Rome’s tremendous run of victories from 264 to 168 (and beyond) fundamentally changed the nature of the Roman state. The end of the First Punic War (in 241) brought Rome its first overseas province, Sicily which wasn’t integrated into the socii-system that prevailed in Italy. Part of what made the socii-system work is that while Etruscans, Romans, Latins, Samnites, Sabines, S. Italian Greeks and so on had very different languages, religions and cultures, centuries of Italian conflict (and then decades of service in Rome’s armies) had left them with fairly similar military systems, making it relatively easy to plug them in to the Roman army. Moreover, being in Rome’s Italian neighborhood meant that Rome could simply inform the socii of how many troops they were expected to supply that year and the socii could simply show up at the muster at the appointed time (which is how it worked, Plb. 6.21.4). Communities on Sicily (or other far-away places) couldn’t simply walk to the point of muster and might be more difficult to integrate into core Roman army. Moreover, because they were far away and information moves slowly in antiquity, Rome was going to need some sort of permanent representative present in these places anyway, in a way that was simply unnecessary for Italian communities.
Consequently, instead of being added to the system of the socii, these new territories were organized as provinces (which is to say they were assigned to the oversight of a magistrate, that’s what a provincia is, a job, not a place). Instead of contributing troops, they contributed taxes (in money and grain) and the subordination of these communities was much more direct, since communities within a province were still under the command of a magistrate.
We’ll get to the provinces and their role in shaping Roman attitudes towards identity and culture a bit later, but for the various peoples of Roman Italy, the main impact of this shift was to change the balance of rewards for military service. Whereas before most of the gains of conquest were in loot and land – which the socii shared in – now Roman conquests outside of Italy created permanent revenue streams (taxes!) which flowed to Rome only. Roman politicians began attempting to use those revenue streams to provide public goods to the people – land distribution, free military equipment, cheap grain – but these benefits, provided by Rome to its citizens, were unavailable to the socii.
At the same time, as the close of the second century approached, it became clear that the opportunity to march up the ladder of status was breaking down, consumed by the increasingly tense maelstrom of the politics of the Republic. In essence while it was obvious as early as the 120s (and perhaps earlier) that a major citizenship overhaul was needed which would extend some form of Roman citizenship to many of the socii, it seems that everyone in Rome’s political class was conscious that whoever actually did it would – by virtue of consolidating all of those new citizens behind them as a political bloc – gain immensely in the political system. Consequently, repeated efforts in the 120s, the 100s and the 90s failed, caught up in the intensifying gridlock and political dysfunction of Rome in the period.
Consequently, just as Rome’s expanding empire had made citizenship increasingly valuable, actually getting that citizenship was made almost impossible by the gridlock of Rome’s political system gumming up the works of the traditional stepwise march up the ladder of statuses in the Roman alliance.
Finally in 91, after one last effort by Livius Drusus, a tribune of the plebs, failed, the socii finally got fed up and decided to demand with force what decades of politics had denied them. It should be stressed that the motivations behind the resulting conflict, the Social War (91-87), were complex; some Italians revolted for citizenship, some to get rid of the Romans entirely. The sudden uprising by roughly half of the socii at last prompted Rome to act – in 90, the Romans offered citizenship to all of the communities of socii who had stayed loyal (as a way of keeping them so). That offer was quickly extended to rebellious socii who laid down arms and rejoined the Romans. The following year, the citizenship grant was extended to communities which had missed the first one. The willingness to finally extend citizenship won Rome the war, as the socii who had only wanted equality with the Romans, being offered it, switched sides to get it, leaving only a handful of the hardest cases (particularly the Samnites, who never missed an opportunity to rebel against Rome) isolated and vulnerable.
The consequence of the Social War was that the slow process of minting new citizens or of Italian communities slowly moving up the ladder of status was radically accelerated in just a few years. In 95 BC, out of perhaps five million Italians, perhaps one million were Roman citizens (including here men, women and children). By 85 BC, perhaps four million were (with the remainder being almost entirely enslaved persons); the number of Roman citizens had essentially quadrupled overnight. Over time, that momentous decision would lead to a steady cultural drift which would largely erase the differences in languages, religion and culture between the various Italic peoples, but that had not happened yet and so confronted with brutal military necessity, the Romans had once again chose victory through diversity, rather than defeat through homogeneity. The result was a Roman citizen body that was bewilderingly diverse, even by Roman standards.
(Please note that the demographic numbers here are very approximate and rounded. There is a robust debate about the population of Roman Italy, which it isn’t worth getting in to here. For anyone wanting the a recent survey of the questions, L. de Ligt, Peasants, Citizens and Soldiers: Studies in the Demographic History of Roman Italy 225 BC – AD 100 (2012) is the place to start, but be warned that Roman demography is pretty technical and detail oriented and functionally impossible to make beginner-friendly.)
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Queen’s Latin or Who Were the Romans, Part II: Citizens and Allies”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-06-25.
July 30, 2024
QotD: The Roman Republic and the Social War
July 13, 2024
The real story of Henry Hook, VC – Zulu
The History Chap
Published Nov 23, 2023Henry Hook, VC, 1850-1905. Zulu — the Battle of Rorke’s Drift.
Henry Hook was one of 11 defenders at the mission station at Rorke’s Drift (battle of Rorke’s Drift, Anglo-Zulu War 1879) who were awarded the Victoria Cross. Controversially, his character was misrepresented in the 1963 film Zulu. His character, played by James Booth (1927-2005), was depicted as an insubordinate barrack-room lawyer, a drunk and a malingerer. This was far from the truth.
Hook was actually a model soldier, who was teetotal, and who would serve as a regular and volunteer for over 40 years. His family were upset by the film, although contrary to popular stories, there is no evidence that Henry Hook’s daughters walked out of the [movie’s] premiere.
Nevertheless, in this video I aim to share his real story. Not just of his service in the army (and at Rorke’s Drift) but of a humble man from Gloucestershire, who returned home to find his wife had run off with another man, who found love for a second time and who worked in the British Museum.
Where is Henry Hook buried? Henry Hook’s grave can be found at St. Andrew’s church in the hamlet of Churcham, Gloucestershire. it is about five miles west of Gloucester.
0:00 Introduction
1:26 Early Life
3:10 Rorke’s Drift
3:56 Zulu
5:00 Defending The Hospital
7:45 Assegai wound
9:47 Making Tea
10:23 Victoria Cross
11:07 After Rorke’s Drift
13:11 Failing Health
15:10 The History Chap
(more…)
July 6, 2024
QotD: The Roman Republic at war … many wars … many simultaneous wars
It certainly cannot be said of this period that the Romans always won the battles (though they won more than their fair share, they also lost some very major ones quite badly) or that they always had the best generals (though, again, they tended to fare better than average in this department). Things did not always go their way; whole armies were lost in disastrous battles, whole fleets dashed apart in storms. Rome came very close at points to defeat; in 242, the Roman treasury was bankrupt and their last fleet financed privately for lack of funds (Plb. 1.59.6-7). During the Second Punic War, at one point the Roman censors checked the census records of every Roman citizen liable for conscription and found only 2,000 men of prime military age (out of perhaps 200,000 or so; Taylor (2020), 27-41 has a discussion of the various reconstructions of Roman census figures here) who hadn’t served in just the previous four years (Liv. 24.18.8-9). In essence the Romans had drafted everyone who could be drafted (and the 2,000 remainders were stripped of citizenship on the almost certainly correct assumption that the only way to not have been drafted in those four years but also not have a recorded exemption was intentional draft-dodging).
And the military demands made on Roman armies and resources were exceptional. Roman forces operated as far east as Anatolia and as far west as Spain at the same time. Livy, who records the disposition of Roman forces on a year-for-year basis during much of this period (we are uncommonly well informed about the back half of the period because those books of Livy mostly survive), presents some truly preposterous Roman dispositions. Brunt (Italian Manpower (1971), 422) figures that the Romans must have had something like 225,000 men under arms (Romans and socii) each year between 214 and 212, immediately following a series of three crushing defeats in which the Romans probably lost close to 80,000 men. I want to put that figure in perspective for a moment: Alexander the Great invaded the entire Persian Empire with an army of 43,000 infantry and 5,500 cavalry. The Romans, having lost close to Alexander’s entire invasion force twice over, immediately raised more than four times as many men and kept fighting.
These armies were split between a bewildering array of fronts (e.g. Liv 24.10 or 25.3): multiple armies in southern Italy (against Hannibal and rebellious socii now supporting him), northern Italy (against the Cisalpine Gauls, who also backed Hannibal) and Sicily (where Syracuse threatened revolt) and Spain (a Carthaginian possession) and Illyria (fighting the Antigonids) and with fleets active in both the Adriatic and Tyrrhenian Sea supporting those operations. And of course a force defending Rome itself because did I mention Hannibal was in Italy?
If you will pardon me embellishing a Babylon 5 quote, “Only an idiot fights a war on two fronts. Only the heir to the throne of the kingdom of idiots would fight a war on twelve fronts.” And apparently, only the Romans would then win that war anyway.
(I should note that, for those interested in reading up on this, the state-of-the-art account of Rome’s ability to marshal these truly incredible amounts of resources and especially men is the aforementioned, M. Taylor, Soldiers & Silver (2020), which presents the consensus position of scholars better than anything else out there. I’d be remiss if I didn’t note that my own book project takes aim at this consensus and hopes to overturn parts of it, but seeing as how my book isn’t done, for now Taylor holds the field (also it’s a good book which is why I recommended it)).
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Queen’s Latin or Who Were the Romans, Part II: Citizens and Allies”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2021-06-25.
July 4, 2024
QotD: “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”
Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord
He is trampling out the vintage where the grapes of wrath are stored…In 1861, the United States had nothing that was recognized as a national anthem, and, given that they were now at war, it was thought they ought to find one – a song “that would inspire Americans to patriotism and military ardor”. A 13-member committee was appointed and on May 17th they invited submissions of appropriate anthems, the eventual winner to receive $500, or medal of equal value. By the end of July, they had a thousand submissions, including some from Europe, but nothing with what they felt was real feeling. It’s hard to write a patriotic song to order.
At the time, Dr Samuel Howe was working with the Sanitary Commission of the Department of War, and one fall day he and Mrs Howe were taken to a camp a few miles from Washington for a review of General McClellan’s Army of the Potomac. That day, for the first time in her life, Julia Ward Howe heard soldiers singing:
John Brown’s body lies a-mould’ring in the grave
John Brown’s body lies a-mould’ring in the grave…Ah, yes. The famous song about the famous abolitionist hanged in 1859 in Charlestown, Virginia before a crowd including Robert E. Lee, Stonewall Jackson and John Wilkes Booth.
Well, no, not exactly. “By a strange quirk of history,” wrote Irwin Silber, the great musicologist of Civil War folk songs, “‘John Brown’s Body’ was not composed originally about the fiery Abolitionist at all. The namesake for the song, it turns out, was Sergeant John Brown, a Scotsman, a member of the Second Battalion, Boston Light Infantry Volunteer Militia.” This group enlisted with the Twelfth Massachusetts Regiment and formed a glee club at Fort Warren in Boston. Brown was second tenor, and the subject of a lot of good-natured joshing, including a song about him mould’ring in his grave, which at that time had just one verse, plus chorus:
Glory, glory, hallelujah
Glory, glory, hallelujah…They called it “The John Brown Song”. On July 18th 1861, at a regimental march past the Old State House in Boston, the boys sang the song and the crowd assumed, reasonably enough, that it was inspired by the life of John Brown the Kansas abolitionist, not John Brown the Scots tenor. Over the years in the “SteynOnline Song of the Week”, we’ve discussed lyrics featuring real people. But, as far as I know, this is the only song about a real person in which posterity has mistaken it for a song about a completely different person: “John Brown’s Body” is about some other fellow’s body, not John Brown the somebody but John Brown the comparative nobody. Later on, various other verses were written about the famous John Brown and the original John Brown found his comrades’ musical tribute to him gradually annexed by the other guy.
Mark Steyn, “The Battle Hymn of the Republic”, Steyn Online, 2019-05-26.
June 27, 2024
Tim Worstall offers a rule-of-thumb for physical fitness
Rather than digging deeply into the esoterica of current research on the human body, Tim Worstall suggests there’s a handy rough metric you can use to judge your own physical fitness in any given area that sounds helpful:
“Exercise Running Fitness Physical Activity – Credit to https://homethods.com/” by homethods is licensed under CC BY 2.0 
.
If you can do the whatever it is in under twice the Olympic time for it then that’s just fine. You may, at that point, step off the treadmill and go get more dip.
Not that I have any expertise in such things as fitness — just the normal amount of forced labour true of anyone who went through public school. It still seems to me to be a good guide.
True, the accuracy of this varies depending upon the specific activity. Managing 100 metres in 20 seconds is not a huge call — only just managing it would have small children jeering perhaps. But a mile in 8 minutes, yes, that does require a certain level of fitness and one that’s also indicative of, well, being at a certain level of fitness. Not that I’m going to do anything so gauche as check this, but that sounds like about the fitness tests for middle aged men in the military (longer if it’s in full kit).
One recent Tour de France time trial was around the 45 km mark. Which they did in 45 to 49 minutes (again, from memory) and doing 45 km in 90 minutes is something the average club cyclist would do on Granny’s bike, with the basket in front. A professional cyclist would need to add a sheepdog to the basket to be that slow. But being able to crank out 45 km on a bike — in that hour and a half — is showing a level of fitness that I take to be just fine for the average couch lizard.
So too the mile swim. Olympic swimming is 1500m, in 14 minutes or so. So, a mile in half an hour? That looks quite testing but if I can get close to that (in my 60s) then I’m happy. I can swim a mile, which in itself is a reasonable level of fitness, but that time would, I think, qualify as being “fit enough”.
It’s possibly true that this guide is more accurate at the longer distances. For being able to even perform the longer distances is itself a guide to fitness and the time recorded is less of an issue. It would also be possible that personal experience is playing a part here — I’ve always been comparatively better at longer. Few fast twitch fibre. So the “Worstall’s” could well be “As applies to Worstall” rather than something more general.
I’ve always been bad at endurance sports, but I’ve done fairly well in sprint-style, “twitchy” sports where you need fast reactions rather than long, slow-burn exertion. Tim’s rule of thumb seems to be more useful for runners, swimmers, etc., than for badminton players or fencers.
June 20, 2024
QotD: Canadian soldiers of the 1950s and early 1960s
J.L. Granatstein, Canada’s Army, 2002.
June 9, 2024
Men In Armour (1949) – The origins and operation of tanks
FWD Publishing
Published Feb 18, 2024Lengthy documentary made in 1949 about the men and tanks of the Royal Armoured Corps (RAC).
June 7, 2024
Redeployment! – Millions of men from Europe to Asia
World War Two
Published 5 Jun 2024Now that Japan is the only Axis power still in the fight, Allied forces — especially American ones — must redeploy to prepare for the final invasion of the Japanese Home Islands. But how do you move millions of men halfway around the globe? And which ones go — veterans, new recruits, or some combination? Who decides? Where exactly do you send them to prepare too, with some many eastern ports like Manila a shambles? Let’s take a look.
(more…)
June 2, 2024
QotD: The Spartans do not deserve the admiration of the modern US military
Even more concerning is the U.S. military’s love of all things Spartan. The U.S. Army, of course, has a Spartan Brigade (Motto: “Sparta Lives”) as well as a Task Force Spartan and Spartan Warrior exercises, while the Marine Corps conducts Spartan Trident littoral exercises — an odd choice given that the Spartans were famously very poor at littoral operations. Beyond this sort of official nomenclature, unofficial media regularly invites comparisons between U.S. service personnel and the Spartans as well.
Much of this tendency to imagine U.S. soldiers as Spartan warriors comes from Steven Pressfield’s historical fiction novel Gates of Fire, still regularly assigned in military reading lists. The book presents the Spartans as superior warriors from an ultra-militarized society bravely defending freedom (against an ethnically foreign “other”, a feature drawn out more explicitly in the comic and later film 300). Sparta in this vision is a radically egalitarian society predicated on the cultivation of manly martial virtues. Yet this image of Sparta is almost entirely wrong. Spartan society was singularly unworthy of emulation or praise, especially in a democratic society.
To start with, the Spartan reputation for military excellence turns out to be, on closer inspection, mostly a mirage. Despite Sparta’s reputation for superior fighting, Spartan armies were as likely to lose battles as to win them, especially against peer opponents such as other Greek city-states. Sparta defeated Athens in the Peloponnesian War — but only by accepting Persian money to do it, reopening the door to Persian influence in the Aegean, which Greek victories at Plataea and Salamis nearly a century early had closed. Famous Spartan victories at Plataea and Mantinea were matched by consequential defeats at Pylos, Arginusae, and ultimately Leuctra. That last defeat at Leuctra, delivered by Thebes a mere 33 years after Sparta’s triumph over Athens, broke the back of Spartan power permanently, reducing Sparta to the status of a second-class power from which it never recovered.
Bret Devereaux, “Spartans Were Losers”, Foreign Policy, 2023-07/22.
May 28, 2024
Rishi Sunak’s big-brained election-winning strategy: bring back the draft
Embattled British Conservative leader Rishi Sunak has had another of his patented brainstorms for a policy that will absolutely win his party huge numbers of “gammon” votes in the July 4th general election:
I thought the misty nostalgia for postwar “National Service” had died out long ago …
Here we go: straight off, let’s get the youth to do some indentured servitude, sorry, National Service.
The Sunday Times reports:
Every 18-year-old will be required by law to sign up for a year of National Service under plans unveiled by the Conservatives this weekend.
Rishi Sunak’s first manifesto commitment would see youngsters given the choice between a full-time course (for 12 months) or spending one weekend a month volunteering in their community. There will be sanctions for teenagers who do not take part. Up to 30,000 full-time positions will be created either in the armed forces or in cybersecurity training. The weekend placements could be with the fire or police service, the NHS or charities tackling loneliness and supporting older, isolated people.
The Tories have pledged to set up a royal commission to design the £2.5billion programme and establish details such as how the cybertraining would be delivered. A pilot will start next year and by the end of the parliament legislation will be passed making it mandatory for all 18-year-olds.
[…]
The Prime Minister says: “This new, mandatory National Service will provide life-changing opportunities for our young people, offering them the chance to learn real-world skills, do new things and contribute to their community and our country.” I doubt very much it will do this. The youth could learn real world skills in a weekend job that they’d actually get paid for but under Tory Rule they must become an indentured servant of the State instead.
It was floated that “the weekend placements could be with the fire or police service, the NHS or charities tackling loneliness and supporting older, isolated people”. Really? The fire and police service having to babysit some surly 17-year-old teenager glued to a mobile phone? Is this really what a police officer wants?
No doubt the vast majority of the youth will be dumped in some NHS hospital to do goodness knows what, or indeed a nursing home. And what about all the people who are currently off work and on anti-depressants “because of mental health”. Will they be forced to volunteer, or let off the requirement?
May 15, 2024
QotD: Recruiting an army in the Roman Republic
So, on the appointed day(s), Polybius tells us all Romans liable for service of military age assemble in Rome and are called up on the Capitoline Hill for selection. This was a point that raised a lot of skepticism from historians,1 mostly concerning the number of people involved, but those concerns have all pretty much been resolved. While there might have been something like 323,000 Roman citizen males in the third or second century, they’re not all liable for general conscription, which was restricted to the iuniores – Roman citizen men between the ages of 17 and 46, who numbered fewer, probably around 228,000; seniores in theory could be conscripted, but in practice only were in an emergency. In practice the number is probably lower still as unless things were truly dire, men in their late 30s or 40s with several years of service could be pretty confident they wouldn’t be called and might as well stay home and rely on a neighbor of family member to report back in the unlikely event they were called. That’s still, of course, too many to bring up on to the Capitoline or to sort through calling out names, but as Polybius notes they don’t all come up, they’re called up by tribe. The Roman tribes were one of Rome’s two systems of voting units (the other, of centuries, we’ll come to in just a moment) and there were 35 of them, four urban tribes for those living in the city and 31 rural tribes for those living outside the city.
So what is actually happening is that the consul sets the date for the dilectus, then assigns his military tribunes to their legions (this matters because the tribunes will then do a round-robin selection of recruits to ensure each legion is of equivalent equality), then calls up one tribe at a time, with each tribe having perhaps around 6-7,000 iunores in it. Conveniently, the Capitoline is plenty large enough for that number, with estimates of its holding capacity tending to be between 12,000 and 25,000 or so.2 And while Polybius makes it seem like all of this happens on one day, it probably didn’t. Livy notes of one dilectus in 169, conducted in haste, was completed in 11 days; presumably the process was normally longer (though that’s 11 days for all three steps, not just the first one, Livy 43.14.9-10).
Once each tribe is up on the Capitoline, recruits are selected in batches; Polybius says in batches of four, but this probably means in batches equal to the number of legions being enrolled, as Polybius’ entire schema assumes a normal year with four legions being enrolled. Now Polybius doesn’t clarify how selection here would work and here Livy comes in awfully handy because we can glean little details from various points in his narrative (the work of doing this is a big chunk of Pearson (2021), whose reconstruction I follow here because I think it is correct). We know that the censors compile a list not just of Roman senators but of all Roman citizen households, including self-reported wealth and the number of members in the household, updated every five years. That self-reported wealth is used to slot Romans into voting centuries, the other Roman voting unit, the comitia centuriata; those centuries correspond neatly to how Romans serve in the army, with the equites and five classes of pedites (infantry). Because of a quirk of the Roman system, the top slice of the top class of pedites also serve on horseback, and Polybius is conveniently explicit that the censors select and record this too.
So at dilectus time, the consuls, their military tribunes (and their state-supplied clerk, a scriba) have a list of every Roman citizen liable for conscription, with the century and tribe they belong to, the former telling you what kind of soldier they can afford to be when called and the latter what group they’ll be called in. And we know from other sources (Valerius Maximus 6.3.4) that names are being read out, rather than just, say, selecting men at sight out of a crowd. That actually makes a lot of sense as dilectus (“select”) may really be dis-lego, “read apart”, from lego (-ere, legi, lectum) “to read”.3 And that matters because the other thing the Romans clearly have a record of us who has served in the past. We know that because in an episode that is both quite famous but also really important for understanding this process, in 214 – after four of the most demanding years of military activity in Roman history, due to the Second Punic War – the Roman censors identified 2,000 Roman iuniores who had not served in the previous four years (or claimed and been granted an exemption), struck them from the census rolls (in effect, revoking their citizenship) and then packed them off to serve as infantry (regardless of their wealth) in Sicily.4
So what happens as each tribe comes up is that the tribunes can call out the names – in batches – of men with the least amount of service, of the particular wealth categories they are going to need to fill out the combat roles in the legion.5 The tribunes for each legion pick one recruit from each batch that comes up, going round-robin so every legion gets the same number of first-picks. Presumably once the necessary fellows are picked out of one tribe, that tribe is sent down the Capitoline and the next called up.
Once that is done the oath is administered. This oath is the sacramentum militare; we do not have its text in the Republic (we do have the text for the imperial period), but Polybius summarizes its content that soldiers swear to obey the orders of the consuls and to execute them as best they are able. The Romans, being practical, have one soldier swear the full oath and then every other soldier come up and say, “like that guy said” (I’m not even really joking, see Polyb. 6.21.3) to get everyone all sworn in. Of course such an oath is a religious matter and so understood to be quite binding.
Then the tribunes fix a day for all of the new recruits to present themselves again (without arms, Polybius specifies) and dismiss them. Strikingly, Polybius only says they are dismissed at this point – not, as later, dismissed to their homes. This makes me assume that the oath being described is administered tribe by tribe before the tribe is sent down (this also seems likely because fitting the last tribe and four legions worth of recruits on the Capitoline starts to get pretty tight, space-wise). Selecting with the various tribes might, after all, take a couple of days, so the tribunes might be telling the recruits of the first few tribes what day the entire legion will be assembled (that’ll be Phase II) after they’ve worked through all of the tribes. Meanwhile, once your tribe was called, you didn’t have to hang around in Rome any longer, if you weren’t selected you could go home, while the picked recruits might stick around in Rome waiting for Phase II.
That leads to the other logistical question for Phase I: the feasibility of having basically all of the iuniores in Rome for the process. Doubts about this have led to the suggestion that perhaps the dilectus in Rome was mirrored by smaller versions held in other areas of Roman territory in Italy (the ager Romanus) for Roman citizens out there. The problem with that assumption is that the text doesn’t support it. The Romans send out conscription officers (conquisitores) exactly twice that we know of, in 213 and 212 (Livy 23.32.19 and 25.5.5-9) and these are clearly exceptional responses to the failure of the dilectus in the darkest days of the Second Punic War (the latter is empowered to recruit under-age boys if they look strong enough to bear arms, for instance). But I also think it was probably unnecessary: this was a regular occurrence, so people would know to make arrangements for it and the city of Rome could prepare for the sudden influx of young men. This is, after all, also a city with regular “market days”, (the nundinae) which presumably would also cause the population to briefly swell, though not as much. And we’re doing this in an off-time in the agricultural calendar, so the farmhands can be spared.
Moreover, Rome isn’t that far away for most Romans. Strikingly, when the Romans do send out conquisitores, they split them with half working within 50 miles of Rome and half beyond that (Livy 25.5.5-9). The implication – that most of the recruits to be found are going to be within that 50 mile radius – is clear, and it makes a lot of sense given the layout of the ager Romanus. Certainly there were communities of Roman citizens farther out, but evidently not so many. Fifty miles down decent roads is a two-day walk; short enough that Roman iuniores could fill a sack with provisions, walk all the way to Rome, stay a few days for the first phase of the dilectus and walk all the way back home again at the end. We’re not told how communities farther afield might handle it, but they may well have trekked in too, or else perhaps sent a few young men with instructions to bring back a list of everyone who was called.
Meanwhile the other part of this phase is happening: the socii. Polybius reports that “at the same time the consuls send their orders to allied cities in Italy, which they with to contribute troops, stating the numbers required and the day and place at which the men selected must present themselves.”6 Livy gives us more clarity on how this would be done, providing in his description of the muster of 193 the neat detail that representatives of the communities of socii met with the consuls on the Capitoline (Livy 34.36.5). And that makes a ton of sense – this is happening at the same time as the selection, so that’s where the consuls are.
We also know the consuls have another document, the formula togatorum, which spells out the liability of each community of socii for recruits; we know less about this document than we might like. Polybius tells us that the socii were supposed to compile lists of men liable for recruitment (Polyb. 2.23-4) and an inscription of the Lex Agraria of 111 BC refers to, “the allies or members of the Latin name, from whom the Romans are accustomed to demand soldiers in the land of Italy ex formula togatorum“.7 That then supplies us with a name for the document. Finally, we know that in 177, some of the socii complained that many of the households in their territory had migrated into other communities but that they conscription obligations had not been changed (Livy 41.8), which tells us there was a formal system of obligations and it seems to have been written down in something called the formula togatorum, to which Polybius alludes.
What was written down? Really, we don’t know. It has been suggested that it might have been a sliding scale of obligations (“for every X number of Romans, recruit Y number of Paeligni”) or a standard total (“every year, recruit Y Paeligni”) or a maximum (“the total number of Paeligni we can demand is Y, plus one more guy whose job is to throw flags at things”.). In practice, it was clearly flexible,8 which makes me suspect it was perhaps a list of maximum capabilities from which the consuls could easily compute a fair enough distribution of service demands. A pure ratio doesn’t make much sense to me, because the socii come in their own units, which probably had normal sizes to them.
So, while the military tribunes are handling the recruitment of citizens into the legions, the consuls are right there, but probably focused on meeting with representatives of each community of the socii and telling them how many men Rome will need this year. Once told, those representatives are sent back to their communities, who handle recruitment on their own; Rome retains no conscription apparatus among the socii – no conscription offices, no records or census officials, nada. The consuls spell out how many troops they need and the rest of it was the socii‘s elected official’s problem.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: How To Raise a Roman Army: The Dilectus“, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-06-16.
1. Particularly in P.A. Brunt, Italian Manpower (1971).
2. Pearson (2021) compiles them; the issue is also discussed in Taylor (2020).
3. The philological argument here is Pearson (2021), 16-17. It is not air-tight because legere has a lot of meanings, including “to pick out” along with “to read”. That said, given that the verb of being recruited into the army is conscribere (“to write together, to conscript”), there really is a strong implication that this is a process with written records, which the rest of the evidence confirms. I think Pearson may or may not be right about the understood meaning of dilectus implying writing, but the process surely involved written records, as she argues.
4. A punishment post, this is also where the survivors of the Battle of Cannae were sent. Both groups remain stuck in Sicily until pulled into Scipio Africanus’ expedition to Africa in 205, so these fellows don’t get to go home and get their citizenship back until the conclusion of the war in 201.
5. In particular, we generally assume the lowest classes of Roman pedites probably could only afford to serve as light troops, the velites, while the wealthy equites had their own selection procedure for the cavalry done first. Of course, rich Romans not selected for the cavalry might serve as infantrymen if registered in the centuries of pedites which is presumably how Marcus Cato, son of the Censor, ends up in the infantry at Pydna (Plut. Aem. 21).
6. Polyb. 6.21.4. Paton’s trans.
7. Crawford, Roman Statutes (1996), 118 for the text of that inscription.
8. Something pointed out by L. de Ligt in his chapter in the Blackwell A Companion to the Roman Army (2007).
May 13, 2024
Roman Legions – Sometimes found all at sea!
Drachinifel
Published Feb 2, 2024Today we take a quick look at some of the maritime highlights of the new special exhibition at the British Museum about the Roman Legions:
https://www.britishmuseum.org/exhibit…
(more…)
May 6, 2024
The Canadian Army defiles updates its online branding
Shady Maples isn’t too impressed with the new corporate image “icon” the Canadian Army extruded onto their TwitX account last week:
The Canadian Army’s dysenteric moose shitting itself to death, er, I mean “The Canadian Army’s latest supplementary icon for online use”
The Canadian Army needs to get its shit together on Twitter, not because Twitter is important, but because people believe that Twitter is important. If you follow official accounts, then you’re probably tracking the Army’s latest update to its corporate branding.
Within hours the Army was
furiously backpedalingclarifying that our new digitalized Rorschach test wasn’t a replacement logo, but an “icon” that “will be used in the bottom left corner of certain communications products and in animations for videos”. This was a bigger news event than the announcement itself.When I first saw this thing, I thought it was a maple leaf blowing past north Africa. Could this be Straussian commentary on our National Defence Strategy? Perhaps, but now thanks to Twitter all I see when I look at it is a dysenteric moose shitting itself to death (and now you do too).
The hook in all this isn’t the new branding, which is just a drop in CAF’s vast ocean of PowerPoint phluff, the visual equivalent of white noise. It’s also not in the backlash either, because that’s just another Tuesday on Twitter. You see, unlike the Iranian nuclear program or whatever’s happening between Drake and Kendrick Lamar, the CAF is not a topic of serious international concern.
Come for the mocking of the icon, stay for the contrasting social media appearances of Canadian and Israeli Lieutenants General.
April 30, 2024
QotD: The ambitious Roman’s path to glory and riches
At no point, however, did the putative justification for war come into play. Picking a war with the Parthians wasn’t bad in itself. Nor was “picking a war with the Parthians because you gots to get paid”. Certainly picking a war with, say, the Gauls wasn’t bad in itself, and “picking a war with the Gauls because I need to capture and sell a few thousand slaves to cover my debts” was so far from being bad, guys like Caesar, if I recall my Gallic Wars correctly, openly declared it from jump street. And though Caesar surely would’ve been prosecuted if he’d lost, and Crassus if he’d lived, suggesting that anyone owed an apology to the Gauls or Parthians would’ve gotten you locked up as a dangerous lunatic.
A confident, manly power might lose a war or two. Hell, they might lose a bunch — the Romans got beat all the time, and so did the British. But no matter how bad the loss, or how embarrassing the peace treaty, they shrugged it off. You win some, you lose some, and when it’s clear you’re going to lose — or when it becomes clear that there’s no possible way “victory” will ever be worth the cost — you cut your losses and came home. HM forces, for instance, lost no less than three wars in Afghanistan. And so what? Great Britain was still the world’s preeminent power. They never even dreamed of apologizing — that’s the Great Game, old sock.
Severian, “Friday Mailbag / Grab Bag”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2021-07-23.
April 26, 2024
The British Army from the start of the Cold War
Dr. Robert Lyman discusses the state of the British Army through the Cold War years down to today, with emphasis on the defence budget tracking against perceived threats to the UK and allies over that period:
Last year General Lord Dannatt and I published an account of the British Army between 1918 — when it achieved a great victory — and 1940, when it did not. The book was written in part to challenge the UK to think seriously about what happens when our country neglects the requirement for an army able to fight at a high-intensity for a prolonged period against a peer adversary.
Part of our argument was to look at the amount of money the country spends on its defence as a barometer of the seriousness or otherwise of our political masters towards spending money on the primary duty of government, namely the security of its citizens. Our fear is that in the rampant feel-goodery that has plagued the West since 1991 the harsh realities of our unstable world have become forgotten. It has taken Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, and Russia’s subsequent bludgeoning of that benighted country for politicians to gradually wake up to the scale of the threat that this sort of instability offers to the world, not merely Europe or the West.
My fear, like that of many others, is that the wake-up call is taking too long and our country’s defences remain in a parlous state. We haven’t had an army able to deploy at divisional level or above in sustained all-arms manoeuvre for perhaps ten years or more. In other words, our ability to provide what our forefathers would have described as a robust “continental commitment” is almost non-existent.
In the book we trace the origins of the failure to think seriously about the need to have a deployable, expeditionary army, able to fight and operate alongside its allies in NATO on an all-arms battlefield. The reality is that the Cold War forced Britain to retain the ability to fight a general war in Europe, all the while finding the resources to undertake its other commitments across the world. Although worldwide events were dynamic from 1945 to 1989 with further conflicts for the United Kingdom in Malaya, Dhofar, Cyprus, Kenya, Borneo, the Falklands, and the long-running Troubles in Northern Ireland, it was the Cold War in Europe that principally drove the defence agenda and kept the budget at around 5 per cent of GDP. As the major bridge between the United States and Europe, the Royal Navy was heavily committed above and below the surface of the Atlantic Ocean to keep open the sea lines of communication to NATO’s dominant partner, while the British Army retained some 55,000 troops in four armoured divisions as part of NATO’s Northern Army Group and the Royal Air Force was also largely forward-based in West Germany as part of the Second Allied Tactical Air Force. These conventional deployments were all conducted under the nuclear umbrella of Mutual Assured Destruction. By the 1980s, with the West under the leadership of US President Ronald Reagan and British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and with increased spending on both conventional armaments and the highly experimental Inter-Continental Ballistic Missile Defence system, the strain of strategic military competition began to show on the political and economic stability of the Soviet Union. Despite the perestroika political movement for reform within the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and the associated openness of glasnost under General Secretary Mikhail Gorbachev, the cracks in the Berlin Wall that opened on 9 November 1989 led inexorably to the collapse of the Soviet Union two years later and the old flag of Russia being raised over the Kremlin on 26 December 1991. The Cold War was over, and an apparent New World Order had begun. The historian Francis Fukuyama declared – somewhat ambitiously – the end of history.
It was at this point that international leaders and their finance ministers in the West began to overlook the cautionary tale that the history of the 20th century might have taught them. With the Soviet Union gone and rump Russia apparently enfeebled, Western states eagerly embarked on military reduction and a peace dividend. In the United Kingdom, the “Options for Change” exercise saw a major slashing of defence capability, beneficially coincidental to help ameliorate a significant economic downturn. The British Army was reduced from 155,000 to 116,000 soldiers, notwithstanding the first Gulf War of 1990–91 which many wishful thinkers regarded as something of an aberration. However, despite that war and the subsequent deployment of large parts of the armed forces to Bosnia from 1992 and then to Kosovo in 1999, the new Labour government of Prime Minister Tony Blair continued with the implementation of its Strategic Defence Review of 1997–98. As a piece of policy work, this was considered an honest review of the United Kingdom’s defence policy and a progressive blueprint for future defence planning and expenditure. Endorsed by Tony Blair and the Chiefs of Staff, this review might have stood the nation in good stead for the future had the Chancellor of the Exchequer, Gordon Brown, fully funded its outcome. For his own reasons, he chose not to do so. The underfunding of the United Kingdom’s defence capability began to show its deficiencies a year after with the second Gulf War of 2003, and the situation was then exacerbated by a protracted campaign in Iraq for the British Army lasting until 2009 and an even more intense one in Afghanistan lasting until 2014.
