… the recruits return on the appointed day and are reassembled, probably on the campus Martius (the field of Mars, just outside the city), which in any case is where the whole process will end up moved to in the first century (probably to accommodate the larger number of Roman citizens). Moving the process outside of the ritual boundary of the city, the pommerium, would have been important, because the power of certain Roman magistrates to command armies (imperium, a crucial concept we’ll deal with when we get to the series on the Republic) 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 pommerium. That said, Polybius doesn’t tell us where this part takes place and I don’t myself know of any source that explicitly does.
I should stop to note that this phase gets short shift in the scholarship. Brunt, Italian Manpower (1971) 625ff somehow manages to miss it entirely, conflating it with the selection of recruits in Phase I, but it is clearly a distinct stage in the process. Polybius is not subtle here: after the oaths are taken, the [military] tribunes dismiss the recruits (Polyb. 6.21.6), designating a time and place for them to reassemble without arms and then when they show up then (Polyb. 6.21.7), they are divided into units, are ordered to get their equipment and then sent home again (Polyb. 6.26.1) to reassemble one more time (Polyb. 6.26.2) when the army is properly formed. That is three clear stages: selection, apportionment and mobilization, which occur on different days in different places.
The function of this phase is the division of recruits into their constituent units. First the pedites (again, “infantry”) are split into four types: velites, hastati, principes and triarii. Polybius notes that the “youngest and poorest” 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.1
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.2 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 leves milites or rorarii. Perhaps not very much.
Meanwhile 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” […] Wealthier Romans were required to furnish themselves with mail. Once again, the fact that the tribunes are likely to have access to the census, and thus the self-reported wealth figures of the recruit’s households (tied to their century assignment) is going to facilitate these divisions.
Each class (except the velites) then 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 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.
Once all of those divisions are complete, the tribunes instruct the men on how they are to arm themselves and then send them home (Polyb. 6.26.1). I should note here the Paton translation (rev. Walbank and Habicht, but I don’t think they change anything here) reads, “The tribunes having thus organized the troops and ordered them to arm themselves in this manner dismiss them to their homes” but a more strictly literal translation would run, “The tribunes, having made the divisions and given them orders concerning equipment then dismiss the men to their homes”. There’s an assumption worked into the translation that soldiers arm themselves; I think this assumption is correct, but it is not required by the text.
But of course the staging of this process only really makes sense if soldiers do self-equip. Otherwise, why send them all to their homes at this stage, when you have the entire army gathered and divided into units? If equipment was state issued, it’d be trivial to hand it all out right at this stage and then march off to war. Instead, soldiers are dispatched home with orders concerning their equipment.
Meanwhile, the process for the socii is running in parallel. We know basically nothing about this stage of their process, but it is certainly happening. All Polybius tells us is that “the magistrates [of the socii], choosing the men and administering the oath in the manner above described, send them off, appointing a commander and a paymaster” (Polyb. 6.21.5). The implication is that the socii have a similar process to the Romans (albeit in miniature as there are many communities of socii who collectively provide about as many troops as the Romans, so their dilecti – whatever name they really went by – will be much smaller). This is reflective of the Roman attitude towards the socii – they do not care how the troops are raised or paid, only that they are raised. So long as the socii show up at the appointed time with the right gear, ready to fight, the Romans are fine with the process.
But the system here mirrors the Roman one quite strongly. Each Roman 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). So while the Romans are dividing into units and then heading home to buy, fetch or borrow their equipment, the socii are at work recruiting their own troops to the numbers and of the types demanded at the dilectus, arming them, making arrangements for their pay (the Romans supply food, but not pay, for the socii) and then sending them to the planned rendezvous.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: How To Raise a Roman Army: The Dilectus“, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-06-16.
- In Polybius’ day, there may have been significant overlap between these two definitions just because Roman military success was likely to put enough loot in the pocket of a seasoned veles to enable him to afford the equipment of the heavier infantry.
- Perhaps in some cases a leather or textile head-covering rather than a metal one; evidence here is very thin.
November 2, 2026
QotD: Organizing a Roman Republican army
August 29, 2026
QotD: Peter Green’s vengeance against the Hellenistic Age
But telling the actual narrative of the Hellenistic world, however bizarre and entertaining it gets, is really only the superficial purpose of Alexander to Actium. No, the real point of the book, and the real reason to stick around for all 700 pages, is to witness Peter Green’s incredible, almost maniacal act of vengeance against an era he despises.
Whether it’s playwrights …
The poet-playwright Menander … has always struck me as a classic example of a growth industry created by papyrological accident.
… poets …
Callimachus, like Ben Jonson, has always had a rather better press than he deserves, and for much the same reason: his academic ideals and credentials can hardly fail to appeal to those other academics … I cannot help finding him at once pretentious and faintly distasteful, a literary exhibitionist with an unpleasant groveling streak about him, a sycophant implacable in his attacks on rival sycophants[.]
… philosophy …
Popular philosophies — and Stoicism must be accounted one of the most popular ever — almost always tend to have an intellectually suspect quality about them.
… coin portraits …
Prusias I of Bithynia is porcine, crass, and self-satisfied. The early kings of Pontus resemble nothing so much as a family of escaped convicts: Pharnaces I has the profile of a Neanderthaler, and Mithridates IV that of a skid-row alcoholic.
… or academia itself …
Museum faculty developed a reputation for symposia, frivolous research topics, and alcoholism: to anyone in the same profession there cannot fail to be a certain sense of deja vu.
… Green knows how to write a burn. It’s not simply that he’s a hater: his book about the Battle of Salamis overflows with love and admiration for the golden age Greeks who defeated the Persians. No, Green specifically has a bone to pick with the Hellenistic era and its rulers, its people, its art, and its ideas. For those who read for entertainment, the best part of Alexander to Actium isn’t the battles, the George R.R. Martin-esque politics, or the even more Martin-esque incest — it’s tagging along as Peter Green gets revenge on the Hellenistic Age by writing a definitive textbook about it, so that all students of history who come after him will read of his scorn and contempt.
Green’s harsh attitude is clear right from the preface, when he sets the book’s scope.
[I will not] devote specific sections either to law or to school education, on the grounds that during our period the first … was little more than an elaborate sham masking the realities of power, while the second offered nothing, in essence, but literary rote learning, elementary mathematics, music, athletics, and — most important — a rhetorical grab bag that would enable men at the top to talk their way into, or out of, anything.
Hellenistic historiography fares just as badly:
Polybius remains the only worthwhile historian of the Hellenistic period whose work substantially survives. Diodorus, as we are too often reminded, is a third-rate compiler … I have no wish to burden an already overlong book with yet another imaginative analysis of his chronological inconsistencies and synthetic rhetoric. Like Plutarch, he believed that one virtue of history lay in “recording the nobility of distinguished men, publicizing the vileness of the wicked, and in general promoting the good of mankind”. Successful statesmen, he thought, were righteous, while evil ones met with frustration: nothing, in short, succeeds like success. None of this inspires confidence.
From there the savagery continues almost non-stop, right down to the last page when Green ridicules imperial Roman literature for “guttering out” by the mid-2nd century. Virtually nothing escapes.1
Take philosophy, that most noble of ancient endeavors. The Hellenistic world’s biggest philosophical contribution was Stoicism. Today, Stoicism enjoys a good reputation for encouraging adherents to be stolid and uncomplaining in the face of difficulties. Green, though, puts the spotlight on Stoicism’s lesser-known traits like its determinism and pantheism, then singles it out as a shallow ideology perfect for helping elites rationalize their own hypocrisies.
Sandbach correctly notes that “the belief that the world was entirely ruled by Providence would have an appeal to the ruling class of a ruling people”. What Stoicism offered, in fact, was a built-in justification — moral, theological, semantic — for the social and political fixed order: it was the most powerful and subtle instrument of self-perpetuation that the Hellenistic ruling class ever conceived. The mere fact of anything happening meant that it had been fated to happen; and since nature was providentially disposed toward mankind, what was fated could not fail to be all for the best. This interesting version of determinism is most often presented as a source of comfort when things seemingly went wrong; but of course, as I have suggested, it would be of even greater benefit to those who were anxious to have some moral principles to offer the world in justification of ruthless self-interest. If it was bound to happen, it had to be right.
People have always wanted to learn the future, but Stoicism’s belief in a deterministic yet providential cosmos drove a tremendous increase in the popularity of astrology, divination, and other woowoo, often egged on by the philosophers themselves.2 Green even hypothesizes that Stoicism’s popularity directly sabotaged whatever nascent scientific progress there was in the late Hellenistic age.
Blake Neff, “GUEST REVIEW: Alexander to Actium, by Peter Green”, Mr. and Mrs. Psmith’s Bookshelf, 2025-10-20.
- Don’t assume that you, the reader, will be free from Green’s scorn. Green studied the classics at Cambridge back when standards were standards. The preface alone includes untranslated phrases in Greek, Latin, French, and even German, a norm that continues throughout the book for the first three languages (and for the fourth in the highly-entertaining footnotes). Green has no patience for the puny monolinguists of today.
- Posidonius of Apamea, one of the most famed Stoic writers of the ancient world, was also one of its most famed astrologers.
September 4, 2016
QotD: Polybius on Roman incorruptibility
Again, the laws and customs relating to the acquisition of wealth are better in Rome than at Carthage. At Carthage nothing which results in profit is regarded as disgraceful; at Rome nothing is considered more so than to accept bribes and seek gain from improper channels. For no less strong than their approval of money-making is their condemnation of unscrupulous gain from forbidden sources. A proof of this is that at Carthage candidates for office practise open bribery, whereas at Rome death is the penalty for it. Therefore as the rewards offered to merit are the opposite in the two cases, it is natural that the steps taken to gain them should also be dissimilar.
But the quality in which the Roman commonwealth is most distinctly superior is in my opinion the nature of their religious convictions. I believe that it is the very thing which among other peoples is an object of reproach, I mean superstition, which maintains the cohesion of the Roman State. These matters are clothed in such pomp and introduced to such an extent into their public and private life that nothing could exceed it, a fact which will surprise many. My own opinion at least is that they have adopted this course for the sake of the common people. It is a course which perhaps would not have been necessary had it been possible to form a state composed of wise men, 11 but as every multitude is fickle, full of lawless desires, unreasoned passion, and violent anger, the multitude must be held in by invisible terrors and suchlike pageantry. For this reason I think, not that the ancients acted rashly and at haphazard in introducing among the people notions concerning the gods and beliefs in the terrors of hell, but that the moderns are most rash and foolish in banishing such beliefs. The consequence is that among the Greeks, apart from other things, members of the government, if they are entrusted with no more than a talent, though they have ten copyists and as many seals and twice as many witnesses, cannot keep their faith; whereas among the Romans those who as magistrates and legates are dealing with large sums of money maintain correct conduct just because they have pledged their faith by oath. Whereas elsewhere it is a rare thing to find a man who keeps his hands off public money, and whose record is clean in this respect, among the Romans one rarely comes across a man who has been detected in such conduct…
Polybius, Histories VI, 56.
