might mean some failure in the mechanics of the ritual (necessitating it be performed again), or that the god had been offended in some way, but it might also mean something more. A lot of sacrificial rituals were done at the outset of important tasks – before battles, political events, etc. What the god might be telling you then with a failed sacrifice is “DO NOT PROCEED”. The practitioner is given a bit of wiggle room on how to interrupt a failed sacrifice in this way: it might mean “don’t attack at all”, but it might also mean “don’t attack now”. Roman generals, ready to attack, might repeat the same ritual over and over again, like a runner at the start of a race waiting for the “go” signal. But more information was potentially available, because the exact nature of the liver and its quality might signal more things. In Rome, it was understood that the very best knowledge in this regard came from the Etruscans (an example of how antiquity lends credibility to ritual – Etruscan religion was old even to the Romans, and thus had acquired a strong reputation). The reading of a liver could be complex: we find “liver models” from both Italy and the Near East with guidance on how to interpret different parts of the liver of a sacrificed animal. This could be fairly specific: famously, it was haruspex who warned Caesar about the danger of the Ides of March (Seut. Caes. 81.2).

Hastati.
[Wiki. Like most Mediterranean armies, the Roman infantry were initially armed with a spear (the hasta) and shield.] The heavy infantry ([in three classes,] hastati, principes and triarii) carry a large oval shield (the scutum), a sword (the gladius Hispaniensis, a versatile cut-and-thrust sword), two heavy javelins (pila), and wear both a metal helmet (the ubiquitous bronze Montefortino-type) and body armor. Poor soldiers, Polybius tells us, wear what in Latin is a pectorale (and thus in English a “pectoral”); this gets represented as a single smallish bronze plate over the upper-chest, but our evidence for this equipment suggests a more complete cuirass consisting of a front and back plate joined by side and shoulder plates, with a broad armored belt protecting the belly, a sort of “articulated breastplate”.

Honor.
Honos or honor (same word, different forms; it means honor). Honor was a thing the Romans felt they could almost see or feel, an emotional force around a person of great worth (great dignus). In Roman society, the social demand to defer to an individual understood to have greater honor was strong (and so, of course, everyone wants to prove themselves to be that sort of person). A person with honor had an expectation of a certain inviolability, a sort of social force-field around them which was their dignitas (literally: “worthiness”) – that their achievements had put them above, for instance, petty insults or injuries. An exceptional concentration of honor, so much that it could cow almost anyone into deference, was termed auctoritas (“authority”), a quality in the Republic wielded collectively by the Senate (the auctoritas Senatus) and in the imperial period by well-regarded emperors (like Augustus). We might view Augustus’ claim that he ruled more by auctoritas than by force somewhat cynically, but I suspect it was often actually true: Augustus had achieved exceptional facta through his virtus (winning the civil wars, expanding Rome’s borders, reorganizing the Roman government, then presiding over a long period of peace and prosperity) and so most Romans would have felt the tremendous pressure of his intense honor to defer to him. And of course recognizing that a person is possessed of honor, dignitas and auctoritas, that itself is a quality of the constraining virtues.

Imperium.
[Wiki]
Imperium literally meaning a command or control; imperium comes from the Latin verb imperio (lit: “to order or command”). Thus imperium was a sphere of command over others. In Roman politics, this could mean an individual had the authority to command an army or to set up courts (consuls, praetors and dictators had this sort of imperium), but the Romans understood their empire as a sort of command exercised by the Senate and People of Rome [“SPQR”] over non-Roman people, thus they called that too imperium – an imperium of the Roman people (imperium populi Romani), crucially over the non-Roman people; once cannot, after all, have imperium over one’s self. An imperium of the Roman people must be an imperium over someone else. […] That power was represented visually around the person of magistrates with imperium through the lictors (Latin: lictores), attendants who follows magistrates with imperium, mostly to add dignity to the office but who also could act as the magistrates “muscle” if necessary. The lictors carried the fasces, a set of sticks bundled together in a rod; often in modern depictions the bundle is thick and short but in ancient artwork it is long and thin, the ancient equivalent of a police-man’s less-lethal billy club. That, notionally non-lethal but still violent, configuration represented the imperium-bearing magistrate’s civil power within the pomerium (the sacred boundary of the city). When passing beyond the pomerium, an axe was inserted into the bundle, turning the the non-lethal crowd-control device into a lethal weapon, reflective of the greater power of the imperium-bearing magistrate to act with unilateral military violence outside of Rome (though to be clear the consul couldn’t just murder you because you were on your farm; this is symbolism). The consuls were each assigned 12 lictors, while praetors got 6. Pro-magistrates had one fewer lictor than their magistrate versions to reflect that, while they wielded imperium, it was of an inferior sort to the actual magistrate of the year. […] While in office, any Roman with imperium is immune from prosecution, but can be prosecuted immediately on leaving office for any crimes they may have done while in office. Consequently, a consul’s freedom of action is going to be limited by their concern about potentially having to face a jury after their one-year term is complete. Even if they aren’t worried about that, once their year is done they go back to being just another senator, so good relations with the rest of the Senate is a good idea.

Imperator.
[Wiki]
It would be reasonable to assume that the Latin word for a person with imperium would be imperator because that’s the standard way Latin words form. And I will say, from the perspective of a person who has to decide at the beginning of each thing I write what circumlocution I am going to use to describe “magistrate or pro-magistrate with imperium“, it would be remarkably fortunate if imperator meant that, but it doesn’t. Instead, imperator in Latin ends up swallowed by its idiomatic meaning of “victorious general”, as it was normal in the republic for armies to proclaim their general as imperator after a major victory (which set the general up to request a triumph from the Senate). In the imperial period, this leads to the emperors monopolizing the term, as all of the armies of Rome operated under their imperium and thus all victory accolades belonged to the emperor. [This was in part to deter commanders on the frontier from launching campaigns specifically to receive a Triumph. Under the empire, the best that was awarded were Ornamenta triumphalia (“Triumphal ornaments”) rather than a full Triumph.] That in turn leads to imperator becoming part of the imperial title, from where it gives us our word “emperor”. That said, the circumlocution I use here, because this isn’t a formal genre and I can, is “imperium-haver”. I desperately wish I could use that in peer-reviewed articles, but I fear no editor would let me (while Reviewer 2 will predictably object to “general”, “commander” or “governor” for all being modern coinages).

In suo anno (“in his year”).
One thing I want to note is the “elimination contest” structure of the cursus honorum. To take the situation as it stands from 197 to 82BC, there are dozens and dozens of military tribunes, but just eight quaestors and just six praetors and then just two consuls. At each stage there was thus likely to be increasingly stiff competition to move forward. To achieve an office in the first year of eligibility (in suo anno, “in his own year”) was a major achievement; many aspiring politicians might require multiple attempts to win elections. But of course these are all annual offices, so someone trying again for the second or third time for the consulship is now also competing against multiple years of other failed aspirants plus this new year’s candidates in suo anno. [E]ven given the relatively small(ish) size of Rome’s aristocracy, these offices are fiercely competitive as one gets higher up.

Interrex.
[Wiki]
Constitutionally, there were always [supposed] to be two consuls and consular elections had to be presided over by a consul. [In the rare situation where this was not true,] the customary solution to this problem was the appointment of an interrex, a five-day-long office which essentially only had the authority to hold elections for new consuls in the absence of consuls or an already appointed dictator. Prior to 82, the last confirmed interrex we know of was in 216, but there may have been another in 208, in either case this also a long-unused office. All the interrex is supposed to do is hold an assembly of the comitia centuriata which can elect new consuls; they did not have any further authority.

Italy or Peninsular Italy (Middle Republic).
Quite a few people look at a map like that, classify most of Rome’s territories as “Italian” and assume there is a large, homogeneous ethnic core there (except, I suspect, anyone who has actually been to Italy and is aware that Italy is hardly homogeneous, even today!). But Roman Italy in 218 B.C. was nothing like that. Peninsular Italy (which doesn’t include the Po River Valley) contained a bewildering array of cultures and peoples: at least three distinct religious systems (Roman, Etruscan, Greek), half a dozen languages (some completely unrelated to each other) and many clearly distinct cultural and ethnic groups divided into communities with strong local identities and fierce local rivalries (if you want more on this, check out Salmon, The Making of Roman Italy (1982), Fronda, Between Rome and Carthage (2010), and Keaveney, Rome and the Unification of Italy (2005)).

Iuniores.
[Among] Roman citizen males in the third or second century, not all [are] liable for general conscription [in the dilectus], which was restricted to the iuniores – Roman citizen men between the ages of 17 and 46; seniores in theory could be conscripted, but in practice only were in an emergency. In practice the number is probably lower still as unless things were truly dire, men in their late 30s or 40s with several years of service could be pretty confident they wouldn’t be called and might as well stay home and rely on a neighbor of family member to report back [from the dilectus in the unlikely event they were called.

Jugurthine War (112-106 BC).
[Wiki. Conflict between the Roman Republic and Jugurtha, King of Numidia.]

Julian “the Apostate”, or more formally, Flavius Claudius Julianus.
[Wiki] [Born 331 AD. Emperor 3 November 361 – 26 June 363 AD. Julian was the last non-Christian emperor of Rome and attempted to revive the traditional Roman cults. He died during an invasion of Sassanid Persia.
Thersites the Historian did a video playlist on the life of Julian.]

Justinian I, originally Petrus Sabbatius.
[Wiki] [Born 482 AD. Emperor 1 April 527 – 14 November 565 AD. Justinian’s attempt to re-unify (renovatio imperii) the lost western provinces of the Roman Empire (North Africa, Dalmatia, Sicily, Italy, and Spain) failed through a combination of imperial overstretch and plague. His civil achievements included the re-codification of Roman law (the Corpus Juris Civilis) and a church building and beautification program that included the construction of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople.
Thersites the Historian did a video on Justinian I.]

Lares and Penates.
[Lares and Penates] The [Roman religious] world is full of smaller and more personal gods [than the “big gods” like Jupiter, Apollo, or Ishtar]. The most pervasive of these are household gods – gods associated with either the physical home, or the hearth (the fireplace), or the household/family as a social unit. The Romans had several of these, chiefly the Lares and Penates, two sets of gods who presided over the home. The Lares seem to have originally been hearth guardians associated with the family, while the Penates may have begun as the guardians of the house’s storeroom – an important place in an agricultural society! Such figures are common in other polytheisms too – the fantasy tropes of brownies, hobs, kobolds and the like began as similar household spirits, propitiated by the family for the services they provide. (As an aside, the Lares and Penates provide an excellent example on how practice was valued more than belief or orthodoxy in ancient religion: when I say that they “seem” or “may have originally been”, that is because it was not entirely clear to the Romans, exactly what the distinction between the Lares and Penates were; ancient authors try to reconstruct exactly what the Penates are about from etymologies (e.g. Cic. De Natura Deorum 2.68) and don’t always agree! But of course, the exact origins of the Lares or the Penates didn’t matter so much as the power they held, how they ought to be appeased, and what they might do to you!) Household gods also illuminate the distinctly communal nature of even smaller religious observances. The rituals in a Roman household for the Lares and Penates were carried out by the heads of the household (mostly the pater familias although the matron of the household had a significant role – at some point, we can talk about the hierarchy of Roman households, but now I just want to note that these two positions in the Roman family are not co-equal) on behalf of the entire family unit, which we should remember might well be multi-generational, including adult children with their own children – in just the same way that important magistrates (or in monarchies, the king or his delegates) might carry out rituals on behalf of the community as a whole.

Laws of the Twelve Tables lex duodecim tabularum.
[Wiki] [The earliest known codification of Roman law, 449 BC.]

Legatus (Legate (military).
[Wiki] [In the Middle Republic, the Legatus was the second-in-command to a Consul while commanding an army in the field, usually a former Consul or senior senator recommended by the Senate (after consultation with the commander, to attempt to ensure that they would be able to work well together in the field). In the Late Republican period, multiple legati would be assigned to a Consular army, specifically to command individual legions (legatus legionis). In the Empire, this was made a more formal post, except for legions assigned to Egypt or Mesopotamia which were commanded by an equestrian praefectus legionis. Legion command in the Empire was a two-year appointment, later extended to four years. Roman representatives to foreign powers were also called legate.

Lepidus, or more formally, Marcus Aemilius Lepidus.
[Wiki] [Born c. 89 BC. Interrex 52 BC (last known to hold this office), Consul 46 and 42 BC, Proconsul 43-40 and 38-36 BC, Triumvir 43-36 BC, Pontifex Maximus 44-13 or 12 BC. Died 13 or 12 BC. A close ally and supporter of Caesar‘s, leading the Senate to appoint Caesar to his dictatorship. Appointed as Caesar’s Magister equitum in 46 BC over Mark Antony. Succeeded Caesar as Pontifex maximus in 44 BC. A member of the second Triumvirate with Mark Antony and Octavian. After his death, Augustus took over the role of Pontifex maximus and it remained one of the offices of the Emperor after that.]

Legion.
[Wiki] [The primary army organizational unit from early in the Republic until late in the Empire. A classic Middle Republican legion would consist of 4200 infantry and 300 cavalry, while an Imperial legion would number 5600 infantry and 200 auxilia cavalry. A Middle Republican legion would usually have a matching Ala of socii-raised troops until the Social War forced Rome to offer the various socii communities full Roman citizenship. Until late in the Republic, legions were not permanent units but were raised and disbanded as required. Legionaries were all free-born Roman citizens until quite late in the Republic, where competing factions in the civil wars needed more warm bodies to fill out the ranks. Republican legions were organized by maniple (two centuries of 80 legionaries per maniple) until the late Republic where organizations switched to cohorts (480 legionaries in six centuries).] The legion is organized into three primary heavy infantry lines (hastati, principes and triarii), with the last line at half-numbers compared to the other two. These lines are broken into units called maniples (manipuli, “handfuls”) of 120 men with intervals between them. Those maniples in turn are split into centuries (centuriae, “group of 100”) consisting of sixty men [“because no numerical term in the Roman army means what it sounds like it means”], one in front and one behind. That leaves an interval between the maniples, creating a kind of checkerboard formation we call a quincunx after the symbol for “five” on a die. Out in front of all of this there is a diffuse screen of light infantry, the velites, who are differently equipped (no armor, small shield, seven light javelins [not pila] and a sword for close-in defense). The standard way this army fights then is that each line attacks in sequence, falling back through the gaps of the line behind it if it cannot defeat the enemy. Formations other than the three-line quincunx (called the triplex acies, “three battle lines”) are used sometimes, but the triplex acies is standard. The question is what does it look like when the first two lines – the hastati and the principes (who make up the main force of the army) – engages. The traditional view is what we might term “volley-and-charge”. Here the assumption is that when the hastati engage, the rear centuries move to close (or at least shrink) the gaps and then the whole line advances (six men deep) and at c. 25m or so, hurls their pila before drawing swords and charging.
[Historia Civilis did a short video on the legion and Epimetheus did a survey of How the Roman legionary evolved in the Republic (although he credits a lot of the changes in the legions to the “Marian Reforms“, which Dr. Devereaux and many others now believe were not “a thing”.]

Lictor.
[Wiki. Lictors, despite being bodyguards to the magistrates, were not soldiers, although they often were former soldiers.]
One of the way that legal power was visually communicated in Rome was through lictors, attendants to the magistrates who carried the fasces, a bundle of rods (with an axe inserted when outside the sacred bounds of the city, called the pomerium). More lictors generally indicated a greater power of imperium (consuls, for instance, could in theory give orders to the praetors). Praetors were accompanied by six lictors; consuls by 12. The dictator had 24 lictors when outside of the pomerium to indicate his absolute power in that sphere (that is, in war), but only 12 inside the city. The magister equitum, as the dictator’s subordinate, got only six, like the praetors. [Promagistrates, having imperium, were entitled to one less lictor than the primary office-holders, so 11 for proconsuls and five for propraetors.]

Limes.
[Wiki. Originally, the fortified border with the German tribes but later usage expanded the term to include all of the Empire’s defended external land borders.]

Limitanei.
[Wiki] [Instituted in the army reforms of Constantine, these were stationary border troops of the middle and late empire. Their role was to defend against raids and small incursions and (ideally) to hold on in the face of larger invasions until the mobile comitatenses forces were able to arrive (if they weren’t busy with something more urgent, like overthrowing the current emperor).]

Livy (Titus Livius).
[Wiki.] [Born 59 BC, died 17 AD. A native of Patavium (modern-day Padua) in Cisalpine Gaul, which was granted citizenship by Caesar. One of the best-known Roman historians, his (incomplete) work on the history of Rome, Ab urbe condita (From the founding of the city) provides one of the few extant period histories of the Monarchy and Republic through to the early days of the Empire. He was a friend and academic rival to Asinius Pollio, who had been governor of Cisalpine Gaul in Livy’s teen years.]

Lorica (body armour).
[Wiki] [Roman body armour took many forms from the earliest days of the monarchy to the end of the western empire. These types included lorica hamata (chainmail), lorica musculata, plate armour sculpted to show musculature, lorica plumata, scale armour that resembled layers of feathers, lorica segmentata, the iconic banded armour that most people think of when they hear the word “legionary”, and lorica squamata, scale armour.]
[ScholaGladiatoria did a video on the lorica segmentata. Metatron also did a video on The Lorica Segmentata.]

Lupercalia.
[Wiki] [An annual festival celebrated on the Ides (the 15th) of February (which apparently got its name from the purification instruments used in this festival, the februa.]
[Historia Civilis did a pair of short videos on here and here.]

Lustrum.
[Wiki] [The five-year inter-census period, derived from the lustration, a purification sacrifice performed by one of the censors at the end of the census. The Romans themselves believed the first lustration had been performed by Servius Tullius fifth legendary King of Rome in 566BC.]

Macedonian Wars.
[First (214-205 BC), Second (200-196 BC), Third (172-168 BC), and Fourth (150-148 BC).]

Magister equitum (Master of Horse).
[Wiki]
The magister equitum was a lieutenant [of the dictator], not a colleague, but interestingly once selected by a dictator could not be unselected or removed, though his office ended when the dictator laid down his powers. The magister equitum, as the dictator’s subordinate, was attended by six [lictors carrying fasces], like the praetors.

Maniple (Legionary sub-unit of the Middle Republic).
[Wiki] [A maniple was composed of two centuries of legionaries. Each legion of the middle republican period was composed of thirty maniples (consisting of 120 men in the hastati and principes and 60 men in the triarii maniples). The Romans start using the larger 480-man-cohort as the basic maneuver unit during the second century BC).]

Marian Reforms.
[Wiki] [Far too much here to summarize, as Dr. Devereaux has an extensive blog post on the lack of evidence for there being any such thing as the “Marian Reforms”. Most of the “reforms” appear to have been adopted over a long period of time, not necessarily during Marius’ lifetime.]

Marius, or more properly, Gaius Marius.
[Wiki] [Born c. 157 BC, died 13 January 86 BC. Consul 107, 104-100, 86 BC. In his first consulship, Marius was the victor in the Jugurthine War, and in 104 as consul again, he fought and defeated the Cimbri and the Teutones, holding the consulship continuously until 100 BC. Loser of a conflict with Sulla, Marius was exiled to Africa in 88 BC. Returning in arms, his forces took Rome and began purging his enemies. Elected to the consulship one final time, he died early in his term of office, before Sulla could return in fire and slaughter. Leadership of his faction fell to Cinna.]

Milo, or more formally, Titus Annius Milo.
[Wiki] [Born c. 90 BC, Praetor 54 BC, died 48 BC. Milo was a friend of Cicero and Pompey and a bitter rival of Clodius, whose murder was done on his direct orders.]

Mos maiorum.
[Wiki]
The Romans had no written constitution and indeed most of the rules for how the Roman Republic functioned were, well, customary. […] The Romans were very conservative in their outlook, believing that things ought to be done according to the mos maiorum – “the customs of [our] ancestors”. The very fact that the way you say “ancestors” in Latin is maiores, “the greater ones” should tell you something about the Roman attitude towards the past. And so often real innovations in Roman governance were explained as efforts to get back to the “way things were”, but of course “the way things were” is such a broad concept that you can justify pretty radical changes in some things to restore other things to “the way they were”. One thing is very clear about the Greeks and Romans generally: they had at best a fuzzy sense of their past, often ascribing considerable antiquity to things which were not old but which stretched out of living memory. Moreover there is a general sense, pervading Greek and Latin literature that people in the past were better than people now, more virtuous, more upright, possibly even physically better. There seems to have been a broad sense of the folk system that things get worse over time and thus things must have been better in the past and thus returning to the way things were done is better.

Nero, or more formally Nero Claudius Caesar Augustus Germanicus.
[Wiki] [Born 15 December 37 AD, Emperor 54 AD, died by suicide 9 June 68 AD. Last of the Julio-Claudian dynasty, his reign ended in the infamous Year of the Four Emperors.]
[Sean Gabb did a video on Nero: Can We Trust the Sources?]

Nobiles.
[Wiki]
There are what our sources call nobiles, a term of the Late Republic which (among others) H.I. Flower uses to define the system of the Middle Republic – usefully so. To be nobilis was to be “well known” – the word comes to give us our word “noble” but it doesn’t mean that yet, it means “notable”. Families that got into high elected office in repeated generations (these are going to be very wealthy families; politics is not a game for the poor in Rome) joined this informal club of nobiles. The exact borders of this club shifted, though generally only slowly, with small but significant numbers of new entrants as older families faded into relative obscurity (sometimes to surge back into prominence). But the movement is slow: from one generation to the next, most of the families of the nobiles remain the same, in part because Roman voters fairly clearly assume that the sons of great politicians will be great like their fathers.

Novus homo (new man or self-made man).
[Wiki. A term used for someone who achieved high office in the Republic as the first in his family to do so. Often used as a pejorative.]

Numantine War (143-133 BC).
[Wiki. The last major conflict of the Celtiberian Wars, between the Roman Republic and the Celtiberian tribes of the province of Hispania Citerior.]

Numen (divinity or divine will).
[Wiki]
What connects these gods [Lares, Penates or Genius] with the big ones is not their scale but a certain kind of power. The Romans called this power numen. Literally, the word means a nod – or more correctly, a thing produced by nodding. Presumably this has something to do with the power to produce results without directly effecting them, to do so “with a nod”. As with most things, this spark of divinity may be left pleasantly vague and blurry. After all, it doesn’t matter how it works, but only that it works. But note how that conception of divine power – the ability to change the world “with a nod” as it were – leaves a tremendous space for differences in scope: Forculus might open a door with his nod, which is rather less impressive than if Poseidon crumbles the entire house with his (Poseidon, in addition to ruling the seas, was the Earthshaker). These gods – the ones we don’t often think of – defined many of the rhythms of life. For instance, a Roman boy wore a small charm called a bulla to protect him from evil magic – when he came of age (and thus had his own masculine energy which could repel the feminine evil magic), he offered that charm to the Lares and Penates as thanks for protecting him through his youth. It was a key passage into adulthood. Likewise, a Roman girl surrendered the trappings of girlhood to the Lares and Penates before her wedding, and offered her new Lares – those of her husband’s house – a copper coin on her arrival so that they would bless the addition to the household. The key thing to note here is that divinity is not an all-or-nothing proposal. Beings that have numen do not all have equal amounts of it. The powers of the great gods – Jupiter, Zeus, Thor, Marduk, Ra, that sort – are vast and global in scope. Arculus isn’t going to strike you with lightning, or flood out your city, or cause your army to lose a battle – but he may keep you from getting robbed (or cause the valuables in your storage chest to rot!). And for a lot of work-a-day people, that kind of power is all you need, for the relatively small concerns of your life.

Optimates.
[Wiki. Supporters of the senate in political struggles with the populares, “supporters of the people” during the first century BC.]

Optio.
[Wiki] [Second-in-command to the Centurion within a century of a Roman legion.]

Parma (light infantry shield).
[Wiki]
Unlike the heavy infantry (the hastati, principes and triarii) who carried the large Scutum, the skirmishing Velites carried a smaller round shield called a Parma.

Pater Familias.
[Wiki]
Roman legal and political thought understands the cives to be made up of familiae (singular familia). Familia is one of those dangerous Latin words because you want to translate it as “family” (and sometimes can), but it has a bigger meaning than that. Put simply, a familia is the household of a free, adult male with no living male ancestors (the pater familias), including his wife (the mater familias), any sons they may have (married or unmarried) or unmarried daughters, any children those children may have and all property – including enslaved people – owned by all of those individuals. An enslaved servant was thus a member of the familia, but not a “member of the family”. Roman law understands the legal power of the pater familias within the familia to be absolute, to the point of being able to put any member to death (this seems to have almost never happened, but it was legally permitted). One could argue the state and Roman law exists between, but not within, these familiae: within the familia the pater familias is absolute and it is only outside the familia that his authority is balanced with the law or the state. […] even an adult son remained the legal dependent of his father while his father lived. Individuals in potestate (under the power of another) didn’t hold their own property in a legal sense – their property came under the power of their pater familias. They also couldn’t conduct binding transactions without his consent (though an individual in potestate could still vote, serve in the army and run for office). Individuals under the legal power of another – be they children or slaves – could have a small amount of pseudo-property called a peculium, but this was still technically an extension of the property of the pater familias.
[Historia Civilis did a short video on the Roman view of the family.]

Patricians and Plebeians.
[Patricians and Plebeians]
This was a formal legal distinction; one was by birth one or the other. At the dawn of the republic, the leading families in Rome at the time, who sat in the Senate when it advised the kings (and who thus founded the republic itself) were the patricii, a title derived from senators being called patres (“fathers”, often patres conscripti). And in the early decades of the republic, political offices were restricted to members of these key families. Everyone else – the vast majority of Rome’s households – were plebeians. The thing is, from the mid-fourth century to the early third century (the Lex Hortensia of 287 marks the end of this process) the legal distinctions between the two groups largely collapsed as rich plebeian families successfully pushed to be “let in” to full participation in Roman government. Consequently, by the mid-third century the distinction between patrician and plebeian is mostly politically unimportant. It does matter for religious purposes and being a patrician from a famous family is a nice status marker to have, but elite plebeian families are not rare in the Middle Republic. So, repeat after me: the patrician/plebeian distinction is not particularly meaningful in the Middle Republic. There are rich plebeian families in the Middle Republic who are influential in politics. Do not anachronistically forward-project the political struggles of the fifth-through-early-third centuries onto the struggles of the late-second or first centuries. Plebeian is not a synonym for “poor”.

Pietas.
[Wiki]
The due respect one owes family, elders and the gods (and gives us the word “piety”). To be pius is to be dutiful towards parents, country, elders, and the gods, putting their needs before your own (thus Aeneas, saving his father from burning Troy is famously pius Aeneas).

Pilum (javelin).
[Wiki]
The pilum is an unusual javelin. The most common form of javelin we see in the ancient Mediterranean is what I’ve taken to calling the “small tip, wooden haft” javelin. It has a light wooden haft; these don’t generally survive so it is hard to be exact on how much they’d weigh, but javelin-tips have thinner sockets than spears, suggesting a narrower haft (and probably a shorter one). That’s tipped by a small iron spear-tip usually a miniature version of the local thrusting-spear shape (though often with a less pronounced mid-ridge). The whole assembly probably going to around half a kilogram, though again there’s probably a fair bit of range here (the Roman hasta velitaris, that lighter javelin for the velites, probably had a total mass of around 200-250g). The pilum is … not like that. Instead of a narrow wooden haft, it has a thick, heavy wooden haft with estimated masses typically around 1kg instead of maybe 200-400g. And that’s topped not with a c. 50g javelin-tip, but with a tip that has a long iron shank connecting the point (which can be “arrowhead” shaped or “bodkin” (square-sectioned pyramidal) shaped) to the haft and massing 250-350g. Thus a pilum altogether has about the same mass as a thrusting spear, but it is very much not a thrusting spear. The whole thing tends to be around 1.25-1.5kg; this is a hefty weapon. The Romans end up using a few different systems to connect the iron shank to the wooden haft. The most common was actually the “socketed” pilum, in which the shank (which is square in cross-section) terminates into a socket (round in cross-section) that fits on to the haft. This type is what we see in Cisalpine Gaul before the Romans, its the version of the pilum that ends up being locally copied in Spain and Transalpine Gaul in response to the Romans and it occurs in basically all periods. […] Plutarch says that Marius designed it to incorporate a wooden rivet where the long metal shank met the heavy wooden shaft, replacing one of the two iron nails with a wooden rivet that would break on impact, in order to better disable the shield. The problem is that the pilum is actually archaeologically one of the best attested Roman weapons with the result that we can follow its development fairly closely. And the late, great Peter Connolly did exactly that in a series of articles in the Journal of Roman Military Equipment Studies and while the design of the pilum does develop over time, there’s simply no evidence for what Plutarch describes. The “broad tanged” pilum type could have been modified this way, but we’ve never found one actually so modified; instead the pila of this type we find all have rivets (two of them) in place (where rivets are preserved at all). Moreover, most pila of that “broad tanged” type, both before and after Marius, have the edges of that broad tang bent over at the sides, which would prevent the sort of sliding action Plutarch describes even if one of the rivets broke. Meanwhile, by the first century there are three types of pila around (socketed, broad-tanged and spike-tanged) only one of which could be modified in this way (the broad-tanged type), and that type doesn’t dominate during the first century [BC] when one might expect Marius’ new-style pila to be in use. In practice then the conclusion seems to be that Plutarch made up or misunderstood this “innovation” in the pilum or, at best, the design was adopted briefly and then abandoned.
[ScholaGladiatoria has several videos on the pilum: Roman Pilum – ScholaGladiatoria Mini Documentary, Roman Pilum Throwing – Javelin & Shield Roman Army Style, Why The Roman Army Used The Pilum Spear, Shield Penetration! Roman Pilum vs Shield: Was this the main purpose?, Roman Pilum (Throwing Spear) vs Armour! Testing against shield, chainmail & plate, How did the Roman Army Marian Reforms PILUM (spear) Work? An appendix to @tods_workshop.]

Plutarch.
[Wiki. Born 46 AD, died c. 119 AD. Greek historian and Platonist philosopher, best known for his work Lives of the Noble Greeks and Romans (usually known as Parallel Lives), which charted similar biographies for prominent Greek and Roman historical figures.]

Polis (pl. poleis).
[Early Rome and many of the other future socii were very similar to classical Greek poleis.]
A complicated and effectively untranslatable Greek term, polis most nearly means “community” and is often translated as “city-state”. However, there were poleis in Greece without cities (Sparta being one – a fact often concealed by translators rendering polis as city). Instead a polis consists of a body of citizens, their state, and the territory it controls (including smaller villages but not other subjugated poleis), usually but not always centered on a single urban center. Poleis are almost by definition independent and self-governing (that is, they have eleutheria and autonomia).

Pollio, or more properly, Gaius Asinius Pollio.
[Wiki. Born 75 BC, Consul 40 BC, died 4 AD. Roman statesman and historian whose primary historical work has been lost. The later historians Appian and Plutarch used a lot of Pollio’s work in their own histories. A supporter of Caesar, he was with Caesar at the Rubicon, and loyally served Caesar through the civil war. After Caesar’s assassination, Pollio supported Antony against Octavian. After the end of the civil conflicts, he established the first public library in Rome, the Atrium Libertatis.]

Polybius.
[Wiki. Greek historian born around 200BC in Megalopolis in Arcadia. His father was appointed strategos of the Achaean League and he in his turn eventually became a high-ranking cavalry officer in the league. He was among a thousand Achaeans interned at Rome to ensure the loyalty of the Greek cities to the Republic. During the 17 years he was detained as a Roman hostage, he developed a friendship with Scipio Aemilianus and became well-acquainted with the extended Scipio clan and their supporters. As a result, he accompanied Scipio to the final destruction of Carthage in 146BC. Most of his works have been lost but The Histories was a major source for many later historians including Livy and Plutarch.]

Pomerium.
[Wiki] [The ritual boundaries of the city of Rome, which among other things limit the powers of the Tribunes of the Plebs.]
Rome itself was ritually defined by a sacred boundary, the pomerium around the city itself; the phrase means something like “beyond the [city] wall” but in practice the pomerium might only imperfectly match the city’s actual defensive wall at any given time. The larger point is that this sacred boundary covered only the urban core: no part of Rome’s hinterland was within it; indeed as the city grew, large portions of the urban core were outside of it. The pomerium was a ritual boundary but one with legal significance. Weapons were banned within the pomerium and the powers of certain magistrates (those with imperium) were diminished within it, while the powers of other magistrates (the tribunes of the plebs) did not extend beyond it. Roman armies could only operate, legally, outside the pomerium so war was an activity that, by definition took place outside this zone (which is why the later stages of the dilectus must happen on the campus Martius, the “Field of Mars”, which sits just outside the pomerium).
[Historia Civilis did a short video on the pomerium.]

Pompey the Great, or more formally, Gnaeus Pompeius Magnus.
[Wiki. First came to prominence for raising an army of three legions (without a shred of legal authority) with which he aided Sulla against the Marians. Later commanded (as proconsul) an army which defeated 5,000 armed slaves at the end of the Third Servile War (and claiming credit for ending the war, which Crassus had actually done the majority of the work to win). One of the three members of the First Triumvirate with Caesar and Crassus, later the military leader of the Senatorial forces opposed to Caesar. Murdered by agents of Ptolemy XIII after fleeing to Egypt after his defeat at Pharsalus in an attempt to curry favour with Caesar.
Thersites the Historian did a video on how Pompey became “the Great” and Historia Civilis did a video on Pompey’s terms as consul and his fall.]

Pontifex maximus.
[Wiki] [Despite the Pope sometimes being called the “Pontiff”, the Roman Pontifex maximus did not have the same role in religious life during the Republic. The Pontifex maximus was an elected position that was held for the life of the incumbent. On the death of Lepidus, the last elected to the position, in 13/12 BC, Augustus took over the role and it remained one of the Imperial titles after that.]
I stress this point because this is a common mistake: assuming that the Pontifex Maximus as Rome’s highest priest was in some way the “boss” of all of Rome’s other priests. He was not; he was the presiding officer of the college of Pontiffs and the manager of the calendar (this was a very significant role), but the Pontifex Maximus was not the head of some priestly hierarchy and his power over the other pontifices was limited. Moreover his power over other religious officials (the augures, haruspices, the quindecimviri sacris faciundis and so on) was very limited. Instead, these figures report to the Senate, though the Senate will generally defer to the judgment of the pontifices.
[Historia Civilis did a short video on the role of the Pontifex maximus.]

Populares.
[Wiki. Supporters of the people against the optimates, who supported the senate in political struggles during the first century BC.]

Praefecti Aegpyti or Governor of Egypt.
[Wiki]
Tacitus describes Augustus as having “kept in the [imperial] house” (retinere domi) the governance of Egypt, assigning it to an equestrian prefect. Egypt was a relatively late addition to Rome’s growing Empire; the Ptolemaic dynasty had ruled it since the death of Alexander the Great in 323. Praefecti Aegpyti typically served around three years, where generally not from the province they oversaw (also typical), and wouldn’t be reassigned to a post back in that province (also typical). Unlike with the earlier Ptolemaic government, there was no royal court in Egypt, the prefect’s entourage more nearly resembling that of a Roman governor, nor was the emperor personally present. Residents of Egypt who wished to petition the emperor had to do it through the same channels as any other resident of the Roman Empire.

Praefecti Cohortium.
Each Roman [Consular] army has a presiding magistrate (like a consul) and an assigned financial magistrate (a quaestor), just as each socii detachment has a commander and a paymaster. The commander of these socii units show up in our sources as praefecti cohortium and seem to have been drawn from the local elite of those communities (just like the Romans).

Praefecti Sociorum.
[When a Roman Consular army assembles,] the Romans and socii converge, as the socii are arriving at the same spot, on the same day, under arms in their own small units with their leaders [the praefecti cohortium]. The army commander (generally a consul) now appoints twelve Roman officers, the praefecti sociorum as senior officers over the socii [junior officer equivalents to centurions would be appointed by the socii] who are divided into two wings (alae), which generally flank the legions in battle. The praefecti sociorum, we’re told, first have the job of pulling out an elite subset of the socii, the extraordinarii, from the socii cavalry (who generally outnumber the Roman cavalry) and infantry.

Praetor.
[Wiki]
After [elected terms as quaestor and aedile and possibly the tribunate] was the praetorship, [on the cursus honorum] the first office which came with praetor urbanus and the praetor peregrinus). In 227 the number increases to four, with the two new praetors created to handle administration in [the provinces of ] Sicily, [and] Corsica et Sardinia. That number then increases to six in 198/7, with the added praetors generally being sent to Spain. Finally Sulla raises the number to eight in 81 BC. The minimum age seems to have been 39 for this office. […] The six praetors are the junior imperium-possessing magistracy and though all of the praetors were elected together, by the Middle Republic the job of being praetor might vary quite a lot depending on which role you were assigned by the Senate. You will recall that the praetorship is an old office, originally taking the place of chief magistrate which later becomes the consulship (note Livy 3.5.11-12, 7.3.5-8; Cic. Leg. 3.8; Fest. 249L; Gell. 11.18.8, 20.1.47; Plin. Natural History 18.12 see also Varro Ling. 5.80), though at some point the title of the chief magistrate shifted [to] consul and the praetor (just one of them) served as a junior assistant to the consuls. We’re not well informed about the praetorship in this early form, but it seems likely it had a similar role in organizing the courts, while the consuls led the armies. In any case the number of praetors increases rapidly in the last half of the third century, with a second added in c. 242, two more in 228 and two more in 198/7, giving the total of six. [Sulla increased the number to eight, and Caesar increased it again to ten, then fourteen, then finally sixteen. Augustus reduced that to twelve and changed the nature of the position, becoming Senate-appointed rather than popularly elected, and no longer having imperium.] Because the praetors had imperium, they could in theory lead armies and organize courts the same as consuls (though they lacked some of the other distinctive consular powers) but in practice the responsibilities of the praetors were usually quite distinct and split into two large categories: praetors assigned a provincia (which again, you should read as “job” not “province”) at Rome [the Praetor peregrinus] and praetors assigned a provincia outside of Rome. […] Praetors in the field tend to be assigned to putative “quiet” provinces or auxiliary support functions. The standard praetorian provinces were Corsica et Sardinia (one province) and Sicily, later joined by the two Spains (Hispania Citerior, “Nearer Spain” and Hispania Ulterior, “Further Spain”), when they were quiet. When a major military action flared up on this areas, the response wasn’t to send a praetor with a large army, but to assign a consul or a proconsul to the province instead, though because these assignments are made annually that tends to mean that [if] trouble flares up, the praetor with his smaller army tries to manage it and if he fails and is defeated, then a consul is sent out with a major army. [The lex Villia annalis of 180BC forbade former consuls to hold a second praetorship.]
[Historia Civilis did a short video on the role of the praetor.]

Praetor urbanus and Praetor peregrinus.
[Praetor peregrinus and Praetor urbanus] The two praetors operating normally in Rome were termed the praetor urbanus and praetor peregrinus and their responsibility was almost entirely focused on the court system. The praetor urbanus was primarily concerned with legal disputes involved two citizen parties, while any issue involving foreigners came under the jurisdiction of the praetor peregrinus, though the latter was sometimes also deployed out of Rome on special duties, at which point the praetor urbanus, who almost always remained in Rome, would handle both. On coming into office, the praetor urbanus (and probably also the praetor peregrinus) issued the edictum praetoris (“Praetor’s edict”) which set out how he intended to carry out his office. Early on, these edicts seem mostly to have been restricted to changes in procedure or the assessment of damages, but by the first century praetorian edicts could lay out substantive law creating what later Roman jurists would term the ius praetorium (“praetorian law”), which sat alongside the main law code itself, the ius civile (“civil law”). Mostly what these edicts lay out seem to be procedures or the conditions under which the praetor will grant a cause of action. By the time the edict is fully developed, praetors seem to be seeking and getting advice from an emerging class of legal experts, iuris prudentes (“men learned at law” = “legal consult”) to craft what must often have been pretty formulaic edicts.

Praetorians.
[Wiki] [Originating as the personal guards of Roman generals (initially for the Scipios), they were designated by Augustus as his own personal security force. Their headquarters were just outside the pomerium in the Castra Praetoria. The Praetorians often had a major role in determining the emperor due to their close proximity to the current emperor and their near-monopoly of significant military force in and around the capital. The practice of “ensuring” their loyalty through donatives quickly became standard after the reign of Tiberius. They were disbanded by Constantine in 312 AD.]
[Metatron did a video on What is a Roman Praetorian?.]

Princeps senatus.
[Wiki]
Once the convening magistrate was done introducing the issue, the opinions of each senator, in turn, were sought. The order was set by the censors, but it was based on offices held and seniority, so while the censors could shift (“movere“) a senator down in the order, they were expected to have a good reason (typically conspicuous moral turpitude). The order began with the princeps senatus, traditionally the most senior ex-consul, though “most senior” here often meant both in age and in influence, so while the princeps senatus was never young, it might not strictly be the oldest senator. After that, the former consuls (in Latin consulares, which enters English as “consulars” to mean “men who have held the consulship”) spoke, with the most former (and thus likely oldest) going first. And then the Senate proceeded down in rank order to ex-praetors and so on all the way down. As you may well imagine, the figures who spoke first tended to set the terms of the debate and indeed the whole reason they spoke first is because they were understood to be preeminent in auctoritas.

Principate (the early Roman Empire).
[Wiki. The early Roman Empire under Augustus and his successors until the Crisis of the Third Century.]
Thersites the Historian did a video on Augustus’ Principate: The Institutions of the Early Roman Empire.]

Principes.
[Wiki]
The heavy infantry (hastati, principes and triarii) carry a large oval shield (the scutum), a sword (the gladius Hispaniensis, a versatile cut-and-thrust sword), two heavy javelins (pila), and wear both a metal helmet (the ubiquitous bronze Montefortino-type) and body armor. Poor soldiers, Polybius tells us, wear what in Latin is a pectorale (and thus in English a “pectoral”); this gets represented as a single smallish bronze plate over the upper-chest, but our evidence for this equipment suggests a more complete cuirass consisting of a front and back plate joined by side and shoulder plates, with a broad armored belt protecting the belly, a sort of “articulated breastplate”.

Proconsul.
[Wiki]
Roman expansion put strains on all of these systems. Fundamentally, the Roman system remained one designed for a small city-state. Everything – military command, attending the Senate, passing legislation, using veto power – needed to be done in person by magistrates who only had a single year in office. While Roman territory and the scope of Rome’s wars remained small, that sort of system worked fine. As Roman territory and Rome’s wars expanded, it put all sorts of strains on that system: how to handle multi-year campaigns which kept the armies in the field? How to handle having more commands than magistrates? The solution was to extend (prorogue) a magistrate’s authority, making them a pro-magistrate (“pro” meaning “standing in for”). It’s tricky to pin down exactly when the Romans first did this as our sources for early Rome (Livy and Dionysius of Halicarnassus) tend to use terms for proconsular power (pro consule or ἀνθύπατον ἀρχὴν) long before prorogation seems to have been used in Rome. Generally, we think that the first genuine prorogation happens in 327 as part of the run-up to the Second Samnite War (Livy 8.23). The problem here was two-fold: Rome’s evident shift to year-round campaigning meaning that the army needed a continuous commander in the field as in this case where it was conducting a siege, combined with the greater distances – the commander, Q. Pubilius Philo, is besieging Naples – making swift changes in command difficult. Prorogation becomes common and regular during the Punic Wars. The First Punic War, taking place primarily in Sicily, demanded the use of prorogation to cover the lag time between elections in Rome and commanders arriving in Sicily, as well as to allow single commanders to conduct more complex campaigns. By the Second Punic War, which takes place in Italy, Sicily, Gaul, Spain, North Africa and Illyria (much of that simultaneously) it was also necessary to prorogue commanders in order to simply get enough field commanders with consul or a praetor at least notionally had imperium which traveled (though in practice they would be expected to focus on the provincia the Senate assigned them), the imperium of a promagistrate, who after all only “stood in for” the actual magistrate of the year, was in fact restricted to their defined sphere of action.

Propraetor.
[Wiki]
The expanding number of areas of Roman overseas control pushed this further as more regions meant more provinciae (in the sense of “jobs”) which demanded more imperium-havers to handle. New praetors were eventually made for Sicily, Corsica-and-Sardinia and the two Spains, but by the mid-second century the Romans are regularly assigning imperium-havers to Gaul (Cisalpine or Transalpine), Africa, Greece and Macedonia and of course also need magistrates with imperium in Italy to handle the regular functions of government.

Proquaestor.
[Wiki]
Once a quaestor‘s term of service was done, they became eligible for entry into the Senate and would normally be entered into the Senate’s rolls in the next census (conducted every five years). Now you may be wondering, as Rome’s territory outside of Italy expanded, how the eight quaestors could meet the demands and the answer is: they couldn’t. The solution, rather than adding more annual quaestors, was to “prorogue” (Latin: prorogare) a quaestor‘s term in office, making them a “pro-quaestor“. This is the first of our pro-magistrates, who are Roman magistrates whose term of service has been prolonged to provide sufficient officials for all of Rome’s overseas commands. Consuls and praetors could also be prorogued like this (becoming proconsuls and propraetors) and we’ll talk about that more when we get to those offices, as their habit of being prorogued is rather more important.

Provinciae.
[Wiki]
Beginning in 241 BC, Rome begins establishing permanent control of territories overseas in what come to be the provinciae or provinces. Initially the word provincia simply indicated an assignment, a job for a Roman magistrate – generally a consul or praetor – to take an army somewhere and either wage war or “keep the peace”. Over time those assignments became routine as Roman power expanded, leading to the understanding of the provinces as permanent administrative and geographical divisions. But fundamentally a province (at least, during the period of the republic) was a sphere of Roman foreign policy, to which a magistrate was sent with an army to administer. One way to understand this is through a common binary opposition in Roman language: domi (“at home”) vs. militiae (“at military service” , sometimes also rendered as belli, “at war”). If you weren’t domi then you were militiae. Much of Italy might be a grey area that could be both domi or militiae depending on circumstances (though sometimes Romae, “at Rome”, replaces domi in the opposition, making it rather more specific), but the provinces were always militiae, a sphere of activity and service, a place the res publica exerted its praetors. And the rest of the provinces follow, bit by bit, though after a long pause. Macedonia in 147, absorbed after the Fourth Macedonian War (150-148), and the province of Africa in 146 after the Third Punic War. That fifty-year pause from 197 to 147 sees the Roman “standard operating procedures” in the provinces become codified into strong norms that influence how later provinces are governed. Asia is incorporated as a province in 133 after being bequeathed to Rome by its last king, Attalus III, who doubtless expected the Romans to pick a successor, but politics in Rome made its annexation convenient, so annexed it was. Then Gallia Narbonesis in 120, followed by a slew of eastern provinces in the 60s, most a result of Pompey‘s campaigns: Creta et Cyrenae (Crete and Cyrenaica), Bithynia et Pontus, Syria and Cilicia. […] In each case, those neat “years of incorporation” can be deceptive, because they typically come at the end of years – and in some cases decades – of regular military activity in the region. While Macedonia is regarded as “becoming a province” in 147, Roman generals had been being assigned the provincia of Macedonia on-and-off since 200 and the start of the Second Macedonian War. Moreover, even after this point the province remained an active combat zone with its outward-facing borders ill-defined and offering Roman magistrates assigned there considerable latitude for offensive action, as Cicero can quip as late as 55 that the borders of Macedonia “were those of swords and javelins” (Cic. In Pisonem 38), which is to say, they projected as far as the Roman army could take them.

Publicani (Roman tax farmers).
[Wiki]
During the Middle and Late Roman Republic, the job of extracting tax revenue from the provinces was too administratively complex for the limited machinery of the Republic, so instead the senate directed the censors to auction the right to collect taxes. Groups of Roman businessmen (and often silent patrician partners) would group resources together to bid for the right to collect taxes from a province – any taxes they took in excess of that figure would be their profit. These companies could be very large indeed. For instance, parts of the lex portorii Asiae (the customs laws for the Roman province of Asia) survive and include regulations for the relevant company including a slew of customs houses and guard posts (the law is incomplete, but mentions more than 30 collection points – all major ports – to which would also need to be added posts along the land routes into the province). From other evidence we know that the staff at customs posts included armed guards along with the expected tax collectors and bookkeepers. And we know that publicani were sometimes delegated local or Roman forces to do their work (e.g. Cic. Ad Att. 114, using Shackleton Bailey’s numbering). They also maintained the closest thing the Roman Republic had to a postal service (Cic. Ad Att. 108). It’s not clear exactly how many employees one of the larger tax collection companies might have had (and those for the province of Asia – equivalent to the west coast of Anatolia – would have been some of the largest), but it was clearly considerable, as were the sums of money involved. […] We certainly know that these publicani often collected substantially far more than was due to them under the law (the reason why “tax collector” and “sinner” seem to be nearly synonymous in the New Testament). […] Every five years when the censors were elected, one of their jobs would be to let out public contracts; of old, those were for things like road maintenance and so on. But they would also, as Rome’s empire expanded, let out contracts on taxes. The form of these contracts was that the publicanus (almost always in its plural, publicani) would put a bid of the estimated five-year tax revenue of the province in question. The winning bid – whichever was highest – would then put up property as surety equal in value to the bid and then have to deliver annually one fifth of the bid each year until the whole amount was discharged. Of course then any amount collected above the value of the bid was profit which the publicani – the tax farmers – could keep. In turn, they were expected to run the entire complex apparatus of tax collection. Now as you might imagine, five years of tax income for an entire province might be an enormous amount of money, requiring a tremendous amount of property be put up as surety. In order to manage that, aspiring publicani would band together into companies called societates (sing. societas) to pool enough wealth together to bid on the contracts. These weren’t quite joint-stock corporations, in part because Roman law doesn’t recognize corporate persons, but to some degree liability was limited because the societas only risked the property put up as surety. That said, having such a societas go bankrupt could be absolutely ruinous to the investors and indeed the prospect of one such societas going bankrupt (it is the societas of tax farmers for the vectigalia of the province of Asia, which would have been a massive venture) is a major motivator of the political tensions leading up to Julius Caesar‘s election as consul in 59.

Pugio (dagger).
[Wiki. The backup weapon of the infantry soldier.]

Punic Wars.
[First (264-241 BC), Second (218-201 BC), and Third (149-146 BC)]
[Thersites the Historian did a video on Carthage’s strategic situation in the Second Punic War.]

Pyrrhic War (280-275 BC).
[Wiki] [Struggle between the Roman Republic and forces led by Pyrrhus, King of Epirus over the independence of the Greek colony of Tarentum. Noteworthy for giving us the concept of a “Pyrrhic Victory” where the losses of the winner are so terrible that they are only slightly better off than the losers. It was also the first war that pitted Roman troops against war elephants.]
The Greek cities in southern Italy now at last recognize their peril and call in Pyrrhus of Epirus to try to beat back Rome, leading to the Pyrrhic War (280-275). Pyrrhus wins some initial battles but – famously – at such cost that he is unable to win the war. Pyrrhus withdraws in 275 and Rome is then able over the next few years to mop up the Greek cities in Southern Italy, with the ringleader, Tarentum, falling to Rome in 272. Rome imposed treaties on them, too, pulling them into the alliance system. Thus, by 264 Rome’s alliance system covered essentially the whole of Italy South of the Po River. It had emerged as an ad hoc system and admittedly our sources don’t give us a good sense of how and when the terms of the alliance change; in many cases it seems our sources, writing much later, may not know. They have the foedus Cassianum, with its rather more equal terms, and knowledge of the system as it seems to have existed in the late third century and the dates and wars by which this or that community was voluntarily or forcibly integrated, but not the details of by what terms and so on.

Quaestor.
[Wiki]
The first major office of the cursus honorum was the quaestorship. The number of quaestors elected grows over time. Initially just two, their number is increased to four in 421 (two assigned to Rome, one to each of the consuls) and then to six in the 260s (initially handling the fleet, then later to assist Roman praetors or pro-magistrates in the provinces) and then eight in 227. There may have been two more added to make ten somewhere in the Middle Republic, but recent scholarship has cast doubt on this, so the number may have remained eight until being expanded to twenty under Sulla in 81 BC through the aptly named lex Cornelia de XX quaestoribus (the Cornelian Law on Twenty Quaestors). It’s not clear if there was a legal minimum age for the quaestors and we only know the ages of a few (25, 27, 29 and 30, for the curious) so all we can say is that officeholders tended to hold the office in their twenties, right after finishing their mandatory stint of military service. Serving as a quaestor enables entrance into the Senate, though one has to wait for the next census to be added to the Senate rolls by the censors. […] [In a Consular army, the quaestor was] a much more junior magistrate than the imperium-haver (but senior to the military tribunes), he handles pay and probably in the middle Republican period also supply. That said, the quaestor is not usually the general’s “number two” even though it seems like he might be; quaestors are quite junior magistrates and the imperium-haver has probably brought friends or advisors with a lot more experience than his quaestor (who may or may not be someone the imperium-haver knows or likes).
[As part of Sulla’s reforms, those who serve as Questors are automatically made members of the Senate at the end of their term of office (previously, the promotion would have to wait until the next censors were elected).]
[Historia Civilis did a short video on this.]

Republic or de res publica.
[Wiki] [Beginning in 509 BC, after the final king was exiled, the Romans established a new form of government for themselves, de res publica, which lasted with many disruptions and modifications until 27BC when Augustus formally established the Principate.]
The Romans had no written constitution and indeed most of the rules for how the Roman Republic functioned were, well, customary. The Roman term for this was the mos maiorum, the “custom of the ancestors”. In practice, the idea here was that the “constitution” of the Republic consisting in doing things as they had always been done, or at least as they were understood to have always been done. Consequently, as historians, we adopt the formulation that the Republic is what the Republic does – that is that one determines the rules of offices and laws based on how they are implemented, not through a hard-and-fast firm legal framework. […] The Latin term for the republic was, naturally enough, res publica (from which the modern word republic derives). Res is a very common, earthy sort of Latin word whose closest English equivalent is probably “matter”, with that wide range of possible meanings. Res can mean a “thing” more generally, “matter” in the scientific sense, but also in an abstract sense it can be an interest, a cause, a court case or other set of events, or property generally. Meanwhile publica means “public”, in the sense of something held in common or collectively or done for the collective good or interest. That gives res publica a wonderful kaleidoscope of meaning – it is the collective property (the “commonwealth”) of the citizenry but also the communal affairs, the matters of collective concern, the actions undertaken for the public benefit and indeed even the public benefit itself.

Rights of Roman women.
[Wiki]
Demographically, functionally all women in Roman society married at least once and Roman law effectively assumes this. Prior to marriage, girls are in the potestas [legal power] of their father, like sons. Legally, this might or might not change with marriage. Roman marriages came in two legal types, cum manu and sine manu, “with” and “without” “the hand”. Manus, “the hand” here is another word for potestas, so really what this means is, “with the transfer of legal power” (cum manu) and “without the transfer of legal power” (sine manu). Under a cum manu marriage, a women essentially had the same legal status as a daughter to her husband, with her property becoming his property, even if she had before been sui iuris (legally independent), but she also becomes one of his heirs. Under a sine manu marriage, her legal position doesn’t change, she remains an heir to father but not her husband – essentially legally positioned much like her brothers. The real significance of this, of course, is that women’s husbands are likely to be younger than their fathers and given ancient life expectancy, unlikely to live through their daughter’s whole adulthood. That in turn matters because sine manu marriages are clearly the most common sort by the Late Republic and probably even by the Middle Republic; the concern here is probably not the independence of daughters but rather the desire of fathers to keep any property willed to their daughters in their own family line, rather than it becoming the property of her husband (and his family). And that matters because a woman with no pater familias became sui iuris. In practice the combination of Roman life expectancy with the preference for sine manu marriage meant that there would have been a significant number of women who were sui iuris in Rome at any given time, thus holding their own property in their own name and conducting their own business. Those women might choose to remarry, but do so sine manu so as to retain their legal independence. Now Roman women remained under all circumstances shut out of the “public” functions in society: they could not vote, hold office, or participate in public trials. But Roman private law proceeded on the assumption that, unless specified otherwise – and it usually was not – a sui iuris women was not legally different from a sui iuris man; and recall most of the law here is private. Consequently, Roman women could hold property, execute contracts, do business, make wills, bring suit against people, and be sued themselves. That is a lot more legal latitude than women had in basically any other ancient society I know of and that’s well worth comment. However, women who were sui iuris were required to have a legal guardian, a tutor, however the tutores of adult women had a lot less power, being only able to veto her decisions and only under certain circumstances. Moreover, an adult woman was typically able to choose her own guardian and this was a continuing right; she could replace a guardian too. Interestingly, her sine manu husband had no say at all in this process – her choice of tutor did not need to be him (though it could be) nor did it need to be acceptable to him. It seems to have been common, at least by the late Republic, for women of means to choose guardians over whom they had significant control, such as their own freedman.

Religious ritual in Roman religion.
With that out of the way, all that’s left is to do is ritually clean ourselves, don our toga and veil our heads, stage our ritual procession, conduct our offerings of incense and pour out a wine libation (a poured liquid offering), say our prayer, wash our hands again and then get on with it (those are, as a side note, real steps before an actual Roman sacrificial ceremony; it is not an exhaustive list). […] religious rituals are meant to have (and will have, so the believer believes, if everything is done properly) real effects in both the spiritual world and the physical world. That is, your ritual will first effect a change in the god (making them better disposed to you) and second that will effect a change in the physical world we inhabit (as the god’s power is deployed in your favor). But to reiterate, because this is key: the purpose of ritual (in ancient, polytheistic religious systems) is to produce a concrete, earthly result. It is not to improve our mood or morals, but to make crops grow, rain fall, armies win battles, business deals turn out well, ships sail, winds blow. While some rituals in these religions do concern themselves with the afterlife or other seemingly purely spiritual concerns (the lines between earthly and spiritual in those cases are somewhat blurrier in these religions than we often think them to be now), the great majority of rituals are squarely focused on what is happening around us, and are performed because they do something. This is the practical side of practical knowledge; the ritual in polytheistic religion does not (usually) alter you in some way – it alters the world (spiritual and physical) around you in some way. Consequently, ritual is employed as a tool – this problem is solved by a wrench, that problem by a hammer, and this other problem by a ritual. Some rituals are preventative maintenance (say, we regularly observe this ritual so this god is always well disposed to us, so that they do X, Y, and Z on the regular), others are a response to crisis, but they are all tools to shape the world (again, physical and spiritual) around us. If a ritual carries a moral duty, it is only because (we’ll get to this a bit more later) other people in your community are counting on you to do it; it is a moral duty the same way that, as an accountant, not embezzling money is a moral duty. Failure lets other people (not yourself and not even really the gods) down. I want to stress that these rituals are practical solutions to everyday problems. We focus a lot on the big rituals carried out by ancient states (in part because these tend to be rituals for the “big” gods that we find in mythology), but the great majority of religious activity were small rituals for smaller concerns. A religious festival to encourage the harvest, a small sacrifice for a loved one who got better after being sick, a ritual for safe childbirth (always a dangerous thing before modern medicine) and so on. […] Moreover, it was absolutely essential that the ritual be carried out with exact correctness. As Pliny notes [that] a ritual procession to a sacrifice included not only the magistrate making the sacrifice, but one attendant who carried the written formula for the ritual (so that no mistakes were made), a second whose job was to make sure the magistrate said all of the words correctly, a third who was to silence the crowd so no unfavorable omen was uttered (it wouldn’t do to have the god take an inadvertent word as an insult, or as a part of the formal request!), and a fourth playing the flute so that any words (the whispered chatter of the crowd) uttered that were not part of the ritual formula would not be heard. Pliny is quite certain that failures in this regard have in the past caused the organs of the sacrificial animal to spontaneously malform, indicating divine disapproval.

Roman calendar.
[Wiki]
The Roman calendar is kind of a moving target: at some very early point the Romans seem to have had a calendar with ten months, with December as the last month, March as the first month and no January or February. That said while you will hear a lot of folk history crediting Julius Caesar with the creation of two extra months (July and August) that’s not right; those months (called Quintilis and Sextilis) were already on the calendar. By the time we can see the Roman calendar, it has twelve months of variable lengths (355 days total) with an “intercalary month” inserted every other year to “reset” the calendar to the seasons. That calendar, which still started in March (sitting where it does, seasonally, as it does for us), the Romans attributed to the legendary-probably-not-a-real-person King Numa, which means in any case even by the Middle Republic it was so old no one knew when it started (Plut. Numa 18; Liv 1.19.6-7). The shift from March to January as the first month in turn happens in 153 BC (Liv. Per. 47.13), probably for political reasons. We still use this calendar (more or less) and that introduces some significant oddities in the reckoning of dates that are recorded by the Roman calendar. See, because the length of the year (355 days) did not match the length of a solar year (famously 365 days and change), the months “drifted” over the calendar a little bit; during the first century BC when things were so chaotic that intercalary months were missed, the days might drift a lot. This problem is what Julius Caesar fixed [in his role as Pontifex maximus], creating a 365 day calendar in 46; to “reset” the year for his new calendar he then extended the year 46 to 445 days.
[See the Historia Civilis video on “The Longest Year in Human History” for their take on it. Historia Civilis also did a short video on Roman families and the Roman calendar.]

Roman citizenship.
[Wiki] As with other ancient self-governing citizen bodies, the populus Romanus (the Roman people – an idea that was defined by citizenship) restricted political participation to adult citizen males (actual office holding was further restricted to adult citizen males with military experience, Plb. 6.19.1-3). And we should note at the outset that citizenship was stratified both by legal status and also by wealth; the Roman Republic openly and actively counted the votes of the wealthy more heavily than those of the poor, for instance. So let us avoid the misimpression that Rome was an egalitarian society; it was not. The most common way to become a Roman citizen was by birth, though the Roman law on this question is more complex and centers on the Roman legal concept of conubium – the right to marry and produce legally recognized heirs under Roman law. […] Romans were a lot more comfortable with open hierarchy and status distinctions among the citizenry and so those distinctions were public and formalized in ways that would have been socially unacceptable in a Greek polis. Roman law still shows a lot of concern for protecting the basic dignity of free citizens, but once that baseline is guarded, it is a lot more OK with some free citizens being “big men” and other being “small men”. Naturally the first distinction is between citizens – cives – and non-citizens. While Greek thinking tends to understand the politai as an exclusively male, self-replicating “club” of families, Roman citizenship is more expansive. For one, while it is ambiguous if women were considered citizens of Greekpoleis, it is very clear that Roman women were cives, albeit cives with heavily restricted civic rights. There is thus no need in Rome for a class of “women of citizen status”, because Roman women were simply citizens and could, in the right circumstances, pass on that citizenship to children. That has all sorts of follow-on implications: Roman women were valid targets of wills and bequests, they could own and inherit property, they could act as witnesses in court, bring court cases and indeed even argue such cases themselves (though that was rare), because those were the prerogatives of citizens. Which Roman women were. That said, political participation was limited to adult citizen males, with most offices having age requirements to serve. Outside of the cives, there are Latini (“Latins”, non-Romans under the ius latinum, “the Latin right”. by the late third century these are rarely ethnic Latins who mostly have Roman citizenship at that date, but other communities of socii or residents of the “Latin colonies”), socii (allies whose communities have a relationship with Rome, but are not Latins), peregreni (foreigners whose communities have no alliance with Rome) and servi (slaves). And we shouldn’t leave this merely implied: Rome was very much a slave society with a large enslaved underclass who were on the whole very poorly treated; enslaved people probably made up something like 15-20% of the population of Roman Italy in this period. There is also an odd category, cives sine suffragio, “citizens without the vote”, who were members of Italian communities who couldn’t participate in Roman politics but who had the valuable legal rights of Roman citizens (under the ius civilis) rather than the more limited rights of foreigners (under the ius gentium). Finally, another odd category are liberti, freedpersons. These were enslaved people freed by Roman masters; such individuals gained Roman citizenship but with a few disabilities, like the inability to hold major magistracies or generally to serve in the army (but their children would be freeborn Romans with no such limitations).

Roman kings.
[Wiki] [Rome was believed (by the Romans) to have been founded by Romulus in 753 BC. After the death of Romulus in 716 BC, they believed there were six more kings before the last king was driven out by the first Brutus and the Republic founded in 509 BC:

Numa Pompilius c. 715 – 672 BC (43 years) [Thersites the Historian did a video on Plutarch’s life of Numa Pompilius. ]
Tullus Hostilius c. 672 – 640 BC (32 years)
Ancus Marcius c. 640 – 616 BC (24 years)
Lucius Tarquinius Priscus c. 616 – 578 BC (38 years)
Servius Tullius c. 578 – 534 BC (44 years)
Lucius Tarquinius Superbus c. 534 – 509 BC (25 years)
Thersites the Historian did a video on The Monarchy and Early Republic.]

Roman law.
[Wiki] We have an effectively complete law code for Rome. The challenge is that this code, the corpus iuris civilis (“Body of Civil Law”) was compiled in 534 AD and represents the slow but steady accretion of law from the earliest written Roman law – the Twelve Tables (the exact text of which does not survive in full) – to the sixth century. Meanwhile the great majority of Roman statutes are lost to us or survive only in abridgements, summaries or commentaries. What sources do we have? Well, we do have some Roman laws, either in fragmentary inscriptions or as quoted – typically only in part – in other works. But we also have two introductory textbooks in Roman law which survive, one by an author known only as Gaius (the most common Roman praenomen, so this tells us basically nothing) dating from the second century AD and another compiled under (and credited to) Justinian (r. 527-565), both called the Instititones or “trainings”. We also have the corpus iuris civilis, as mentioned, a massive compilation of legal works which include the Digest, a compiled summary of the opinions of the chief legal theorists (jurists) of the Roman imperial period. And then finally layered on top of this, we have historical works, which can give us a sense in some cases of how the law changes or who might report on famous trials. […] As you may note from the dates where, while we have a lot of evidence for Roman law, most of it is imperial in date and indeed not only imperial but high or late imperial. And that makes reconstructing the legal world of the Roman Republic more challenging. We sometimes know from our historical sources that Roman law changed at one point or another, but as noted these sources tend to write with a genre-compliant level of imprecision which makes tracking exact changes difficult. What sustained evidence we do have, from things like Cicero‘s legal speeches, come from the Late Republic. So while we have a lot more information on how the legal system of the Roman Republic functioned […], there are still sometimes frustrating gaps in our knowledge. Still, I would describe our understanding of the Roman legal system as relatively complete. In practice, Roman law has three main sources – that is, fonts from which the law itself is created – formal, written law (leges and plebiscita, in the imperial period imperial decrees do this too), edicts by magistrates that supplemented the written law (edicta), and finally the role of precedent in two forms: the mos maiorum (the customs of the ancestors), a general instinct by Romans (and thus Roman juries) to adhere to tradition and also by the slow accretion beginning in the second century BC (and becoming prominent really in the imperial period) of case law and legal theory compiled by Roman legal theorists and advisors called jurists.
[Invicta did a playlist of videos on Law & Order in Ancient Rome.]

Roman “lawyers”.
In a move you will either find brilliant or lamentable, depending on if you are currently admitted to one or more state or federal bars, the Romans invented the lawyer, or more correctly we might say they invented the legal expert (a iuris prudens) and the legal advocate (often orator or patronus). Now in our legal system, we combine these roles into the singular lawyer, but the Romans separated them out: a iuris prudens or “jurist” was there to help you untangle questions of law, while your advocate was there to help you argue in court or more correctly, to argue in court for you. The distinction is summed up neatly in a quote from Cicero (Topica 12.51) where a jurist, Aquilius Gallus, who put himself out to answer legal questions from the public, when asked how to argue a question of fact quipped, “Nihil hoc ad ius; ad Ciceronem” – “This is not a question for the law, but for Cicero”, meaning for an orator. Of course if you do not have a patron and find yourself in legal trouble, you could always find a patron willing to represent you. In Roman custom, anyone who represents you in court becomes your patron (though they might also be engaged on a case-by-case basis and expect some rather more concrete display of gratitude), which of course in turn means that for a gifted Roman speaker with political ambitions, the courts might be a good place to collect valuable and influential clients whose political support you can use to your advance. This, of course, famously was how Cicero built his career.

Roman names (Tria nomina).
[Wiki] A larger unit than the familia is the gens, which we might translate as “clan”. This was an extended family unit composed of patrilineally related familiae. It is the name of the gens which is the Roman’s nomen, the middle name of the three-part Roman name (the trinomen). Which, given that a Roman has three names, a praenomen (fore-name), a cognomen (after-name) and a nomen (name) and the gens forms the nomen – this was an important part of identity. Thus Publius Cornelius Scipio‘s nomen is Cornelius because he is of the gens Cornelia (by far the largest of the Roman gentes); the cognomen Scipio indicates a branch of that very large gens, while Publius (the praenomen) is his personal name. The bonds of the gens seem to have been very tight in the early republic, where individual gentes even sometimes went to war on their own, but by the Middle Republic, this had loosened. Still, there does seem to have been a general expectation that gentes or branches of them stuck together; you’d expect Scipiones to support each other politically, for instance.

Roman popular assemblies.
[Wiki] Never to do things by half, Rome has not one or two but four popular assemblies, though one (the Comitia Curiata) might as well not exist by our period. The remaining three assemblies (the Comitia Centuriata, the Comitia Tributa and the Concilium Plebis) all can pass laws, they can all have a rare judicial function and they all elect magistrates (but different ones). Assemblies are pretty tightly controlled: they can only meet when convened by the right magistrate and can only vote on the proposal the magistrate puts to them (and cannot modify it or deliberate on it; up or down vote). That makes them seem quite weak except that they’re the only way to elect magistrates, the only way to pass laws (remember: the Senate cannot legislate), the only way to declare war or ratify a peace treaty. While the assemblies were often just a consensus mechanism getting the people lined up collectively behind a decision reached by the magistrates and the Senate, so long as there were divisions in the oligarchy – and there were almost always divisions in the oligarchy – there was potentially a lot of power for assemblies to express. The assemblies are not democratic in the “one person, one vote” sense. No assembly can convene itself; instead different magistrates have the right to convene different assemblies. Magistrates with imperium (consuls and praetors) can convene the comitia centuriata and the comitia tributa, while the tribunes of the plebs can convene the concilium plebis (also called the comitia plebis tributa). Once convened, the assembly does not have an “open” agenda, rather it is convened for a specific purpose: to approve (or not) a specific action proposed by that magistrate. The assembly does not debate, but instead offers and up-or-down vote (or chooses from a set of candidates if the agenda item for the assembly is “hold an election”) and the decision offered is final. All of this must be conducted in person in a single day. Votes may not be cast in absentia and the presiding magistrate must also be present in person. Candidates standing for office generally also must be present in person; dispensation to stand for election in absentia does happen but it is very rare. The requirement that the business be concluded in a single day is important and in this case religious in origin: the voting of an assembly is surrounded by religion: every assembly opens with a prayer and requires that the auguries (divining the will of the gods through the flights of birds) be taken before hand to ensure the gods are favorable. These sorts of things are for a specific assembly on a specific day and so the business must be completed on that day.

Roman religion.
[Wiki] The most important thing to understand about most polytheistic belief systems [including the Roman belief system] is that they are fundamentally practical. They are not about moral belief, but about practical knowledge. […] For the Roman there is never much question of if the gods exist. The existence of the gods was self-evident in the natural phenomena of the world. Belief was never at issue. […] This, of course, loops back to one of my favorite points about history: it is generally safe to assume that people in the past believed their own religion. Which is to say that polytheists genuinely believe there are many gods and that those gods have power over their lives, and act accordingly. In many ways, polytheistic religions, both ancient and modern (by modern polytheisms, I mean long-standing traditional religious structures like Hinduism and Shinto, rather than various “New Age” or “Neo-pagan” systems, which often do not follow these principles), fall out quite logically from this conclusion. If the world is full of gods who possess great power, then it is necessary to be on their good side – quite regardless of it they are morally good, have appropriate life philosophies, or anything else. After all, such powerful beings can do you or your community great good or great harm, so it is necessary to be in their good graces or at the very least to not anger them. Consequently, it does not matter if you do not particularly like one god or other. The Greeks quite clearly did not like Ares (the Romans were much more comfortable with Mars), but that doesn’t mean he stopped being powerful and thus needing to be appeased. So if these polytheistic religions are about knowledge, then what do you need to know? There are two big things: first you need to know what gods exist who pertain to you, and second you need to know what those gods want. […] Now, normally when you ask what the ancients knew of the gods and how they knew it, the immediate thought – quite intuitively – is to go read Greek and Roman philosophers discussing on the nature of man, the gods, the soul and so on. This is a mistake. Many of our religions work that way: they begin with a doctrine, a theory of how the divine works, and then construct ritual and practice with that doctrine as a foundation. This is exactly backwards for how the ancients, practicing their practical knowledge, learn about the gods. The myths, philosophical discussions and well-written treatises are not the foundation of the religion’s understanding of the gods, but rather the foaming crest at the top of the wave. In practice, the ruminations of those philosophers often had little to do the religion of the populace at large; famously Socrates’ own philosophical take on the gods rather upset quite a lot of Athenians. Instead of beginning with a theory of the divine and working forwards from that, the ancients begin with proven methods and work backwards from that. For most people, there’s no need to know why things work, only that they work. Essentially, this knowledge is generated by trial and error.

Roman roads.
[Wiki] When we talk of “Roman roads” we almost always mean the viae publicae, roads built by public officials (Initially censors who let out the contracts to build such public works, although later roadways get named after the consuls and praetors who constructed them as the Romans build more of them) and was maintained by the state. But of course these major state highways existed within a wider network of local roads (a via vinciales or actus). It’s a step in the right direction) which might or might not be private (a privatum iter). That distinction is important, because it wasn’t that all Roman roads were of the high quality we tend to think of – the roads we’re thinking of were prestige projects undertaken by the state, but [many] private lanes and dirt paths existed too. The first major paved Roman road to be built was the Via Appia, begun by Appius Claudius Caecus during his censorship (312-307BC). While the Via Appia would eventually become the road which connected Rome to Brundisium (modern Brindisi) – important for being the logical port to use when sailing eastward to Greece – the initial construction only went as far as Capua. The timing, coming during the Second Samnite War, was not an accident; the war was pulling central Italy, especially Campania (of which Capua was the chief city) into Rome’s political orbit. A road served to move Roman armies into the theater of conflict, but also to bind this new region more closely to Rome. Roman road construction in Italy over the next several centuries follow this pattern. The third century sees the addition of Roman roads cutting north into Etruria (the Via Aurelia (begun in 241) and the Via Clodia (paved in 225), to be joined by the paving of the Via Cassia, probably in the early second century), the Via Appia extended into Samnium (along with Roman power).
[Metatron did a video on Roman Roads – How Were They Made?.]

Rome (the city).
[Wiki] Rome, the city itself sat along the Tiber; in this period [middle Republic] it was not quite yet divided by it, but instead occupied the seven hills (and the lower ground between them) of the southern bank of the river. The seven hills, of course, are the Capitoline, Palatine, Aventine, Caelian, Esquiline, Viminal and Quirinal. The Capitoline hill (or Capitolium, which might also just refer to the Temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus on the hill) was the Roman equivalent of an acropolis and was where Rome’s most important temples were, particularly the aforementioned temple of Jupiter Optimus Maximus, “Jupiter, the Greatest and the Best”. The Palatine hill, the central hill of the bunch, was the traditional seat of Rome’s upper-class, where the wealthiest families would have their houses. In the imperial period, it would become the normal site for the imperial residence itself, eventually leading to our word “palace”. The Aventine hill, unusual in the bunch, sat outside the pomerium and seems both to have been associated with the plebeians as a sort of mirror to the patrician Palatine, as well as an association with foreign elements (both people and gods) transitioning into membership in the Roman community. In the space between the six northern hills, hugging the slopes of the Capitoline and Palatine, was the forum Romanum. Originally a swampy, lowland space, it was drained in the seventh century creating a common space for the communities that had developed on Rome’s hills and probably marking the beginning of Rome’s coalescence into a single community. By the Middle Republic, it was the long-established center of Roman political life. It featured both key political and religious buildings. Of particular political import was the comitium, initially the site of Rome’s public assemblies (though by this point some of those have moved) as well as the curia Hostilia, the Senate‘s primary meeting point (though it might meet elsewhere as well). Also on the forum was the rostra (literally “beaks” or “rams”) a large speaker’s platform decorated with six warship rams (rostra) captured in 338 BC, which was the standard place for political events like speeches. The courts also operated in the forum. It is difficult to overstate the centrality of the forum to Roman political life and thus the res publica. […] Rome’s system of government is a face-to-face one, where basically all functions must be done in person. The forum was where that happened and political writers – especially Cicero – routinely stress the importance of being in the forum, of being seen in the forum and being heard in the forum as part of the job of one of the nobiles and indeed of course the thing that made one nobilis – notable, known – in the first place.

Sabines.
[Wiki.] Distinctive Sabine material culture hasn’t been recovered from Rome as of yet. There are some clear examples of linguistic influence from Sabine to Latin, although the Romans often misidentify them; the name of the Quirinal hill, for instance (thought by the Romans to be where the Sabines settled after joining the city) doesn’t seem to be Sabine in origin. That said, religious institutions associated with the hill in the historical period (particularly the priests known as the Salii Collini) may have some Sabine connections. More notably, a number of key Roman families (gentes in Latin; we might translate this word as “clans”) claimed Sabine descent. Of particular note, several of these are Patrician gentes, meaning that they traced their lineage to families prominent under the kings or very early in the Republic. Among these were the Claudii (a key family in Roman politics from the founding of the Republic to the early Empire; Liv. 2.16), the Tarpeii (recorded as holding a number of consulships in the fifth century), and the Valerii (prominent from the early days of the Republic and well into the empire; Dionysius 2.46.3). There seems little reason to doubt the ethnic origins of these families. So on the one hand we cannot say with certainty that there were Sabines in Rome in the eighth century as Livy would have it (though nothing rules it out), but there very clearly were by the foundation of the Republic in 509 BC. The Sabine communities outside of Rome (because it is clear they didn’t all move into Rome) were absorbed in 290 and granted citizenship sine suffrago (citizenship without the vote) almost immediately; voting rights came fairly quickly thereafter in 268 BC (Vel. Pat. 1.14.6-7). The speed with which these Sabine communities outside of Rome were admitted to full citizenship speaks, I suspect, to the degree to which the Sabines were already by that point seen as a kindred people (despite the fact that they spoke a language quite different from Latin; Sabine Osco-Umbrian was its own language, albeit in the same language family).

Sacrifice.
We typically call a living thing killed and given to the gods a sacrificial victim, while objects are votive offerings. All of these terms have useful Latin roots: the word “victim” – which now means anyone who suffers something – originally meant only the animal used in a sacrifice as the Latin victima; the assistant in a sacrifice who handled the animal was the victimarius. Sacrifice comes from the Latin sacrificium, with the literal meaning of “the thing made sacred”, since the sacrificed thing becomes sacer (sacred) as it now belongs to a god. A votivus in Latin is an object promised as part of a vow, often deposited in a temple or sanctuary; such an item, once handed over, belonged to the god and was also sacer. There is some concern for the place and directionality of the gods in question. Sacrifices for gods that live above are often burnt so that the smoke wafts up to where the gods are (you see this in Greek and Roman practice), while sacrifices to gods in the earth (often gods of death) often go down, through things like libations (a sacrifice of liquid poured out). There is also concern for the right animals and the time of day. Most gods receive ritual during the day, but there are variations – Roman underworld and childbirth deities (oddly connected) seem to have received sacrifices by night. Different animals might be offered, in accordance with what the god preferred, the scale of the request, and the scale of the god. Big gods, like Jupiter, tend to demand prestige, high value animals (Jupiter’s normal sacrifice in Rome was a white ox). The color of the animal would also matter – in Roman practice, while the gods above typically received white colored victims, the gods below (the di inferi but also the di Manes (the divine shades of your dead ancestors who watch over you)) darkly colored animals. Now, why do the gods want these things? Unlike Mesopotamian gods, who can be killed, Greek and Roman gods are truly immortal – no more capable of dying than I am able to spontaneously become a potted plant – but the implication instead is that they enjoy sacrifices, possibly the taste or even simply the honor it brings them (e.g. Homeric Hymn to Demeter 310-315).

Samnite Wars.
[First (343-341 BC, Second 326-304 BC, and Third 298-290 BC] Rome is, according to Livy, at least, drawn into fighting the Samnites because of its suddenly concluded alliance with Capua and the Campanians (though Rome had been more loosely allied to the Samnites shortly before). In practice, the first two Samnite Wars (343-341, 326-304) were fought to determine control over Campania and the Bay of Naples, with Rome fighting to expand its influence there (by making those communities allies or protecting those who were) while the Samnites pushed back. The Third Samnite War (298-290) becomes something rather different: a containment war. Rome’s growing power – through its “alliance” system – was clearly on a course to dominate the peninsula, so a large coalition of opponents, essentially every meaningful Italian power not already in Rome’s alliance system, banded together in a coalition to try to stop it (except for the Greeks). What started as another war between Rome and the Samnites soon pulled in the remaining independent Etruscan powers and then even a Gallic tribe (the Senones) in an effort to contain Rome. The Romans manage to pull out a victory (though it was a close run thing) and in the process managed to pull yet more communities into the growing alliance system. It seems – the sources here are confused – that the decade that followed, the Romans lock down much of Etruria as well.

Sapienta.
Sapientia is “wisdom” and general good sense, the prudence that comes with age. Cicero gives us a bunch components of it, though: constantia (“restraint, self-control”), aequitas (“justice, fairness, calmness”), temperantia (“temperance, sobriety, moderation”), and prudentia (“prudence, foresight”). These are things we tend to learn as we grow older and it is not an accident that the Romans thought that generally speaking that older men should lead, to temper the virtus of the young. These traits that Cicero is breaking out are also the standard ones that do appear in Roman eulogies and encomiastic literature: men (and women) get praised not for their “manliness”, but more frequently for aequitas, prudentia, constantia, pietas or good fides, for being diligens (diligent, careful) and so on.

Saturnalia.
[Wiki. An annual winter festival in honour of the god Saturn, held from the 17th through the 23rd of December. Noted for its traditional reversal of roles where slaves were served at table by their masters and a “king” was elected who could give orders (usually ridiculous) to anyone that had to be obeyed. Gifts and feasting were part of the festival (which is yet another ancient tradition brought forward into the modern world under a different religious guise.]
[Historia Civilis did a short video on Saturnalia.]

Scipio Africanus, or more properly, Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus.
[Wiki. Born c. 236 BC, Proconsul 216-210 and 204-201, Consul 205 and 194, Censor 199, died c. 183 BC. Best known for his defeat of Carthaginian general Hannibal at the Battle of Zama in 202 BC.] Extensions of this sort [proroguing an imperium-having office], I should note, were generally fairly short. The longest run I can think of in this period is that of Publius Cornelius Scipio Africanus who is privati cum imperio pro consule (“private citizen with pro-consular imperium“) from 210 to 206, mostly as a product of his father and uncle having been the local Roman commanders in Spain and Scipio having taken over when they were both killed, leading to an irregular, emergency command. He’s then consul in 205, before having his command prorogued from 204 to 201 to complete his invasion of Africa (technically, he’s assigned to Sicily with permission to invade Africa if an opportunity presented itself).

Scutum (shield).
[Wiki. The distinctive shield of Roman heavy infantry. Traditionally a scutum has a centrally-mounted grip that is parallel to the ground that (barely) allows the legionary to hold one pilum between the thumb and the back of the shield while throwing the other pilum.] And just as Livy might have us suppose, our evidence supports the adoption of the scutum somewhere in the fourth century too, though perhaps not as neatly and as suddenly as Livy would like. Now the shield shape here may actually be Italic – particularly the curved edges of the scutum and its large size, but the metal “butterfly” boss at the center and the central wooden ridge (the spina) were clear borrowings from the La TèneLa Tène oval shield (which was generally flat, rather than curved, but oval in shape and large). And while we can’t know why the Romans picked these weapons to adopt, it sure does seem remarkable that evidently in the decades immediately following a – at least, according to our sources – traumatic military defeat at the hands of some Gauls, the Romans seem to have centralized their military system, expanded recruitment down the socio-economic ladder, and done so while adopting almost a complete Gallic military panoply. This also seems, by the by, to be the period where Rome commits to a system of expansion in Italy which maximizes military power, enabling broad mobilizations of large amounts of heavy infantry.
[Metatron did a video on The Roman Shield – Scutum Romanum.]

Seleucid War (192-188 BC).
[Wiki. Also known as the Aetolian war, Antiochene war, Syrian war, and Syrian-Aetolian war in various accounts. A conflict between the Roman Republic and allies against Antiochus III, king of the Hellenistic Successor realm of Seleucia. ]

Senate.
[Wiki. The idea of a senatorial “order” is entirely anachronistic for [the Republic]. There is a Senate; it has roughly 300 members (all male), whose membership confers no legal status in this period on their families. The ordo senatorius as an actual thing only comes into existence with Augustus, after the end of the republic. There is a senate and senators but no “senatorial order”. What there are are what our sources call nobiles, a term of the Late Republic which (among others) H.I. Flower uses to define the system of the Middle Republic – usefully so. To be nobilis was to be “well known” – the word comes to give us our word “noble” but it doesn’t mean that yet, it means “notable”. Families that got into high elected office in repeated generations (these are going to be very wealthy families; politics is not a game for the poor in Rome) joined this informal club of nobiles. The exact borders of this club shifted, though generally only slowly, with small but significant numbers of new entrants as older families faded into relative obscurity (sometimes to surge back into prominence). But the movement is slow: from one generation to the next, most of the families of the nobiles remain the same, in part because Roman voters fairly clearly assume that the sons of great politicians will be great like their fathers. The Senate has existed before the republic (and would exist after it) as an advisory body to the king, consisting of the heads of all of the most important elite families (who, after all, the king would want to listen to if he intended to stay king). And so it persisted into the republic as an advisory body to the magistrates, so that any magistrate looking to take an action might first ask the Senate if it seemed a good idea. The Senate has – and say it with me now (I make my classes chant this) – the Senate has no formal powers. Not a one. It cannot raise taxes, levy war, make laws, hold trials, nothing. It only advises, issuing opinions which are called senatus consulta. But remember, this is a system where the Senate is composed of the heads of all of the most influential families. Who hold sway over their large gentes. And all of their clients. If a Roman politician wanted to ever have any future at all for himself or the careers of his family, he had to work with the Senate. Consequently, while the Senate only advised the magistrates, the advice of the Senate was almost always obeyed, giving it a tremendous guiding power of the state. This particular sort of influence has a name, the auctoritas Senatus – the Authority of the Senate. In the republic, the way one becomes a member of the Senate was to win election to lower office and then gain the – usually pro forma – approval of the censors (officials elected every five years to take the census), so the Senate was effectively a body [of] ex-magistrates, the most notable and successful of the nobiles. Thus the combined auctoritas of the Senate was immense indeed.
[Historia Civilis did some short videos on the Senate, during the monarchy, and during the Republic.]

Senatus consultum.
[Wiki] [The non-binding “advice” of the Senate to the elected officials of the Republic. They are not laws, but carry immense influence with the magistrates and the people.] At the end of this process of speaking [in a meeting of the Senate], the presiding magistrate could put the issue to a vote. The magistrate in question set the terms of the vote, laying out a proposed senatus consultum (opinion of the Senate) and asking all senators who agreed to go to one side while everyone who disagreed go to the other. Multiple such motions could be voted in succession and the Senate might approve or disapprove of any set of them, but the order was up to the magistrate who might thus frame proposals tactically to achieve a given outcome. If the vote passed then the proposal – drafted into written form by the presiding magistrate, usually with the assistance of a few more junior senators – and issued as a formal decree of the Senate, called a senatus consultum. […] In addition, just to gum up the process further, a senatus consultum could be veto’d by the consuls or the tribunes, though the opinion of the Senate was still registered, just merely as the senatus auctoritas rather than consultum, though this carried a lot less weight. A veto’d proposal could simply be brought another day, in the hope that it might escape veto subsequently and at least until the 130s, it seems to have been an accepted part of the mos maiorum that one did not maintain a veto indefinitely against either the popular will or the will of the Senate (much less both), so in the third and most of the second century, a veto was a delaying tactic rather than a decisive killing of a motion.

Seniores.
[Among] Roman citizen males in the third or second century, not all [are] liable for general conscription [in the dilectus], which was restricted to the iuniores – Roman citizen men between the ages of 17 and 46; seniores in theory could be conscripted, but in practice only were in an emergency. In practice the number is probably lower still as unless things were truly dire, men in their late 30s or 40s with several years of service could be pretty confident they wouldn’t be called and might as well stay home and rely on a neighbor of family member to report back [from the dilectus in the unlikely event they were called.

Servile Wars.
[First (135-132 BC), Second (104-100 BC), and Third (73-71 BC).]
[Thersites the Historian did a video on the First and Second Servile Wars.]

Sibylline Books.
[Wiki. A collection of oracular predictions offered to the last king of Rome (Lucius Tarquinius Superbus) for purchase at a set price. When the king refused, part of the offered purchase was burned, then the remaining predictions were offered for the same price. Rinse and repeat, and eventually on advice of the augurs, the final third were purchased. The surviving books were entrusted to the care of the Temple of Jupiter on the Capitoline hill, to be consulted at need.]
[Historia Civilis did a short video on this.]

Sicilia, (Roman Sicily).
[Wiki] The first Roman province acquired was Sicily, which to the Romans (and indeed, to many Italians today) was not part of Italy proper, but its own distinct geographic and cultural space. The war over Sicily, the First Punic War (with Carthage) started in 264 BC and ended in 241, leaving Rome in control of the whole island. Extending the socii-system over the island would have posed immense difficulties and the Romans do not attempt it. For one, whereas the socii of Italy could walk to their [army] musters, Sicilians would have to sail. But perhaps even more pressing was that while Italy had undergone a long process of cultural and institutional convergence which left the various Italic peoples as good fits for the Roman military system, Sicily was a quite different place. Roman intervention in Sicily started in 264; before that the Romans had only minimal involvement in the island, whose affairs were instead defined by conflicts between the Carthage and the Greek colonies, Syracuse in particular. The ingredients for the socii system were thus missing, if the Romans ever even thought of employing the system (we have no evidence they did): the large population of decently affluent freeholding farmers who could fight as heavy infantry in the Roman style and thus make up the contributions wasn’t there. At the same time, even during the First Punic War, the Romans clearly recognized that Sicily had other things to offer, namely grain. Indeed, when Syracuse surrenders in the opening days of the First Punic War (Heiro II, its tyrant, having found himself suddenly wildly in over his head), the main Roman concern is that Syracuse provide provisions for the army in their operations against the Carthaginian holdings in the West of the island (Polyb. 1.18). So the deal was struck: the Romans would leave Heiro in place and in exchange, he paid an indemnity and supplied their armies with grain.

Slavery in the Roman World.
[Wiki] The other long-standing way to become a Roman citizen was to be enslaved by one and then freed. An enslaved person held by a Roman citizen who was then freed (or manumitted) became a libertus (or liberta), by custom immediately the client of their former owner (this would be made into law during the empire) and by law a Roman citizen, although their status as a freed person barred them from public office. Since they were Roman citizens (albeit with some legal disability), their children – assuming a validly contracted marriage – would be full free-born Roman citizens, with no legal disability. And, since freedmen and freedwomen were citizens, they also could contract valid marriages with other Roman citizens, including freeborn ones […]. While most enslaved people in the Roman world had little to no hope of ever being manumitted (enslaved workers, for instance, on large estates far from their owners), Roman economic and social customs functionally required a significant number of freed persons and so a meaningful number of new Roman citizens were always being minted in the background this way. Rome’s apparent liberality with admission into citizenship seems to have been a real curiosity to the Greek world.
[Sean Gabb did a video on Slavery in the Roman Republic and Empire and Slavery in the Roman World.]

Social War (91-87BC).
[Wiki] [Conflict between the Roman Republic and its allies (the socii) that resulted in most of the allied cities being granted Roman citizenship.] At the same time, because the “deal” the Romans offered was good and avoided gross insult to the honor of the socii (unlike many military-tributary complexes, which could be quite blunt about how “under the boot” their subordinated people were), the system was remarkably durable. The socii revolt en masse just twice. In 216 BC, when Hannibal has defeated three Roman armies and is in Italy, about a third of the socii join him; Rome with the remaining two thirds (including all of the Latin colonies) is able to overcome Hannibal and put down the rebellious communities. Then in 91 BC, about half of the socii rise up in the Social War. Their motives are complex: some of the socii clearly “want in” – they want full Roman citizenship, which for reasons beyond the scope of this post, has become a lot more valuable to have by this point. Some of the socii clearly “want out” – they want to break Roman domination over Italy. In any case, Rome is able to peel away the majority of the revolters by promising citizenship and subdue the rest.

Socii.
[Wiki] [Prior to the Social War, Italian allies of the Roman Republic, required to raise field troops to support Roman armies on demand (basically every year).] The earliest indicator we have of what is going to be Rome’s socii-system is the Foedus Cassianum (“Cassius’ Treaty”) concluded with the communities of Latium – the Latins – in 493 BC. […] This is the origin point for Rome’s use of what I’ve termed the “Goku Model of Imperialism” – “I beat you, therefore we are friends”. Having soundly defeated – at least according to our sources – the Latins, Rome doesn’t annex or destroy them, nor does it impose tribute, but rather imposes a treaty of alliance on them (in practice I suspect we might want to understand that Rome’s position was not so dominant as our sources suggest, thus the relatively good terms the Latins get). The treaty sounds like an equal relationship, until one remembers that it is the entire Latin league – thirty or more communities – as one party and then just Rome as the other party. Rome proceeds, in the century or so that follows, to use this alliance to defeat their other neighbors, both the nearest major Etruscan centers as well as the Aequi and Sabines who lived in the hills to the north-east of Rome and the Volsci who lived to the south of Latium. Roman relations with the Latins seem to fray in the early 300s, presumably because the greatest threat to their communities was increasingly not the Volsci, but Rome’s emerging regional power. That leads to a collapse of the Foedus Cassianum in 341 and another war between Rome and the Latin League. Once again our sources are much later, so we might be somewhat skeptical of the details they provide, but the upshot is that at the end the Romans won by 338. […] The Roman alliance system in turn worked kind of like clientela between communities. A community of the socii, as the junior partner, promised to serve in Rome’s armies and stick by the Romans in war. Meanwhile Rome, as the senior partner, promised to protect the socii militarily and to let them have a share of the loot and glory of successful military action. And Rome largely lived up to that bargain in this period. And that helped foster allied “buy-in” for Rome; whereas being a client in some non-Italian cultures (e.g. the Greeks) was shameful, for the Romans and Italians being a “good client” could be a source of positive honor. There was no shame in this relationship, which is really important for managing subordination in slavery-cultures where any hint of “slavishness” demands a violent response to protect honor. In short this was a good deal for allied communities living in what was frankly a pretty “tough neighborhood” (so the security guarantee was valuable) and who might benefit from loot from Rome’s wars. And crucially it was a good deal they could recognize, that they had a language for, which was was valued in their culture, just as it was in Rome. That buy-in let Rome rely on “willing compliance” with the allies except in extreme cases, which in turn let them rely on each allied community to manage its own recruitment, under the direction of its own local leaders. That essentially let Rome take its very intensive recruitment system and “franchise it out”, expanding the geographic, economic and demographic reach of the system without compromising its foundation in community solidarity and civic militarism. […] As Tim Cornell put it [in Beginnings of Rome], the Roman alliance system was, “a criminal operation which compensates its victims by enrolling them in the gang and inviting them to share to proceeds of future robberies”. In the rough neighborhood that was pre-Roman Italy and the ancient Mediterranean in general, where the consequences of losing a war could be so dire, that kind of deal isn’t such a bad one. That said, in the third and second centuries at least, most of the allies – the Latin colonies composed significantly of transplanted Romans excepted – didn’t stick with Rome out of any sense of national unity (there wasn’t any) or great affection. Rather, this seems to have been a pretty hard-nosed calculation of interests: for the elites that ran these communities, Rome protected them from outside threats, backstopped their power internally to some degree and was less bad than whatever their traditional local rival would have been.

Spatha (sword).
[Wiki] [A longer sword than the gladius Hispaniensis, originally adopted for Auxilia cavalry use and later appears to have become the default sword of the late empire infantry.]
[Scholagladiatoria did a video on the development of Roman swords from the gladius to the spatha for sword geeks.]

Struggle or Conflict of the Orders.
[Wiki] The “Struggle of the Orders” was a series of political crises running from 494 BC to 287 BC in which the plebeians (particularly wealthy, influential plebeians) pushed for a greater role in the state. In 494 they extracted a compromise from the Senate (at that point, exclusively patrician) that the plebeians would get their own magistrates, the tribunes of the plebs (tribuni plebis) to organize them within the republic and act as a counter-balance to the patrician magistrates (Livy 2.33). Initially, we are told, there were five tribunes, but the number is eventually expanded to ten and one of the powers these tribunes evidently had was the ability to summon their fellow plebeians to an assembly by tribes. Those assemblies could then pass laws for the plebeians only, called plebiscita, which of course fits with the tribune’s role as the magistrates for the plebeians (while the patrician magistrates spoke, in theory, for the entire community).

Sulla, or more formally, Publius Cornelius Sulla Felix.
[Wiki] In spring 83 BC, Sulla, who had been notionally serving in a proconsular command in the East to fight Mithridates, landed in Italy with his army; Rome had effectively come under the control of a military junta initially led by Gaius Marius (cos. 107, 104-100, 86) and after his death by L. Cornelius Cinna, Gn. Papirius Carbo and Gaius Marius the younger (son of the former). Sulla openly fought the consuls of 83 (Gaius Norbanus and L. Cornelius Scipio), pushing towards Rome. [In] 82, Carbo and Marius the Younger had themselves elected consuls. Marius was killed in 82 during the siege of Praeneste; Carbo fled to Sicily after Sulla took Rome (where he’d eventually be captured and killed by Pompey in 81). […] Sulla convened the Senate and directed them to select an interrex; the Senate selected Lucius Valerius Flaccus on the assumption he would hold elections; instead, Sulla directed him (with the obvious threat of violence) to instead convene the comitia centuriata and instead of holding elections, propose a law (the lex Valeria) to make Sulla dictator with the remit of rei publicae constituendae causa, “for reforming the constitution of the Republic” – an entirely new causa never used before. Of course with Sulla’s army butchering literally thousands of his political opponents, the assembly knew how they were to vote. […] The law also gave Sulla a lot of powers [that dictators did not have traditionally]. He was given the ability to alter the number of senators as well as choose new senators and expel current senators. Sulla rendered his authority immune to the acts of the tribunes, whereas that office had previously been the only office to exist outside of the dictator’s authority. Finally, his appointment had no time limit set to it. What Sulla has done here is used new legislation to create what was is effectively an entirely new office, which shared neither an appointment procedure, term limit, or set of authorities and powers with the previous version. Sulla then made a lot of very reactionary changes to the Roman Republic, got himself elected consul in 80, and then resigned his dictatorship (after rather a lot longer than six months, making Sulla, by the traditional criteria, the worst dictator Rome had up until that point, though I doubt he saw it that way), and after that retired from public life. Sulla seems to have imagined the office he created out of thin air in 82 would be a thing sui generis, a unique office to him only, to that moment only. Which was incredibly foolish because of course once you’ve created the precedent for that kind of office, you can’t then legislate away your own example. […] The story of the collapse of the Roman Republic is one in which these elements of the mos maiorum slowly crumble under the weight of the political disputes of the late second and first centuries. Students often assume that the solution was merely to codify these things into law, but what is striking to me is that the Romans tried that and it didn’t work. The lion’s share of Sulla’s reforms consisted, after all, in writing into law limits that had once been customary and codifying expectations which before had been unspoken and it did nothing to arrest the decline of the res publica. Without the norms – norms that Sulla himself undermined – the laws were merely words on the page. With the norms, the laws were largely unnecessary.
[Thersites the Historian did videos on Sulla as Consul-Elect in 65 BC and the Failure of the Sullan Order: Roman Politics 80-60 BC. Sean Gabb did a video on Sulla: A Failed Reaction. Adrian Goldsworthy covered Sulla’s career and reforms in part 8 of his “The Conquered and the Proud” video series]

Taxation.
[Wiki] The Romans drew soldiers from the socii, on whom they imposed no taxes or tribute, in the provinces, the Roman Republic did impose taxes or what we may more correctly call tribute. This tribute was generally collected as money, though it could also be collected “in kind” as bulk staples, generally grain for the armies. This tribute itself seems to have evolved from the logistics needs of the army – remember that Roman “governors” are in fact just magistrates with foraging and demanding contributions of grain from the communities in the areas they controlled. That ad hoc system of contributions continued to the establishment of permanent provinciae in 197. Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus (the elder, cos. 177, 163; father of the famous Tiberius Gracchus) serves as the commander in Nearer Spain in 179 and 178 pro consule and during that time seems to have codified these ad hoc contributions into a regular system of tribute (App. Hisp. 43). This seems to be similar to the way that Sicilian contributions of grain to Roman armies in the two Punic Wars develop into a taxation system. In other cases, the Romans effectively inherited an existing taxation system (for instance, in the province of Asia and arguably conquered parts of Carthaginian Sicily). In that case, generally speaking, the Romans simply redirected those royal or imperial taxes to the Roman treasury (the aerarium Saturni) without making major underlying changes. Roman taxes thus differed substantially from one province to the next or indeed between communities within provinces. However there were a fairly standard set of taxes that appear frequently. The largest tax was a tax on agricultural production, which the Romans called tributum; a tithe (10%) seems to have been fairly normal. Then there were customs duties on the import or export of goods to other provinces or outside of Roman controlled territory, which the Romans called portoria; rates varied, but were generally low (5% in Sicily, for instance). Finally, the Roman state might come directly to control certain economic ventures, especially mines, but also previously royal lands which might be rented out, that sort of thing. The Romans called revenue from these sources vectigalia and these revenues tended to be “farmed out” rather than administered directly.

Tiberius, or more properly, Tiberius Claudius Nero.
[Wiki] [Born 16 November 42 BC. Died 16 March 37 AD.] [The second Roman Emperor of the Julio-Claudian dynasty. Adopted son of Augustus. Tiberius was the last survivor of the chosen successors to the Principate, despite his not being particularly liked by Augustus. Succeeded by his grand-nephew and adopted son, Caligula.]
[Sean Gabb did a video on Tiberius: A Safe Pair of Hands.]

Transalpine Gaul.
[Wiki. Later renamed Gallia Narbonensis.]

Tres militiae.
[Wiki The military sequence of posts for members of the Equites (similar to the Senatorial cursus honorum).]

Tresviri capitales.
[Wiki. Also known as the tresviri nocturni, these three officials were responsible for what passed for police and firefighting services in Republican Rome. Not having imperium, these officials did not have the ability quell disturbances above the “bar-fight” level.]

Triarii.
[Wiki] The heavy infantry (hastati, principes and triarii) carry a large oval shield (the scutum), a sword (the gladius Hispaniensis, a versatile cut-and-thrust sword), two heavy javelins (pila), and wear both a metal helmet (the ubiquitous bronze Montefortino-type) and body armor. Poor soldiers, Polybius tells us, wear what in Latin is a pectorale (and thus in English a “pectoral”); this gets represented as a single smallish bronze plate over the upper-chest, but our evidence for this equipment suggests a more complete cuirass consisting of a front and back plate joined by side and shoulder plates, with a broad armored belt protecting the belly, a sort of “articulated breastplate”.
[ScholaGladiatoria did a video on The Roman Spear and Shield used together – Triarii.]

Tribune (military).
[Wiki] In addition to the imperium-haver (a consul, praetor or dictator) leading the army, there were also a set of staff officers called military tribunes, important to the process. These fellows don’t have command of a specific part of the legion, but are “officers without portfolio”, handling whatever the imperium-haver wants handled; at times they may have command of part of a legion or all of one legion. […] There are six military tribunes per legion (so 24 in a normal year where each consul enrolls two legions [and their matching two alae]); by this point four are elected and two are appointed by the consul. The military tribunes themselves seem to have often been a mix, some of them being relatively inexperienced aristocrats doing their military service in the most prestigious way possible and getting command experience, while Polybius also notes that some military tribunes were required to have already had a decade in the ranks when selected (Polyb. 6.19.1). […] While short summaries of the cursus honorum often focus on the military tribunate as an initial stepping-stone office (which it was), we have plenty of instances where Roman elites serve as military tribunes after having been elected to higher offices in the cursus. It’s also the only position before the consulship where individuals regularly serve multiple times. While we know that only a handful of the military tribunes were elected and the rest appointed, our sources almost never distinguish between the two, which makes how one gets this office a bit hard to parse. It is unclear, for instance, if the very senior military tribunes we sometimes see are usually elected or appointed by their generals. Clearly, however, there is an in-built advantage for the scions of illustrious families – the sons of the nobiles – because they are going to have family friends and relatives holding praetorships and consulships and thus in a position to appoint them to these posts. That in turn is going to give them a head-start to a political career, giving them opportunities to curry favor with the soldiers (who are also voters) and get their names “out there”.

Tribune of the Plebs (tribuni plebis).
[Wiki] The tribunate was established in 494 BC as an early part of a series of compromises between the patricians who had established the republic and the plebeians over whom it had been established. That often leads to the tribunes of the plebs being regarded as a late-comer to the res publica by students, but if you pay attention to the dates it really isn’t. Very little of the order we are laying out existed properly in 494, when the highest magistrate was still a praetor, for instance. Once we keep in mind that the period from 509 to 367 involved a fair bit of shifting systems and experimentation (decemviri, military tribunes with consular powers, and so on), the early establishment and long duration of the tribunate seems remarkable. By the 450s, there were ten of these fellows and that number also remains stable. Plebeian tribunes were elected in the concilium plebis in elections overseen by the previous year’s still-serving Plebian tribunes, and served for a single year. Early on it seems to have been possible for tribunes to serve multiple years, but by the second century – if not earlier – this had fallen out of practice, such that Ti. Sempronius Gracchus‘ (trib. 133) preparation to run for a second term was viewed by his opponents as extra-constitutional, verging on revolutionary. And I should note that tribunes do not have imperium; they do have some coercive power but it is differently derived. Fundamentally the tribunate’s purpose was as a check on the power of the magistrates and the Senate that advised them; this was a blocking magistracy. That fact can be obscured because of course the most famous tribunes were famous for their legislation (and indeed, tribunes could legislate), but most of the tribune’s activities were about making things not happen. Unfortunately for us, our sources tend to leave tribunes anonymous in these situations; our sources are full of anonymous tribunes exercising a veto or bringing auxilium (a term we’ll get to) or obstructing some proceeding or so on. And we need to keep in mind that most tribunes would have been like these anonymous tribunes and not like the famous ones (the Gracchi, Saturninus, Sulpicius Rufus and so on). The primary job of the tribunate was to prevent abuses of power by magistrates, especially magistrates with imperium. In order to accomplish that job, the tribunes were given a staggering array of powers. Most of the “blocking” powers derived, directly or indirectly, from the sacrosanctitas of the tribunes. Initially, this sacrosanctity emerged out of an oath (which, remember, has a religious character) by the plebeians to defend their tribunes, with violence if necessary, but by the third and second century it had become an accepted part of Roman law. The tribunes, for their time in office were sacrosanct, which meant that their persons were entirely inviolate; as this was an issue of religion, this protection transcended the imperium of the senior magistrates. And the degree of protection was strong: a tribune could not be pushed, shoved, or touched in a hostile manner at all by anyone. That of course protected the tribunes from any kind of coercion by other magistrates, even with lictors, but it also gave tribunes all sorts of interesting follow-on powers. The most important of these was intercessio, intercession, by which a tribune of the plebs could block a magistrate’s action by physically interposing themselves in the way; since they could not be moved, the action failed and was blocked. To block a voting assembly, this had to be done before the voters dispersed into their voting groups. A special kind of intercessio was auxilium, literally “help”, whereby a tribune could intervene to protect an individual from the exercise of a magistrate’s imperium. The most common case of this is a tribune intervening to prevent the arrest of an individual and indeed in the Late Republic we see a sort of political theater seemingly develop where a magistrate on one side of a debate will make a show of “arresting” their opponent and leading them to the carcer (the very small jail just off the forum), knowing full well that tribunes on the other side of the debate will intercede with auxilium to free the fellow.

Triplex Acies.
[Wiki. The standard organization of a legion for battle during the middle and late republican period, with the hastati in the front, backed up by the principes and the veteran triarii either immediately behind or further back as a combat reserve. “When in danger of imminent defeat, the first and second lines, the hastati and principes, ordinarily fell back on the triarii to reform the line to allow for either a counter-attack or an orderly withdrawal. Because falling back on the triarii was an act of desperation, to mention “returning to the triarii” (ad triarios redisse) became a common Roman phrase indicating one to be in a desperate situation.” In the HBO series Rome, the first battle scene shows a different way of moving fresh troops forward into the fight using whistle signals, but this is not documented in our sources and should be viewed as a bit of creative license by the director.]

Triumph.
[Wiki. The formal celebration of a victory by a Roman general, celebrated through the streets of Rome by the victorious army with captives and treasures from the defeated nation or tribe on display.]
[Historia Civilis did a short video on the Roman Triumph.]

Triumvirate.
[First (Caesar, Crassus, and Pompey) and Second (Antony, Lepidus, and Octavian).
Adrian Goldsworthy talks about the First Triumvirate here.]

Umbria.
[Wiki] The people of the northern Apennines were the Umbri (that is, Umbrian speakers), though this linguistic classification hides further cultural and political differences. The Sabines were one such group, but there were also the Volsci and Marsi (the latter particularly well known for being hard fighters as allies to Rome; Appian reports that the Marsi had a saying prior to the Social War, “No Triumph against the Marsi nor without the Marsi”). Further south along the Apennines were the Oscan speakers, most notably the Samnites (who resisted the Romans most strongly) but also the Lucanians and Paelignians (the latter also get a reputation for being hard fighters, particularly in Livy). The Umbrian and Oscan language families are related (though about as different from each other as Italian from Spanish; they and Latin are not generally mutually intelligible) and there does seem to have been some cultural commonality between these two large groups, but also a lot of differences. Their religion included a number of practices and gods unknown to the Romans, some later adopted (Oscan Flosa adapted as Latin Flora, goddess of flowers) and some not (e.g. the “Sacred Spring” rite, Strabo 5.4.12).

Velites (light infantry).
[Wiki] Polybius notes that the “youngest and poorest” [of the military recruits in the dilectus] are assigned to the velites, then the next to the hastati, and so on, creating a sliding scale by both wealth and age; one paragraph down he reiterates that the velites are mostly the youngest soldiers (Polyb. 6.22.1). In practice, we know that the centuries of the pedites were stratified by wealth and that wealthier soldiers were expected to bring heavier, more expensive kit (even Polybius notes this, Polyb. 6.23.14). The equipment of the velites, who were light infantry skirmishers that screened and supported the legion, would have been much cheaper than the equipment of the rest of the infantry (who were all armored, heavy infantry), so I think the right reading of Polybius is that the velites consist of both the young of all of the classes of pedites (putting green soldiers in a position to both prove their courage, but also one where if they falter it doesn’t cause the line to collapse; light infantry can retreat and advance freely) as well as the very poorest of the pedites who couldn’t afford heavier equipment even if they wanted to. The velites carry a sword (Livy tells us it is the same sword as the heavy infantry, the gladius Hispaniensis, Livy 38.21.13), a small shield (the smaller version of the parma; cavalry use a larger version of this shield), and javelins (Livy clarifies they carry seven of them; these are lighter javelins, the hasta velitaris, Livy 26.4) along with a modest helmet. The velites themselves emerge as a distinct arm of the Roman army during the Second Punic War, but an integrated light infantry skirmish force existed earlier; it’s not clear how the velites would have differed from earlier light infantry milites or rorarii. Perhaps not very much.

Vesta.
[Wiki] [The Roman goddess of the hearth and family. The annual Vestalia festival was celebrated from the 7th to the 15th of June and was a very important holiday in the Roman calendar. Usually depicted in period as the fire burning on the altar in her temple rather than in human guise. Her priestesses were known as the Vestal Virgins and their leader was known as the Virgo Vestalis Maxima or Vestalium Maxima. The cult of Vesta was one of the very last official cults disbanded by Theodosius I in 391 AD.]

Vestal Virgins.
[Wiki] [The priestesses of the cult of Vesta. The six Vestals were chosen before puberty and were expected to remain virginal during their entire period of service to the goddess (usually 30 years). Initially restricted to the daughters of patricians, plebeian girls and even the daughters of freedmen were eligible later in the Republic. After their term of service, they could retire with a generous public pension. A Vestal who lost her virginity was subject to being buried alive as a punishment and the man who violated her chastity was publicly executed. The Vestals were under the direct control of the Pontifex maximus in the Republic and the emperor after Augustus took on that role.]

Veto.
[Wiki] [Among the various checks and balances of the Republican system, the “veto” was one of the strongest tools. There were Consular vetos, where one of the Consuls could interpose a veto even against his consular colleague to block any action of the Senate or popular assemblies. The veto had to be exercised in person. Only the censors were immune to the consular veto. The other form of veto was introduced through the Struggle of the Orders with the creation of the office of Tribune of the plebs, with five and later ten plebeian tribunes elected every year. These magistrates were “blocking” or “obstructing” officers who did have the power to introduce legislation, but whose primary role was to prevent legislation from being enacted.]

Via Appia (aka the Appian Way).
[Wiki] The earliest roads of the Roman Republic were, of course, dirt roads; the first major paved Roman road to be built was the Via Appia, begun by Appius Claudius Caecus during his censorship (312-307BC). While the Via Appia would eventually become the road which connected Rome to Brundisium (modern Brindisi) – important for being the logical port to use when sailing eastward to Greece – the initial construction only went as far as Capua. The timing, coming during the Second Samnite War, was not an accident; the war was pulling central Italy, especially Campania (of which Capua was the chief city) into Rome’s political orbit. A road served to move Roman armies into the theater of conflict, but also to bind this new region more closely to Rome.

Vigiles (night watchmen in Rome).
[Wiki] In the imperial period, Rome did have a sort of police force (though their primary job was as firefighters), the vigiles, who in addition to putting out fires kept a night watch and might respond to cries of alarm for things like burglaries, or do riot control. But as far as we can tell they didn’t investigate crimes. The Roman legal system lacked a public prosecutor in any event: if someone did a crime against you, you didn’t wait for the police to investigate and the state to charge, instead you went to a magistrate (here this might be the tresviri capitales or a praetor (either the praetor urbanus or praetor peregrinus, depending on the issue) and laid the charge yourself (and then you or your representative or patron, would prosecute).

Vigintisexviri (“twenty-six men” – minor elected magistrates).
[Wiki] In addition to the major magistrates, we know that Rome also had a number of elected magistrates who ranked below the quaestors. […] The main grouping of these was the vigintisexviri (“twenty-six men”), a collection of six boards of minor magistrates in the res publica whose number added up, collectively, to twenty six (thus the name). These offices were elected annually. The two most prestigious were the tresviri monetales, who supervising the minting of coins and other precious metals under the supervision of the urban quaestors, and the tresviri capitales. The tresviri capitales, created c 290 BC, acted as a night watch, [and] seem to have supervised prisons and executions and also had at least some judicial role and functioned as what passed for Rome’s fire department. If you were robbed, for instance, it seems that the tresviri capitales might investigate that and perhaps even judge the matter if the individual was caught. To provide the manpower for these tasks, the tresviri capitales were provided a group of public slaves (enslaved workers owned by the state), who could make a primitive riot squad or fire-fighting force. We shouldn’t overstate their role, it’s clear that these fellows didn’t act very much like a police force, but they functioned to keep public order. Less prestigious than these two offices but still part of the “twenty six men”, were the decemviri stlitibus iudicandis (“ten men for judging lawsuits”), a board which judged minor lawsuits, including adjudicating the free or non-free status of a person when the question was in doubt. There were also quattuorviri viis in urbem purgandis (“four men for cleaning roads in the city”) who did exactly what the name implies. The remainder were the duoviri viis extra urbem purgandis (“two men for cleaning roads outside of the city”) and the four praefecti Capuam Cumas (“four prefects sent to Capua and Cumae”, which is to say, to Campania). We also hear reference to some quinqueviri cis et ultis Tiberim (“five men on either side of the Tiber”), but if they were ever part of the “twenty six men” it is unclear.

Virtus.
[Wiki]
The most important quality for a Roman man to have was virtus. Virtus derives from the Latin vir (“man” as distinct from a mere male) and so in the narrow sense means “manliness”, although by the time we have Roman literature (around 200BC) the meaning has drifted enough so that women can have virtus too (e.g. Cic. Ad Fam. 14.1.1, 14.11; Juv. 6.166-9). Instead, virtus stands for a constellation of values that were desirable in a man (and often in women too!). At its core, virtus is the animating force of personality that impels one to great deeds: it is ambition, drive and a nearly reckless courage, combined with the obstinacy and determination to persevere through difficulties, through fear. The best translation is often not “virtue” but rather something closer to “valor” as virtus is what makes someone good in battle (and other endeavors), but it’s more about courage than skill. […] Military valor is the clearest, surest, truest test (a certamen, “test” or discremen, “separating point”) of one’s virtus, but virtus can be shown in other fields of human endeavor, including intellectual fields. The key that connects them is courage and drive. […] My go-to quote to make this point to students is always Alcmena’s declaration from Plautus’ Amphitryon (2.2.18-23), “virtus is the best prize, virtus assuredly surpasses all things: it protects and preserves liberty, safety, life, property and parents, country and children. Virtus has everything in itself, all good things come to him who has virtus.” Importantly, virtus is a product of the soul (the animus), a part of the inner-most person, cultivated but not necessarily learned: it is a thing proved as much as developed.

Year of the Four Emperors.
[Wiki] [Upon the suicide of Nero, a succession of imperial claimants appeared to briefly become Emperor in their turn: Galba, Otho, and Vitellius. Vespasian was the last and most successful of the claimants and he established the Flavian dynasty.]
[Sean Gabb did a video on this.]