{"id":76640,"date":"2026-08-04T01:00:18","date_gmt":"2026-08-04T05:00:18","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=76640"},"modified":"2026-08-03T10:52:14","modified_gmt":"2026-08-03T14:52:14","slug":"qotd-limits-to-tactical-flexibility-in-roman-republican-armies","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2026\/08\/04\/qotd-limits-to-tactical-flexibility-in-roman-republican-armies\/","title":{"rendered":"QotD: Limits to tactical flexibility in Roman Republican armies"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>… the real reason I wanted to run through the Roman system<\/strong> […] is actually to demonstrate the limits<\/em> of this kind of synchronized discipline<\/strong>. Because yes<\/em>, this sort of drill and training allowed constituent units to potentially maneuver more dynamically and flexibly (when under competent leadership; it is quite striking that Roman command skill with this sort of thing was very dependent on the skill of the general (and one assumes by proxy the skill of his subordinate officers)), but only to do those things which they had practiced<\/em><\/strong>.<\/p>\n

And therein lies the rub: just as the commander doesn’t have a multitude of points where he can intervene in the battle but rather a limited set of key decision points<\/a>, so too he does not have an infinite set of potential orders he (or his subordinates) might give at any given moment<\/strong>. Instead, the commander (or his subordinates) has a McDonald’s menu worth of options he can employ<\/strong>. He can order anything on the menu and expect the unit to respond accordingly but he cannot<\/em> order anything not<\/em> on the menu, nor can he order an altered version of a menu item (no Big Mac without cheese; Sir, this is not a Wendy’s).<\/p>\n

Now generals could and did<\/em> use drilling in the early stages of the campaign to add one or two “menu items” to their drill so as to be prepared for this or that problem. Indeed the general preparing some sort of surprise of this sort and then deploying it against an enemy is a standard topos<\/em> of effective ancient generalship (although in many cases we may doubt the purported gimmick was actually used (e.g. Dionysius 20.1.6, Dio 10.5)). But that is the thing: such extra “menu items” have to be prepared in advance<\/em> and often well in advance of the battle. Caesar, for instance, anticipating war elephants drills his troops in anti-war-elephant tactics before the Battle of Thapsus (46 BC, Caes. Bel. Afr<\/em>. 84). Alexander’s phalanx seems to have been drilled to respond to scythed chariots as well (Arr. Anab<\/em>. 3.13.5-6).<\/p>\n

That said the bulk of the menu was likely to remain constant<\/strong>. After all these “menu items”, while they have simple names are often actually fairly complex to do and train when you are dealing with units of dozens or hundreds. Turning back to our example of Company, Right Wheel!<\/a> we can get a sense of the complexity of training that maneuver by the way they did it. The “right guide” (the man on the extreme right) adopts a set pace (nine inch steps) while the “left guide” moves at the normal regulated speed (note this requires training your soldiers not only to step in time but to step at standard lengths<\/em>) and every soldier in the middle regulates his motion by maintaining elbow contact with the man to his side. That’s a good method to get the result, but it isn’t an obvious or simple method: the fellow training the company to do this needs to already know<\/em> how to do this.<\/p>\n

Now in the modern period with mass printing, you could print drill manuals that had all of the commands and instructions on how to do them, but in the pre-modern period that kind of mass printing isn’t an option (and our military texts almost never go into this kind of granular detail) so your officers have to learn to train the behavior by observing it and participating in it themselves. Which means in turn a great deal of your “package” is set before the army is even mustered at the beginning of the campaign season because you are relying on a package of culturally embedded knowledge about how armies ought to function. And if your culture doesn’t have that tradition, inventing it from scratch is going to be hard and take time; and by “time” I mean “decades”. Effective drill for volley fire (the “countermarch”), for instance, answered a need that had existed for most of the 16th century, but the embryonic ideas for it only started emerging in the 1570s, the actionable plan on how to do it in 1594 and it was only then finally deployed in a major battle in 1600 at Nieuwpoort.<\/p>\n

However, the time available for that kind of training is limited. Remember that drill works by repeating the same set of actions over and over again<\/em> until they become almost instinctive. That takes a lot of time and repetition! That both means it is going to be difficult to find space for new “menu items” (especially with green troops that still need to learn the basics) but also that synchronized discipline itself<\/em> is expensive. Our ancient sources stress how Roman levels of synchronized discipline required diligent and continuous<\/em> drilling to create and maintain.<\/p>\n

Doing that<\/em> in turn would demand keeping the soldiers in question under arms for training for long periods when they were not fighting. In the Middle Republic this seems to have been accomplished through rolling recruitment: Rome was essentially always at war and always raising armies so there were always a goodly number of veterans to train and “break in” the truly green new recruits in any given draft (though again \u2013 and I owe this notion to Michael Taylor \u2013 there are some signs that the less intense conflict of the mid-second-century leads to some dulling of the Roman edge). As we transition through the Late Republic into the Early Empire, that is replaced by the slow professionalization of the Roman army, culminating in the force of long-service professionals created by Augustus. Being mobilized in peacetime, professional soldiers could be drilled extensively (assuming their cultural values are going to let them drill you; also be wary here of assuming standing forces of “military settlers” are professional in this way).<\/p>\n

But all of that is extraordinarily expensive<\/em><\/strong>. Keeping those soldiers under arms, after all, means that they need to be fed, clothed and paid. Even in a system like the Middle Roman Republic where soldiers provided their own kit out of their own wealth (because Roman soldiers in the Middle Republic were recruited from the modestly well-to-do smallholding class), by drafting those men you have removed<\/em> them from that economic activity. The expense of doing this would have been in most cases enormous and of course those are resources that could<\/em> be deployed to any number of other uses, including simply raising a larger army of less disciplined, well trained troops. For, say, a Greek polis<\/em><\/a> given the choice between having 450 men under arms all year round and excellently trained or having 5,000 hoplites<\/em> under arms only in the one month where there is a battle to fight<\/em> the clear answer is the latter. A lot of things need to line up before producing armies with high levels of synchronized discipline makes sense: the state needs a lot of resources, year-round security challenges and a tactical system which is effective and demands this kind of investment. So while developing synchronized discipline offered an army a degree<\/em> of greater control and flexibility, it was prohibitively expensive<\/strong>.<\/p>\n

Bret Devereaux, “Collections: Total Generalship: Commanding Pre-Modern Armies, Part IIIa”, A Collection of Unmitigated Pedantry<\/em><\/a>, 2022-06-17.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

… the real reason I wanted to run through the Roman system […] is actually to demonstrate the limits of this kind of synchronized discipline. Because yes, this sort of drill and training allowed constituent units to potentially maneuver more dynamically and flexibly (when under competent leadership; it is quite striking that Roman command skill […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":35193,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[62,7,5,41],"tags":[31,1457,1103,572,1345,1482],"class_list":["post-76640","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-europe","category-history","category-military","category-quotations","tag-army","tag-bretdevereaux","tag-infantry","tag-leadership","tag-romanrepublic","tag-statecapacity"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/06\/favicon.png","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-jW8","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76640","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=76640"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76640\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":104048,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/76640\/revisions\/104048"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/35193"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=76640"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=76640"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=76640"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}