The Roman Army I: Legionary And Centurion

EXERCITVS ROMANVS I: LEGIONARIVS ET CENTVRIO

Ave, friends! As part of creating the world of my original character Titus Romulus ( jefffletcher.deviantart.com/ar… ), I wish to start a short series on Roman history. So stay tuned for more, but in the mean time, feel free to download and use the image above for your own purposes, educational or otherwise, as long as you let me know beforehand!

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ORGANIZATION PROFILE:

Organization Name: The Roman Legions (Legiones Romanae)

Founding Date: 0 Ab Urbe Condita (753 B.C. - Founding of Rome); 649 AUB (105 B.C. – Marian Reforms take effect)

Size: 60 legions in 696 AUB (approx. 300,000 legionaries in 50 B.C.) + auxiliaries

Ending Date: 1229 AUB (475 A.D. – dissolution of the Western Roman Empire); 2206 AUB (1453 A.D. – dissolution of the Eastern Roman Empire)

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HISTORY:

“Arise, arise, Men of The Thirteenth! A new day dawns upon us! What are you waiting for? Breakfast in bed? A day in the legion is like a day on the farm. Every meal is a feast! Every denarius, a fortune! Every formation, a parade! By the Gods, do I love the Thirteenth!” – Centurion Marcus Pulcher, Thirteenth Legion, goes about camp, administering the wake-up call

Heavily armored from head to toe, trained to handle any situation, drilled endlessly in combat and obedience, the Roman legionary was the model foot soldier of the ancient world – to the extent that the Roman Army’s model of organization and discipline would be copied for millennia to come! In training and toughness, the Roman legionary was second only to the legendary Spartans themselves! But while Sparta never achieved hegemony beyond her native Greece, Rome on the other hand now controls an empire that stretches from the Atlantic beaches of Lusitania, to the arid plains of old Mesopotamia. For the first and only time in history, all of the Mediterranean is controlled by a single nation.

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STRENGTHS:

Well-trained: all recruits must undergo six months of training and drilling before they can be considered true soldiers. This training allows Roman soldiers to move around the battlefield and fight in well-synchronized, tidy, orderly box-shaped formations, which gives them an advantage over disorderly barbarian rabble.

Discipline: such that the Roman army stays standing and fighting long after most other armies would tire and retreat, even if they’re losing a battle. In most battles, the casualty rate is disproportionately in favor of the victors, as the vast majority of casualties occur when one army has routed and fled and is pursued by the other. The battles of the Roman Civil Wars, however, tended to be incredibly bloody affairs for both sides, as neither side would retreat!

Combat Engineers: Roman legionaries were trained to be both expert fighters AND expert builders. Sometimes, generals won as much praise for impressive works of military engineering as for winning any battle, such as Julius Caesar's two bridges over the mighty Rhine River, both constructed in only nine days. The Roman Army were also the main workforce employed by the Empire to build its extensive network of roads, as the famed Roman roads were built primarily to support the army’s logistics – all the benefits to travel and trade were nice secondary benefits.

Siegecraft: by the first century BC, the Roman Army had become highly proficient at siege warfare and constructing siegeworks, such as long walls to surround and cut off an enemy fortress (circumvallation), tunnels to undermine enemy walls, as well as a variety of siege engines such as catapults, ballistae, battering rams, and mighty siege towers.

Logistics And Organization: the Gallic Wars were not, contrary to popular belief, a match of “civilized Romans vs. Gallic savages”. Indeed, the Gauls were quite “civilized” and well organized themselves, and they did in fact field some heavily armored troops who were just as well equipped as the Romans. What gave the Romans the edge was that their soldiers were just better organized and disciplined, with an excellent system of logistics and resupply in place, and with standardized equipment and training for each of its legionaries. By contrast, Gallic training and equipment tended to run the whole gamut from well armored noblemen, to peasants armed with farm tools.

Versatile Force: the Romans battled every type of enemy, from the disciplined phalanxes of Sparta and Macedon, to the wild savages of Germania, to the rampaging elephants of Carthage, and everything in between. The fact that the Roman Army was for the most part successful in dealing with each and every enemy speaks greatly to their level of flexibility and adaptability. Even when the Roman Army suffered crushing defeats (notable examples being Cannae 216 BC, Arausio 105 BC, Carrhae 53 BC, Teutoburg Forest 9 AD, and so on), the Roman leadership was generally quite good at learning from their mistakes and doing better the next time. Speaking of which…

Tenacity: the Roman Army was not invulnerable, and they did suffer some major setbacks and disasters over the course of their history. Nonetheless, sheer tenacity, perseverance, resilience, and willingness to take these losses in stride and push ahead gave the Romans a major advantage over lesser states that would have simply folded against such defeats. This is perhaps best exemplified by the Battle of Cannae, where Hannibal inflicted one of the greatest defeats in military history and slaughtered 70,000 Romans in a single day. However, much to everyone's surprise, the Roman Republic overcame its initial shock at this defeat, rallied, and continued the war for another decade until they finally won in the end. Hannibal could beat the Romans on the battlefield, but he just couldn’t beat their iron determination and resolve to win.

Band Of Brothers: the strength of the Roman legion comes from the men’s ability to fight together in a cohesive and synchronized fashion. Hence, why so much emphasis is put on every 8-man contubernium (squad) being made to eat, train, march, and be rewarded (or disciplined) together in order to build camaraderie. In combat, every man relies on his squad-mate to cover his sides and back, so that he can concentrate on the enemy in front of him – a tactic that pays dividends compared to the “every man for himself” individualized fighting style of the Gauls.

Marius’ Mules: Roman legionaries routinely march 25 miles (40 km) in a day, carrying all their equipment and gear on their backs, in order to reduce their reliance on supply trains that are slow and vulnerable to enemy attack. This was a major advantage at a time when most other armies moved at glacial paces of 12-19 miles a day at most (20-30km). However, it’s not unheard of for the legion to force-march even longer under exceptional circumstances. At the climactic height of the Punic Wars in 207 BC, for example, a Roman Army of 7,000 men force-marched 300 miles in just seven days, in order to reinforce Rome’s besieged forces against the army of Hasdrubal, brother of Hannibal. Their timely arrival resulted in the decisive Battle of Metaurus, the climactic turning point of the war, and ultimately ensured Rome’s final victory against Carthage.

Capable Leadership: like any military in the world, Rome had its fair share of both competent and incompetent leaders. However, the Republic’s highly ingrained martial culture, as well as their strict laws and procedures for appointing new generals (and providing oversight of existing ones), helped ensure that Roman military leaders were generally capable at their job. Furthermore, the organizational structure of the Roman Army delegated a lot of authority to lower-level officers and captains, giving them the opportunity to take individual initiative, rather than solely depending on the general to micromanage the entire battle from the top.

Citizen Soldiers: the Roman Republic was a decidedly martial culture. As far as they were concerned, you were not a good citizen unless you were also a good soldier, and vice versa. Old conservative Roman values of honor, obedience, and civic duty were strongly instilled in everyone, from the lowly plebeians up to the richest patricians. It was this ingrained cultural mindset, second only to Sparta, that largely motivated the Romans’ approach to warfare. The Roman Republic may very well have been the inspiration behind the Federation from Robert Heinlein’s Starship Troopers!

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WEAKNESSES:

Lack of Cavalry: while their heavy infantry was truly exceptional, one thing the Roman Army has always been seriously lacking in is cavalry. In the late Republic, each legion had 5,000 legionaries, but only 120 cavalry attached to it. Roman cavalry were by no means inferior in quality to any other cavalry in the world at that time, it was just that there were so few of them. This meant that the Roman Army always relied on allied and mercenary horsemen for the bulk of their mounted arm (and these were often of questionable loyalty). Indeed, lack of cavalry was the major factor in Rome’s defeats against Hannibal, against Pyrrhus, at Gergovia, and at Carrhae.

Lack of Ranged units: while Roman legionaries are trained extensively in the use of the pilum, the Romans otherwise view the bow as a cowardly weapon, and refrain from using it. Again, this is an area where the Roman legions rely heavily on auxiliaries and mercenaries, particularly Balearic slingers, Cretan and Syrian archers, as well as Gallic and Germanic huntsmen recruited locally. And again, as with cavalry, the lack of ranged units meant disaster when the Romans met a particularly archer-heavy enemy force at Carrhae in 53 B.C.

It’s A Trap! Favoring huge, slow-moving, plodding infantry formations, a Roman Army is a large and easy target for an ambush, particularly in thick-forested terrain, but especially when the Roman Army is marching from camp to camp, carrying all their equipment, and thus less responsive to a sudden attack. The significant Roman defeats at the Trebia (218 B.C.), Lake Trasimene (217 B.C.), and Teutoburg Forest (9 A.D.) all involved ambushes of some kind. Great care is needed to always scout ahead and detect ambushes before they occur.

Dubious loyalty: before the Marian reforms, soldiers were property-holding citizens drafted to fight in times of need by the state. In theory, this meant their loyalty was to the state, as they were fighting to defend their property. Now that they’re professional career soldiers, the soldiers' loyalty is to their paycheck, which is provided by the general. This means that a particularly wealthy and ambitious general can raise a "private army" that is loyal to him and not to the state, thus setting about the conditions ripe for civil war. It says much that by the First Century B.C., Civil Wars have become a depressingly common phenomenon, when just over a century earlier, men like Scipio would have found the idea of good Roman citizens killing other Romans to be completely inconceivable. 

Expensive: the Roman Army as it is only exists because the Roman Republic is able to supply the vast infrastructure, institutional organization, and (of course) the massive amounts of funding needed to maintain it. This means that unless the Roman Army is gaining tons of loot and slaves, the campaign can literally grind to a halt just due to lack of financing! After all, paying for all those armor and weapons, plus wages and other benefits, must cost a ton of money. And the soldiers aren’t going to put their lives on the line unless they’re getting their weekly paycheck! (The eventual decline of Rome’s institutions and resources in the late Roman Empire is reflected by a sharp decay in the quality, discipline, and training of the Roman Army)

High maintenance: even if you have the money, infrastructure, manpower, and equipment in place, that alone doesn’t make an army. Creating an army of professional, experienced, combat-ready soldiers requires patience, discipline, experience, perseverance, and an enormous investment of effort from everyone involved, from the common infantryman to the drill sergeant to the general himself. Those green recruits aren’t going to whip themselves into shape, you know! Looking at just how much effort it took to maintain the Roman Army, should we be surprised that the Empire eventually fell? 

Times of Change: the Roman Army was the greatest military organization in the world for over 500 years, but starting in the third century B.C., various factors conspired to lead to a severe deterioration in the quality of the Roman Army. Constant civil warring and internal political strife; a sharp decline in the Empire’s economy, infrastructure, and institutions; the moral decay of Roman society as corruption, decadence, and hubris among the ruling elite eroded old Roman values of honor and civic duty; increased reliance on barbarian mercenaries instead of citizen legionaries; and a series of plagues and famines that may have killed up to a quarter of the Empire’s population … all of these factors conspired to slowly but surely erode the state’s capacity and resources. Although the Late Roman Army could still win some incredible victories under capable leadership (the Battles of Strasbourg 357 A.D., Chalons 451 A.D., and Dara 530 A.D. being notable examples), it was clear that this Roman Army just wasn’t the same as that of the Republic and Early Empire. However, it bears worth mentioning that the Eastern Roman ("Byzantine") Empire was able to maintain itself as a top military power for another thousand years...

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Next up:

The Roman Army II: Armor And Shields: jefffletcher.deviantart.com/ar…

The Roman Army III: Weapons Of War: jefffletcher.deviantart.com/ar…