… we are going to look at the place war elephants held in society through two lenses: what war elephants meant to the societies that used them and what they often mean in popular culture – as we’ll see, these are connected topics. Previously in this series, we looked at the battlefield advantages and drawbacks of war elephants; now let’s take them off of the battlefield.
This may seem a strange approach to use to end a discussion of war elephants – after all, these are war elephants – but as will soon become apparent, war elephants are almost impossible to fully understand outside of the social and political context in which they are most useful.
First, we are going to look at how elephants fit into the ancient and medieval political systems which used them as weapons of war. I want to stress very strongly here that what I am presenting is essentially the main argument of Trautmann’s Elephants and Kings (2015), not something I dreamed up. For the sake of brevity, I am leaving out a lot of detail here – but you know where to go to find the argument in full.
Last time, we introduced a problem: while awesome, war elephants were very expensive and relatively easy to counter on the battlefield. This answered the question of why the Romans and Chinese mostly ignored the elephant as a weapon-system despite having access to it, but it raised a second question: if the elephant was at best a limited weapon, why did its use persist in India? After all, if the Romans could figure out how to beat these things, surely the Indians could too!
Part of the answer, of course, is that some of the logistical problems that existed for states located at the edges of elephant’s natural range simply don’t apply to states closer to the source. Indian kings could (and did!) deploy elephants in far greater numbers than Seleucid or Roman armies could. In particular, North Indian rulers, rather than relying on long distance trade, could acquire elephants through trade relations with “forest peoples” in their own hinterland. We have reports of armies with not hundreds but thousands of elephants from, for instance, the Nanda or Maurya empires. Nevertheless, while these factors simplified elephant logistics, they hardly made the use of the animals cheap.
What Trautmann instead observes is that the rise of war elephants occurred specifically in the context of kingship in India. Indeed, elephants were associated with kingship through royal elephant hunts and domesticated elephants kept for show even before war elephants were developed. Around 1400 B.C. the chariot arrives in India, bringing with it a military aristocracy where the nobles – and the noblest of all nobles is, of course, the king – rode into battle.
(I keep finding myself recommending it, but I’ll again note – for a good rundown of the value of chariots as royal symbols more than battlefield weapons, check out chapter 2 of Lee, Waging War (2016).)
That was the context the war elephant emerged into. By the fifth century or so, the war elephant seems to be displacing the chariot as the quintessential vehicle of the warrior-aristocrat (and thus the ultimate warrior-aristocrat, the king). Interestingly, the Mahabharata (fourth century B.C., but with components that may date as early as the ninth) preserves some of this shift, with a mix of aristocrats on chariot and aristocrats on elephant. As chariots faded (they were tactically inferior to true cavalry which was arising at this time), elephants progressively became the vehicle for the important warriors.
It’s not hard to see the appeal. For the warrior-aristocrat, battle isn’t just about winning, but is also about social status and position. Put another way: why does anyone put up with warrior-aristocrats, who get to live in luxury and boss everyone around? The implicit reason (sometimes explicit) across cultures is that it is the martial prowess – typically the personal, physical combat skill – that justifies the existence of the military aristocrat. You need Sir-Better-Than-You (to use a European framing) because you need someone who has mastered a difficult combat art (mounted combat) and is very, very good at it.
The warrior-aristocrat needs to be seen being a warrior aristocrat. For this purpose the elephant (much like its chariot forerunner) is perfect. Fighting from the back of an animal is a difficult skill which requires a lot of training the common folk do not have time to do. It also requires being able to afford and maintain a very expensive military asset commoners cannot afford. And not only does it allow the warrior-aristocrat to have an out-sized impact on the battle, but it literally elevates him over his fellow men so he can be seen (and it could not have escaped anyone that this was a physical realization of his actual high status). So long as the elephant remained even moderately militarily valuable, it was a perfect vehicle for a warrior-aristocrat to display his power and prowess.
And even more so for the king. Not only can the king ride his own elephant, but with his vast resources, he can procure elephants for his retainers. What is more impressive than a warrior aristocrat who has his own elephant? A warrior-king who has hundreds or thousands of elephants and his own warrior aristocrats to mount them. The thing is, a king’s actual power derives from the perception of his power – showing off the king’s military might makes him more likely to be obeyed (in ways – like tax collection – which allow him to further enhance his military might). This isn’t just a vanity project for the king (though it is that too) – extravagant displays of royal power are a key component of remaining king (the key big-word idea here is legitimacy).
This pattern in turn becomes self-reinforcing: as kings use elephants to show off (and thus reinforce) their power, elephants become symbols of royal power all on their own. Trautmann (2015) tracks this spread, particularly in South-East Asia – as the Indian model of kingship spreads into that region, war elephants spread with it. Whereas in places where there is plenty of contact, but the institution of Indian-style kingship doesn’t spread, war elephants are used rarely, if at all.
This in turn answers another quandary: why war elephants appealed to Hellenistic (that is, the heirs of Alexander) monarchs. Macedonian monarchy was not a form of Indian kingship – it had grown up in Macedon and been influenced by exposure to the Great Kings of Persia all on its own – but it was very similar in many ways. Compatible, we might say. Macedonian monarchs did not ride elephants (they rode horses), but they did need to be seen demonstrating martial excellence before their armies, just like Indian kings. In that context, the display of wealth and royal power implied by fielding a large elephant corps could be powerful, even if the king himself didn’t ride on an elephant. This is, perhaps most vividly demonstrated with Seleucus I Nicator, who earned himself the nickname “The Elephant King” and even produced coins advertising that fact […] This tie between elephants and kings seems to have been quite strong. Trautmann (2015) notes that even within India, states without kings (oligarchies, independent tribes and cities, etc) only rarely acquired elephants and never in the same sort of numbers as kings. So even when elephants are cheaper – because they are close by – unless you need elephants as physical symbols of the power and legitimacy of the king and his warrior-aristocrats, they are largely not worth the effort to procure.
The one great exception is Carthage – by the time it was using war elephants, Carthage was a mixed republic (much like Rome), and yet employed elephants extensively. Unfortunately, we have no sense of if Carthage – like Rome – would have abandoned elephants given time. The earliest attestation we have of Carthaginian war elephants is 262 B.C. (although they would have encountered them earlier from Pyrrhus of Epirus) and Carthage is completely gone in 146 B.C. It is possible Rome simply caught Carthage in the same “trying them out” phase of elephant use Rome would undergo in the second century B.C. and that Carthage may too have largely abandoned war elephants had it not been destroyed.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: War Elephants, Part III: Elephant Memories”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-08-09.
July 17, 2025
QotD: War elephants in India
July 11, 2025
QotD: Pyrrhus arrives in Magna Graecia to support the Tarantines
There are a few reasons I think this is unlikely. First, sources enlarging armies to fit the narrative magnitude of battles is a very common thing. But more to the point, Pyrrhus has crossed to Italy with 28,500 men total and – as Plutarch notes – hasn’t had a chance to link any of his allies up to his army. That may mean he hasn’t even reabsorbed his scouting force of 3,000 and he may well have also had to drop troops off to hold settlements, secure supplies and so on. Pyrrhus’ initial reluctance to engage (reported by Plutarch) is inconsistent with him wildly outnumbering the Romans, but his decision to wait for reinforcements within reach of the Romans is also inconsistent with the Romans wildly outnumbering him. So a battle in which Pyrrhus has perhaps 20-25,000 men and the Romans a standard two-legion, two-alae army of 20,000 give or take, seems the most plausible.1
The two forces met along the River Siris at Heraclea on the coastal edge of Lucania, Laevinius having pushed deep into southern Italy to engage Pyrrhus. As usual for these battles, we have descriptions or partial descriptions from a host of sources (in this case, Plutarch, Dionysius of Halicarnassus, Zonaras, Florus) which don’t always agree, leaving the modern historian in a bit of a pickle. Generally, we assume that a lot of the later Roman narratives of a famous defeat are likely to have been tailored to try and minimize the embarrassment, either by implying the battle was closer than it was or that Pyrrhus was a very impressive foe (or both) or other “face-saving” inventions. Worse yet, all of our sources are writing at substantial chronological distance, the Romans not really having started to record their own history until decades later (though there would have been Greek sources for later historians to work with). Generally, Patrick Kent tends to conclude that – somewhat unusually – Plutarch’s moralizing focus renders him more reliable here: Plutarch feels no need to cover for embarrassing Roman defeats or to embellish battle narratives (which he’d rather keep short, generally) because his focus is on the character of Pyrrhus. Broadly speaking, I think that’s right and so I too am going to generally prefer Plutarch’s narratives here.
A fairly handy map of Pyrrhus’ campaigns (though some of the detail is lost in the big sweeping arrows). What is notable is, apart from Pyrrhus’ lightning raid into Latium in 280, he is almost invariably fighting in “friendly” territory, either in Lucania (Heraclea), Apulia (Asculum) or Samnium (Beneventum), the lands of his allies. Pyrrhus never fights an actual pitched battle on Roman-controlled territory, which I think speaks to his strategic intent: to carve out a kingdom in Greater Greece, not to conquer the whole of Italy.
Wikimedia Commons.The battle was defined by Pyrrhus’ use of terrain – Pyrrhus thought delay might be wiser (to link up with his allies) but left a blocking force on the river (the Romans being on the other side). The Romans responded by forcing the river – typical Roman aggression – but Plutarch at least thinks it caught Pyrrhus by surprise (he hadn’t fought Romans before) and so it leaves him in a scramble. He charges his cavalry (Plut. Pyrrh. 16.5) to give his main phalanx time to form up for battle resulting in what seems like a cavalry engagement near the river. Pyrrhus nearly gets himself killed in the fighting, but survives and falls back to his main infantry force, which then met the Romans in an infantry clash. The infantry fighting was fierce according to Plutarch and Pyrrhus, still shaken from being almost killed, had to come out and rally his troops. In the end, the Romans are described as hemmed in by Pyrrhus’ infantry and elephants before some of his Greek cavalry – from Thessaly, the best horse-country in Greece – delivers the decisive blow, routing the Roman force.
It is, on the one hand, a good example of the Hellenistic army “kit” using almost all of its tactical elements: an initial – presumably light infantry – screen holding the river, followed by a cavalry screen to enable the phalanx to deploy, then a fierce and even infantry fight, finally decided by what seems to be flanking actions by cavalry and elephants. Plutarch (Pyrrh. 17.4) gives two sets of casualty figures, one from Dionysius and another from Hieronymus; the former says that the Romans lost 15,000 to Pyrrhus’ 13,000 killed, the latter that the Romans lost 7,000 to Pyrrhus’ just a bit less than 4,000 killed. The latter seems almost certainly more accurate. In either case, the Roman losses were heavier, but Pyrrhus’ losses were significant and as Plutarch notes, his losses were among his best troops.
Even in the best case, in victory, Pyrrhus had lost around 15% of his force (~4,000 out of 28,000), a heavy set of losses. Indeed, normally if an army loses 15% of its total number in a battle, we might well assume they lost. Roman losses, as noted, were heavier still, but as we’ve discussed, the Romans have strategic depth (in both geography, political will and military reserves) – Pyrrhus does not. By contrast, Alexander III reportedly wins at Issus (333) with just 150 dead (and another 4,802 wounded or missing; out of c. 37,000) and at Gaugamela (331) with roughly 1,500 losses (out of c. 47,000). The Romans will win at Cynoscephelae (197) with just 700 killed.
This isn’t, I think, a product of Pyrrhus failing at all, but rather a product of the attritional nature of Roman armies: even in defeat they draw blood. Even Hannibal’s great victory at Cannae (216) costs him 5,700 men, according to Polybius (more, according to Livy). But the problem for Pyrrhus is that his relatively fragile Hellenistic army isn’t built to repeatedly take those kinds of hits: Pyrrhus instead really needs big blow-out victories where he takes few losses and destroys or demoralizes his enemy. And the Roman military system does not offer such one-sided battles often.
Nevertheless, Pyrrhus shows that a Hellenistic army, capable handled, could beat a third-century Roman army, albeit not cleanly, and that is well worth noting.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Phalanx’s Twilight, Legion’s Triumph, Part IIIb: Pyrrhus”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2024-03-08.
1. I should note, this is Kent’s assessment as well.
July 7, 2025
Augustus: Visionary Statesman or Destroyer Of The Republic?
The Rest Is History
Published 27 Jan 2025The Roman historian Suetonius’ The Lives of the Caesars, written during the early imperial period of the Roman Empire, is a seminal biography covering the biographies of the early emperors of Rome, during two spectacular centuries of Roman history. Delving deep into the personal lives of the Caesars and sparing no detail, no matter how prurient, pungent, explicit or salacious, it vividly captures Rome at the peak of her power, and those colourful individuals at the heart of everything. It is an unsettling yet fascinating portrait of the alien and the intimate, that sees some of history’s most famous characters revealed as almost modern men, plotting a delicate line between private and public, respectability and suspicion. From the showmanship of Augustus, the first Caesar, and his convoluted family melodramas, to Tiberius, a monster in the historical record famed for his sexual misdeeds, to Caligula, who delighted in voyeuristic moral degeneracy, and the looming shadow of Nero; all will be revealed …
00:00 A humble plug from Tom
02:55 The most spectacular two centuries in Roman history
05:25 The value of Suetonius as a biographer
08:43 Suetonius’ interest in the love lives of the Caesars
12:58 Suetonius’ influence on popular culture
16:15 Augustus: Rome’s greatest actor
21:25 Roman politics as spectacle
21:55 Augustus as the model of a good emperor
24:30 What kind of monarchy was this?
28:00 The life of Suetonius
35:52 How did Roman histories work?
39:04 Why Romans had no idea of privacy
40:05 Did Roman emperors sexual misdemeanours matter
42:08 How we see sexual relations different to the Romans
(more…)
July 5, 2025
QotD: Roman provinces under the Republic
While the Romans mostly improvise this system for just a handful of provinces – most of the basic patterns of Roman provincial governance develop in just the first four provinces1 – that system becomes the customary way Roman magistrates [consuls and praetors]and promagistrates [proconsuls and propraetors] handled the overseas provinces they were assigned to. Consequently, it was replicated over and over again through Rome’s steadily expanding empire. By the time the Republic collapses into the Empire, Rome will have not four provinces but fourteen; by the end of the reign of Augustus, as the Roman Empire largely took the borders it would mostly hold for the next four centuries, there were just under thirty provinces. Yet the way Rome will govern these provinces largely continued to hold to model established in the Republic, at least through to the Severan Dynasty (193-225 AD), if not further.
As a result, the improvised system the Romans developed for those first four provinces would end up being how the vast majority of people in the Roman empire would experience Roman governance.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: How to Roman Republic 101, Addenda: The Provinces”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-11-03.
1. Sicily, Corsica et Sardinia, Nearer Spain and Further Spain, gained in the period from 241 to 197 and Rome’s only provinces until the addition of Macedonia in 147.
July 2, 2025
History of Britain IV: Caesar in Britain, Reconnaissance in Force, 55-54 BCE
Thersites the Historian
Published 29 Jan 2025Caesar’s landings in Britain illustrate his willingness to take risks, even unnecessary ones. The questionable decision-making, however, also led to the first surviving detailed description of people and events in Britain.
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June 29, 2025
QotD: People in the past believed their own religion
It is an old mistake – Polybius makes it of the Romans, writing in c. 150 BC. Polybius notes that Roman religion was “distinctly superior” for maintaining the cohesion of the Roman state, but that “they (= the ruling class) have adopted this course for the sake of the common people” (Plb. 6.56.6-8), by which he means for the sake of the “fickle multitude” which must be “held in invisible terrors and pageantry”. Polybius, I should note, immediately contradicts himself – one benefit of this religion, he says, is that Roman magistrates (read: elite Senators) do not steal from the public treasury even when they are not watched, which would seem to imply that even many very elite Romans believed their own religion (also, irony alert: those famously incorruptible Romans …). Poor men, after all, are not elected to watch the treasury.
Fortunately, Polybius is not our only source on Roman culture, so it is possible to say – and I want to be clear here – Polybius is wrong (on this point at least). Roman elites took their religion very seriously. There are exceptions, of course – Julius Caesar was an Epicurean philosophically, although this does not seem to have altogether disrupted his performance of the duties of Rome’s highest priesthood (he was Pontifex Maximus). Nevertheless, such philosophically minded men were generally regarded with scorn by even the Roman elites (Cicero heaps such scorn on Cato in the Pro Murena in what were clearly intended as friendly “ribbing” before a mostly elite audience), who nevertheless greatly valued religious character (in contrast, Cicero is quick to accuse his hated enemy Catiline of irreligion before the Senate). Roman leaders vowed temples and sacrifices in duress, and built and gave them in victory. Lavish dedications to the gods from all levels of Roman society confirm the overall picture: the Romans believed their religion. Yes, even the elite Romans (there is, I should note, some complicated in that elites tended to separate what they viewed as religion from common “superstition”, but that’s a topic for another day.) And, if anything, the evidence for elite “buy-in” to Medieval religion is far more voluminous.
Yet none of the main characters of Game of Thrones, apart from perhaps Catelyn Stark, is devoted to their region’s traditional religion in any private sense. I cannot recall at any point any character protesting an action on account of religion – no marches held up by high holy days (a regular occurrence in ancient and medieval literature), no groups, individuals or places religiously exempt from violence. The Faith has certain rules about sexuality, but they’re rules that are not only flouted privately by individuals in the show, but also quite publicly by the last ruling dynasty for centuries.
Moreover, none of the ruling characters seem to have any religious functions – or if they do, they simply ignore them most of the time. Keep in mind, these people believe that their gods – be it the Seven or the Old Gods – are powerful divine beings who are directly and immediately interested in the world and who act on that interest. Keeping such beings happy is vitally important – it is not an afterthought. No society, so far as I can tell, has ever believed there is enough gold or enough armies to save you if you have enraged the gods. There is simply no off-setting an angry divinity (and before the smart guy asks, “what about a favorable divinity?” the Greeks had an answer for that – go read Euripides’ Hippolytus. It ends badly for the mortals).
The lack of religious duties or functions for characters who are kings is particularly surprising. Kingship has three core roles in almost all human cultures where the institution appears: kings are 1) chief judge, 2) chief general, and 3) chief priest. That third role appears more or less prominently in almost all societies. In ancient Egypt and (at times) in Mesopotamia, kings were held to literally be either earthly incarnations of major gods or minor gods in their own right. Roman Emperors held the office of Pontifex Maximus, and took over as the chief priest of the state, before becoming gods on their deaths. The Chinese emperor was the “Son of Heaven” and was tasked with maintaining the right relationship with the divine (the “mandate of heaven”). The emperors of Japan are purported to be direct descendants of the goddess Amaterasu (and they have a family tree to back it up).
The relationship between medieval kings and the Church was more complicated, because of the existence of a clear religious head (the Pope) outside of secular authority, but medieval kingship retained a strong sense of religious purpose. Coronation rituals often involved the clergy and were essentially religious rituals, because kingly power was still thought to be bestowed by God. Kings, in turn, had a special role in keeping their kingdom in right relationship with the divine, both through just rule (which included protecting the Church) and through the performance of religious rituals. Those rituals, of course, worked both ways: both believed to be religious efficacious (as in they helped bring about God’s good favor), but also valuable tools of building royal legitimacy (hat tip to my colleague Elizabeth Hassler’s excellent dissertation on the topic of holy kingship). In some places (England and France most notably), kings were thought holy enough to be able to heal certain diseases miraculously by touch – a king who couldn’t was clearly insufficiently pious.
Bret Devereaux, “New Acquisitions: How It Wasn’t: Game of Thrones and the Middle Ages, Part II”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2019-06-04.
June 26, 2025
A Basic Explanation Of The First Punic War
MoAn Inc.
Published 8 Jan 2025GEOGRAPHY NOTES
Messina is the modern name for Messana. Both are correct.
Acragas / Akragas was renamed as Agrigentum by the Romans. Most videos on YouTube use the name Agrigentum for convenience purposes … so again, both are correct.
Panormus is modern day Palermo.
Drepana / Drepanum is modern day Trapani.
Lilybaeum is modern day Marsala.!READ THE SOURCES FOR FREE!
Livy: https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/…
Polybius: https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/…
Cassius Dio: https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/…
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June 23, 2025
Augustus and the empire – The Conquered and the Proud 14
Adrian Goldsworthy. Historian and Novelist
Published 15 Jan 2025This time we look at Augustus, the empire and the army. The man who built the Altar of Augustan Peace in Rome was also the last of the great conquerors, who added more territory to the Roman Empire than any other individual leader. How he did this, and how he kept the army under control, is the theme of this video.
QotD: Recruiting and organization under the “Marian reforms”
Sallust reports that Marius, “after he saw that the spirits of the plebs were aroused, he swiftly loaded ships with supplies, pay, weapons and other requirements; with them he ordered Aulus Manlius, his legate, to set out. Meanwhile himself he enrolled soldiers, not according to the mos maiorum [‘the customs of the ancestors’] from the census classes, but making use of whoever wished to go, mostly the capite censi [‘those counted by heads’ = the propertyless poor or proletarii]” (Sall. Iug. 86.1-2, trans mine). Plutarch repeats this report, that Marius violated custom by enrolling men who didn’t meet the property qualification for military service (Plut. Mar. 9.1).
There are a few oddities here to start, though. First, Sallust quickly notes that this resulted in Marius having an army rather larger than what the Senate had actually authorized (Sall. Iug. 86.4) and that’s actually quite a neat detail that may explain part of what’s going on here because this has, in a way, happened before. In 134, Scipio Aemilianus was elected consul for the second time (illegally, again) with a mandate to end the frustrating Roman war against the Celtiberian stronghold of Numantia in Spain. The Senate, however, denied Scipio authorization to raise fresh troops, to which Scipio responded by enlisting some 4,000 volunteers to replenish his legion; Appian says this was done with the consent of the Senate, but Plutarch’s brief note on it sure implies Scipio Aemilianus is end-running around Senatorial efforts to stifle him (App. Hisp. 84; Plut. Mor. 201A-B). And this too was hardly the first time for this sort of end-run; Scipio Africanus (what is it with Scipiones!?) back in 205 agitated for his invasion of Africa to end the Second Punic War and was given the province of Sicily with authorization to go to Africa if he thought it necessary, but the Senate registered its displeasure by refusing to let him levy troops, at which point – wait for it – Scipio took volunteers, equipping and financing his force through the socii and even building a fleet that way (Liv. 28.45.9-12).
In short, the Senate sometimes tried to trim the sails of generals it was displeased with – and Marius reportedly had gotten elected on a campaign platform of “to hell with the Senate” (Sall. Iug. 84.1) – by limiting the size of their armies or refusing to allow them to conduct a levy. And since 205 (a century before Marius), popular generals had occasionally juked this effort by the Senate by instead calling for volunteers, which the Senate could not stop. Marius is not doing something new in taking volunteers to supplement an army through the levy.
He also doesn’t keep doing it. After Marius wins in Africa with his volunteer-supplemented army (the bulk of which of course were still recruited through the dilectus under Metellus), he returns to Italy to take over the war against the Cimbri and Teutones but he doesn’t keep up the volunteer force, instead taking command of his predecessor Rutilius Rufus’ normally levied army (Front. Strat. 4.2.2). In practice, Marius probably took volunteers in part for that first army because the Senate was diverting available levy manpower towards the early phases of the Cimbric War (or at least that was a convenient excuse to kneecap him) – a series of costly military disasters for Rome which likely soaked up much of the manpower the Senate was willing to raise. Once Marius has access to that “primary” stream of manpower generated through the dilectus, he uses it and seems to stop using volunteers.
But what of recruiting the capite censi? Well, that isn’t quite new either, although it surely wasn’t typical. For one, it wasn’t that the poor absolutely never served; Polybius notes that the capite censi served in the fleet (Polyb. 6.19.2). But we also see non-assidui (assidui being the term for those wealthy enough to be liable for normal conscription) in a range of other emergencies. Livy reports in 329 a “crowd of sellularii [men who work sedentary trades, literally, ‘stoolsmen’], a type least suited for military service, were called into the army” (Livy 8.20.4), though the historicity of this report is questionable given the early date. In 296, Etruscan entrance into the Third Samnite War causes a draft of “not only the freeborn or the iuniores took the oath, but cohorts were made of seniores and centuries of freedmen” (Livy 10.21.4). Gellius (16.10.1) quotes Ennius reporting the proletarii were pulled into the armies in 280, presumably in response to Pyrrhus’ victory at Heraclea. And during the Second Punic War the Romans pulled out all of the stops, recruiting debtors and men convicted of capital crimes (Livy 23.14.3), enrolling slaves into the army (called the volones; you free them first and then draft them, Livy 27.38 and 28.10, Val. Max. 7.6.1) and as noted above, taking volunteers more generally.
As an aside, if you are wondering why the Romans seem in some of these to skip recruiting freeborn capite censi and go straight to freedmen and enslaved people, I think there are two answers here for this period. First, many of the available freeborn poor are probably already in service in the fleet. Second, there probably aren’t that many of them. Recall our chart of Roman social classes – the capite censi in the third century is quite small, almost certainly outnumbered by enslaved persons in Italy. But the population of Italy was rising over the third and especially second century and without adding new farmland, those new freeborn Romans may have swelled the ranks of the capite censi, leading to a much larger propertyless class by the late second century or the first century.1 Consequently, there may have been a lot more capite censi worth recruiting by Marius’ day, when Rome no longer needed to keep a large navy at sea (not facing any naval powers in its wars) and the number of capite censi having risen.
Finally, Marius does not mark the end of the Roman dilectus! Evidently Roman conscription persisted at least to the end of the Roman civil wars, as Suetonius reports Augustus (perhaps when he was still Octavian) inflicting the traditional penalty of being sold into slavery for draft-dodging on a Roman eques who cut the fingers off of his two sons to make them ineligible for military service (Suet. Aug. 24.1). Indeed we have attestations of the dilectus in 55, 52, 50, 49, AD 6 and AD 9.2 Even once the army is fairly clearly primarily a volunteer force, at least notionally the ability to hold a levy when necessary to fill the ranks remained “on the books” and Trajan (r. 98-117 AD) holds at least one levy because he punishes a father for the same reason Augustus had done (Dig. 49.16.4.12). So the traditional dilectus remained a thing Roman leaders could do well into the empire. In practice it seems safe to assume the system by the mid-first century is substantially ad hoc, as the census straight up doesn’t happen from 69 BC to 28 BC, which would make it hard to actually enforce the property requirements. But the process doesn’t stop in 107 and there’s no reason to suppose from 107 to 69, with the census being regularly conducted, that most annual levies were not conducted along traditional property lines.3
So the most we might say is that a one-time crisis expedient in earlier periods slowly becomes a standard way to supplement legions and then the standard way to recruit them, with the old normal method of the dilectus instead becoming the unusual way to supplement in a crisis. It’s unclear exactly when that shift-over point happens, but it sure isn’t in the career of Gaius Marius, who sits clearly in the “volunteers as a crisis response” side of the issue.
And what of the notion that Gaius Marius introduced both citizenship as a reward for service as a regular bonus and also that he instituted the paying of soldiers at the completion of a campaign to render them loyal? Well on the latter point, the Romans had been distributing spoils to the soldiers at the end of a campaign as a lump-sum payment since the beginning. This is exceedingly well reflected in Livy’s accounting of the years from 201 to 167 (where we have a nice continuous burst of Livy), see for instance Livy ::deep breath:: 30.45, 31.20, 33.23, 33.37, 34.46, 34.52, 36.40, 37.59, 39.5, 39.7, 40.34, 40.43, 40.59, 41.7, 41.13, 45.40, 45.43.4 And the idea that Roman victories might seize land which would then be settled as Roman coloniae, creating new land for Roman settlers was also not new (Wikipedia has a convenient list of Roman coloniae). So Marius is simply promising to do a thing Roman commanders regularly did, essentially saying, “serve with me, because I’m going to win and victory will make us rich”. Which is exactly the reason volunteers rushed to serve with Scipio Africanus and Scipio Aemilianus: they anticipated a lucrative victory for such well-regarded commanders.
And by now you may well be asking, “but wait, then when does the system change?” Because after all, I said that by the early empire, we can pretty clearly see an army primarily composed of professional, long-service volunteers who receive substantial retirement bonuses and are permanently stationed on the frontiers. Who is responsible for that? And in response, I give you, this guy.
It’s Augustus. It was always Augustus. Or at least I should say that is my view, given the evidence. Older scholarship – I think here of Keppie (1984) in particular – tended to assume that because most of the big changes happened with Marius (but we’ve seen they don’t) that Octavian/Augustus probably made only minimal changes to the military system he inherited from Julius Caesar. I don’t think that’s correct. I think if we look at the evidence in more detail it becomes clear that Augustus is the “break” (though not a clean break by any means) and that in fact we need to start regarding Augustus as a military reformer of some significant scale rather than merely the codifier of a Caesarian military system (though he probably does that too).
Augustus, after all, institutes regular bonuses for discharge, establishing a treasury funded by a regular tax to meet the expense rather than simply promising that he would win a lot and so soldiers would get rich off of their share of the booty (Res Gestae 17). And it’s not hard to see the problem he’s responding to – the massive military buildup of the Roman civil wars had left Octavian, as the victor, with the red-hot potato of hundreds of thousands of soldiers who were promised the spoils of victory, including large numbers of men who didn’t win but who, if not settled down somehow would disrupt the state (RG 3). Earlier in the civil wars, Octavian had used proscriptions and land confiscations to solve this problem but as emperor, he needed a permanent solution, thus the establishment of the aerarium militare and its discharge bonuses (praemia). Before that, you simply had generals promising to feast their soldiers off of the property of the vanquished; the civil wars had only changed that in that the vanquished were now Romans. It also establishes a standard length of service, creating that professional, long-service army.
There’s a related issue which is the fate of the citizen equites and the velites. Caesar’s armies in Gaul seem to have neither, so the assumption was that the shift to recruiting proletarii meant that these wealth-based distinctions (the richest Romans serve as equites, the poorest as velites) dropped away, leaving a uniform heavy infantry legion. And in a schematic it makes sense: both roles are absorbed by the auxilia and indeed Caesar makes use of a lot of Gallic cavalry auxiliaries. But as François Gauthier recently pointed out,5 it’s not all clear that the velites really did vanish in the late-second/early-first century. Cicero still refers to to them writing in the 40s (Cic. Fam. 9.20; Brut., 271) and their apparent absence in Caesar’s writing may well just be an accident of Caesar’s avoidance of technical language. Caesar doesn’t generally talk about hastati or triarii much either; he prefers milites (“soldiers”). Likewise, it’s clear the citizen cavalry – the equites – survived Marius; as Jeremiah McCall notes, we have good evidence for citizen equites at least as late as the 90s BC and suggests the citizen cavalry probably vanished in the 80s as a result of the Social War and Sulla‘s Civil War.6 It surely did not happen in 107 or 104.
Meanwhile the auxilia as a mature part of the Roman army really only emerge under Augustus, and not even right at the beginning of his reign either. Roman armies needed cavalry and light infantry to function, so once again we may not be looking at a clean break but rather a period of transition as a result of some generals preference for (non-Italian) allied or auxiliary cavalry and light infantry and the formalization of that system not in 107 with Marius but again in 27 with Augustus.
Marius is also sometimes credited with the idea of extending citizenship to non-citizens who served, which is a catastrophic misreading of one episode in his career. For one, this gets read as meaning that Marius extended citizenship to all of the Italians in his army or that he made it standard to do so. Note for instance this line pulled from Wikipedia:
Finally, Marius granted citizens of the Italian allies (Etruria, Picenum, etc.) full Roman citizenship if they fought for Rome and completed a period of service in the Roman army.
[Dated] 6/25/2023, specified in the hope this page changes to be less wrong.
And that’s very much not right either. We have evidence for only a handful of citizenship extensions by Marius. In particular, of his army he extended citizenship to just two cohorts (c. 1,000 men) from Camerinum (Plut. Mor. 202D, Cic. Pro Balbo 46.). I can only assume this gets misunderstood because some writers don’t know their unit sizes, but Marius had 32,000 men in his army at Vercellae (101 BC), probably something like half of which were socii. These two cohorts were a comparatively tiny fraction. Marius also seems to have selected a very small number of his other socii veterans for citizenship (Cic. Pro Balbo 48), but there was no blanket grant of citizenship. Of course there wasn’t, this issue remained substantially unsolved until the Social War (91-87BC); if Roman levies had been calmly minting new citizens out of thousands of Italians through the 90s, there would hardly have been a cause for the Social War.
Instead, citizenship as a reward for service is an artifact of the imperial period and the auxilia. The Roman use of non-Roman, non-socii troops to supplement their armies was not new, but it emerged as a formalized, permanent part of the Roman army not during the civil wars – where such units where both ad hoc but also not nearly so numerous – but under the reign of Augustus, coming to form about half of the army by the end of his reign (Tac. Ann. 4.5; on the emergence of the auxilia, see I. Haynes, Blood of the Provinces (2013)). Indeed, as Haynes notes (op. cit. 49), it is actually only under Tiberius (r. 14-37) that we get direct evidence of citizenship grants to auxilia and the practice even then seems at least somewhat irregular (though it comes to be regularized).
In short that, the notion that Gaius Marius instituted the pattern of granting citizenship to serving non-citizens on discharge is simply wrong; that’s not in our sources. That doesn’t become consistent until Tiberius well over a century later. Gaius Marius did recruit volunteer capite censi into his army once but didn’t make a habit of it and as such isn’t a major reformer so much as a key step in a slow process of change which reaches its decisive point probably under Augustus, more than half a century after Gaius Marius died. He wasn’t the first to do either thing, whatever our sources say.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: The Marian Reforms Weren’t a Thing”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2023-06-30.
1. For more on the dynamics of this, see N. Rosenstein, Rome at War (2004), as this is part of his central argument.
2. For textual references, see Brunt, Italian Manpower (1971), 636-7.
3. We do not know how that process would have accounted for the massive expansion of the Roman citizen class due to the Social War. But evidently it did!
4. These were happily already compiled by Brunt, op. cit., 394.
5. “Did velites Really Disappear in the Late Roman Republic?” Historia 70 (2021).
6. J.B. McCall, The Cavalry of the Roman Republic (2002), 100-113..
June 16, 2025
History of Britain, III: Celtic Britain
Thersites the Historian
Published 21 Jan 2025Although most of our early information about the Celts comes from Greek and Roman writers whose experience was with Celtic tribes on the continent, we can glean some insights into the Celts of Britain. We also introduce the fact that Ireland eventually became the world’s greatest repository of Celtic cultural preservation.
June 11, 2025
These Romans are crazy – in praise of Asterix the Gaul
Adrian Goldsworthy. Historian and Novelist
Published 30 Dec 2024Today we look at the Asterix comic books — fun tales of indomitable Gauls and their fights with Julius Caesar’s Romans.
June 4, 2025
QotD: Conquest empires
Specifically, metal.
Soft metals are not for conquest empire. Gold, silver, copper, tin, etc, may be used for plates or posts or jewellery or skin scrapers, but they are not war fighting metals. Even the lightest leather armour or layers of feather padding makes them practically valueless for war fighting. Metal only becomes an imperial material when it can be made hard enough for combat purposes.
The first such metal is Bronze, which is made by combining different metals in compounds. Copper compounded with enough tin (usually 5-10 percent) makes Bronze. Bronze can make armour and weapons and even axles and bearings. But copper (mined in mountains) and tin (usually from swamps) and the charcoal needed to melt them (from forests) combined in sufficient quantities for mass production (cities supported by taxed farmers), require extensive trade routes, and probably a stable currency of some sort. But once these elements can be combined, empires can give up on mere Security, and enter Conquest.
All the early Sumerian, Egyptian, Hittite, Persian, Greek, Roman, Indian and Chinese empires that we now scrawl across maps with lines to show how they conquered the territories of other empires are based on this simple concept. The Hittites with their Bronze, Egyptians with their chariots, and Romans with their Steel: being only different developments from the same basic “metal technology” roots.
Yet this is where motive becomes uncertain. All these empires got into conquest, but in many cases they did it either to continue their security (by pushing the dangerous boundaries ever further), or to protect the trade that made their system work. Conquest for the sake of conquest was certainly an element — particularly with rulers like Alexander the Great — but the original reason why Phillip of Macedon and his predecessors had developed the world’s most efficient fighting machine had more to do with constant threats from Persians and Greeks and other “barbarians” than with any desire to get into the conquest game itself. Sometimes things done for security lead to expanded boundaries for security, which then lead to expanding further for conquest. (Often because the system developed for paying those fighting for security requires conquest to pay them off … see Julius and many later Caesars!)
Nigel Davies, “Types of Empires: Security, Conquest, and Trade”, rethinking history, 2020-05-02.
May 16, 2025
A Very Basic Introduction To Ancient Carthage
MoAn Inc.
Published 1 Jan 2025Images Used
Hamilcar Barca and The Oath of Hannibal – Benjamin West (1738–1820) – https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient…
Ancient Carthage. (2024, December 27). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient…
Numerius Fabius Pictor (antiquarian). (2023, October 11). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numeriu…)
Aristotle. (2024, December 27). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aristotle
Herodotus. (2024, December 30). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Herodotus
Cassius Dio. (2024, November 28). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassius…
Plutarch. (2024, December 23). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plutarch
Polybius. (2024, December 31). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polybius
Livy. (2024, November 23). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Livy
File:Death Dido Cayot Louvre MR1780.jpg. In Wikipedia. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi…
Colosseum. (2024, December 21). In Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colosseum
Carthage Ports Puniques, https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi…
File:Bardo National Museum tanit-edit.jpg. In Wikipedia. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi…
File:Bardo Baal Thinissut.jpg. In Wikipedia. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi…
File:Ginnasium Solunto.jpg. In Wikipedia. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi…
File:Carthage 323 BC.png. In Wikipedia. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Fi…A Bit About MoAn Inc. –
Trust me, the ancient world isn’t as boring as you may think. In this series, I’ll be walking you through a VERY basic idea of what happened during Rome’s famous Punic Wars.Donate Here: https://www.ko-fi.com/moaninc
Free Marble Image Photo by Henry & Co.thanks to https://unsplash.com/wallpapers/desig…
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May 12, 2025
QotD: The Gracchi
But it is also generally the only reading students get and it is not the only valid reading of the evidence we have. So for this week, I want to complicate the Gracchi, presenting some of the details that often get left out of introductory surveys. In particular, we’re going to discuss the problems that Tiberius Gracchus’ key law, the Lex Sempronia Agraria was designed to solve and I am going to argue that Tiberius was attempting to solve a problem that didn’t exist (though he couldn’t have known it), a view which is now quite common in the scholarship but almost entirely absent in how we tend to teach the Gracchi.
But more to the point, I am going to argue that Tiberius and Gaius Gracchus’ behavior did, in fact, violate the norms of the Republic and that it was not entirely unreasonable for the senatorial elite to conclude these men, in their unrestrained and nakedly ambitious approach to politics, represented a real threat to the Roman political order and that they might be aiming for something approaching a “soft coup” in the context of a political order whose features – including the democratic ones – worked through an unwritten constitution of norms (what the Romans called the mos maiorum, “the customs of the ancestors”), which both brothers actively undermined. The claim that the Gracchi threatened to make themselves tyrants was not an empty claim and that is the dark reflection of their role as well intentioned reformers.
In short, then, if the only version of the Gracchi you have encountered is that of the near-saintly, then martyred proto-progressive reformers, that’s not quite the complete picture (and the left-coding of their ideas is decidedly anachronistic). Naturally, in trying to complicate this picture, I am essentially taking the position of prosecutor, so this “take” is going to be far more negative on the Gracchi than how I would, say, teach them in class or, indeed, how I regard them myself.
So the way we’re going to approach this problem is first to discuss the problem that Tiberius Gracchus thought he was addressing (and some of the issues there), before walking through the means he used to push forward the Lex Sempronia Agraria. Then I want to look at some of the wide-ranging laws proposed by Gaius Gracchus to assess the degree to which those laws cohere and ways we might understand his program and actions, potentially rather more negatively.
Bret Devereaux, “Collections: On the Gracchi, Part I: Tiberius Gracchus”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry, 2025-01-17.
May 11, 2025
History of Britain, I: Hail Prettanike! Early References to the British Isles
Thersites the Historian
Published 6 Jan 2025The natural starting point for examining the history of Britain is to look at how the island and its inhabitants first entered the historical record.
