The
Roman Legionary At War
(Part
I)
“It’s
as if they were born armed to the teeth…they do not wait for a
crisis but train constantly to be ready for one. Practice techniques
are every bit as strenuous as the real thing, and every soldier goes
through battle drills every day as enthusiastically as if he were
actually in combat…their training exercises are battles without
bloodshed, and their battles are training exercises with blood.”
–Joseph, The
Jewish War
3.72
Very
few words conjure feelings of awe, power, courage, ferocity and
viciousness like the word “legion.” Derived from the Latin
“legio,” meaning levy, the legions were the quintessential heavy
infantry in the Ancient World. Composed of highly-trained,
highly-motivated and strictly disciplined citizen-soldiers of the
Roman, and originally Latin, state, the legions have left a lasting
reputation of excellence and skill even when facing impossible odds.
For a society that lived for war in a way that very few civilizations
did, even Sparta, martial excellence was absolutely needed, but of
late, possibly thanks to inaccurate Hollywood portrayals and popular
culture that lacks proper scholarship, the individual prowess of
Roman legionaries has come under attack.
Some people see them as
individually weak warriors, useful only when fighting in massive,
dense formations like a Greek phalanx. While absolutely laughable
within the classical historic community, and even within the war
gaming community, these views are frustratingly difficult to
dislodge. The truth however, remains: Roman soldiers were heavily
indoctrinated to swordsmanship from a very young age-youths began
training with weighted weapons at the age of eight-and this, combined
with their intense, systematic training and the nature of their
techniques, which relied on open-order formations rather than dense
blocks of men, make it clear that Roman legionaries stand amongst the
deadliest swordsmen in history. As Dr. Robert L. O’Connell put it
in his classic The
Ghosts of Cannae:
“this system turned legionaries into extraordinarily deadly
individual warriors, more than a match for any opponent of any race
and any class, on the battlefield and everywhere else.” The time
has come to set the record straight.
Background
In
order to understand the legionary, one must first look at the society
that produced him. Rome was obsessed with war and the warrior
culture, but the reasons for this obsession, an obsession Dr. Simon
James describes as “not just an obsession for war, but for
victorious war…” (Rome
and the Sword)
is more mundane than imagined: necessity. The Romans belonged to the
Latin tribe, which occupied the fertile plains of Latium, and
constantly had to fight to protect it from equally-bellicose Italic
tribes like the Oscan Samnites and the non-Indo-European Etruscans.
All Italian peoples obsessed with war, and they fought them
frequently. In fact, the earliest Roman finds dating to the 6th
Century BC include long iron swords, clear indications of how Romans
saw their warriors. However, during the Roman Kingdom, which existed
under heavy Etruscan and Greek influence thanks to the kings who
ruled it, Roman infantry fought in the same phalanx formation the
Greek cities perfected. This formation existed after the formation of
the Republic in 509 BC until it was shattered by a massive Gallic
invasion at the Battle of the Allia in 387 BC. The Celtic Gauls went
on to sack the city, only leaving when paid off, further pushing Rome
to martial excellence. Vestiges of it continued to exist until the
Samnite Wars. Tough mountain peoples, the Samnites fought in a
far-looser formation than the tight phalanx, which wasn’t suited to
the excessively hilly Italian countryside, with javelins and swords,
weapons the Romans always excelled at. Deftly-handled Samnite
maniples-“handfuls”-trapped and defeated more than one Roman
army, and the Romans, always quick studies, dropped the phalanx
entirely and adopted the manipular legion. Now equipped with heavy
throwing spears called pila
(pilum individually) and swords, the Romans retook the offensive.
They defeated the Samnites, Gauls, rebelling fellow Latins, and the
Greeks before facing a huge test in the brilliant Pyrrhus of Epirus,
who landed in Italy with a Macedonian army. All sources suggest that
Pyrrhus was greatly shocked at the discipline and individual skill of
Roman legionaries, who fought with “a dance-like grace, constantly
dodging and darting left to right before striking” (Livy) and
though he defeated the Romans in two battles, he lost so many men to
them that he is said to have exclaimed “another such victory, and
we are undone,” a quote that led to the term “Pyrrhic Victory.”
He left soon after, but the fighting machine he fled from only
continued to improve. Thus the legions had proved themselves on the
world’s stage. At next return, we will continue to examine the
evolution of the legion and the intense individual training of the
common soldier, as well as his excellent record of victories against
all enemies, including Tribal warriors and even gladiators.
Punic
Wars
The
legion continued to evolve. After Pyrrhus, the Romans consolidated
Italy into a confederacy, where cities maintained domestic autonomy
but contributed troops, trained and armed in the legionary style, to
Roman consular armies, which consisted of two Roman legions of 4,200
infantryman along with 300 cavalry each, and two Latin or Italian
Allied alae (wings) of nearly equal size, with the exception of
cavalry, which numbered about twice as many as the Roman horse. The
legions became more streamlined, deploying a “checkerboard”
formation at both the strategic and tactical level- according to
Polybius, Plutarch, Josephus, Tacitus, Livy etc…every soldier had
three to six feet of personal space when deployed in the standard
line of battle-consisting of three lines of heavy infantry. Initially
assigned to positions by wealth, the Punic (Polybian) legions instead
assigned infantry based on experience, and only equipped them
according to wealth. The first, called hastati,
consisted of the youngest heavies. Armed with two pila and a sword,
usually a xiphos
but, by the end of the 1st
Punic War, the famed gladius
hispanensis (Spanish sword) and
equipped with elongated, curved shields called scutum and either
bronze pectorals (a tiny bronze plate protecting the heart and
vitals) or chainmail coats, the hastati began the melee portion of
the battle with a shock charge (called “impact foot” by the
Collins scale) initiated with a pila volley, followed swiftly with a
close-to-swordfighting range rush. In melee combat, the soldiers
punched with their shields when possible and darted to attack in a
manner Dr. O’Connell describes as “…unlike the frenzied bout or
a massed formation as portrayed in Hollywood, but a lethal sword
dance, with combatants darting, and executed from multiple angles of
attack” (Ghosts of Cannae.) If they did not break the enemy, the
second line, called principes,
moved forward to engage. Identically armed but more experienced and
aged between 25-35, the principes would eventually become the model
of the professional legions of Marius, and were often seen as the
cream of the legion. Behind them stood the triarii,
elite veterans that still resembled hoplites to a degree, as they
carried heavy thrusting spears instead of pila. Still, they fought
with the same amount of space as the other portions, leaving them
very Roman. Standing in front of these men were the velites,
light skirmisher infantry armed with a sword and a bundle of lighter
javelins, while cavalry equipped in the Macedonian style guarded the
flanks.
This
legion outfought Carthaginian mercenary armies in Sicily and even
invaded Africa, where it scored several brilliant victories before
being routed by war elephants and evacuating. Still, the Romans won
the war with decisive sea victories, and captured much of Sicily and
Sardinia. With Carthage distracted after the peace, Rome saw a chance
and also grabbed Corsica to deprive the hated Carthaginians any sea
bases with access to Italy. Carthage soon recovered and launched an
invasion of Italy from over the Alps, led by the brilliant Hannibal.
Hannibal clearly respected the swordsmanship of Roman troops, and he
managed to score three brilliant victories over the legions. The
largest, at Cannae, won because Hannibal trapped the legionaries in
the center without room they needed to fight, seemed to almost break
Rome. A few allies even defected, but Romans at this time were
fanatically patriotic and refused to give up. 75% of Roman manpower
willingly served at one time, a tremendous example of national
sacrifice, and Rome finally took to the offensive when she discovered
her own genius in Publius Cornelius Scipio the younger, later called
Africanus. Rome trapped Hannibal in Italy, crushed Punic power in
Spain under Scipio, and counter-invaded Africa. Scipio handily
defeated Hannibal at Zama despite his inferior numbers, and ended the
Second Punic War as an impossible Roman “comeback” victory. From
here, the legions humbled the armies of Alexander’s successors by
forcing the phalanx to fight Roman swordsmen man-to-man over rough
terrain, defeated the mainland Greeks, destroyed Carthage, crushed
resistance in Spain and easily defeated two slave armies that also
boasted gladiators. Only disaster could change the legions.
It
occurred. Massive German and Celtic invasions of Italy,
archeologically proven to number in the hundreds of thousands,
crushed 80,000 Roman legionaries at Noreia and Arausio when bitter
command differences split the Romans apart into two smaller,
separated armies. National panic swept, and Rome would finally turn
to one man, Gaius Marius, and his contract enlistments and
professional legions. When we return, we will finalize the evolution
of the legions and finally discuss training, individual combat skill,
and battlefield success. Trust me, everything you think you know is
wrong; everything.
New
Armies
From
the beginning, Marius had worked against the system. A plebian,
Marius worked extremely hard to achieve everything he ever had,
including consulships. When elected consul again to counter the
Germanic/Celtic invasion, Marius immediately dropped the property
qualification for service and recruited even the poorest of men.
Soldiers enlisted for eight years, with options to reenlist at the
consul’s permission, and though the legions themselves saw a
constant change of short-service manpower, they were never disbanded
again. The mix of veterans and raw recruits may have troubled Marius,
but he quickly worked through it. He divided his men into groups,
with the rookies given over to gladiators to teach the fundamentals
of sword fighting. Gladiators were never consider the equal of
legionaries, but they were good at teaching the basics. However, six
months of training saw the green troops overmatch the slave
instructors according to Livy, so Marius reunited the groups and
brought in soldiers who had mastered the armatura, the mysterious (we
have no knowledge of it save that only the most elite soldiers
mastered it, that mastery was necessary for promotion to the
centurionate, and that no recorded gladiator ever mastered it despite
attempts) and hyper-advanced legionary weapons drill that the Senate
banned from use in gladiatorial schools as it brought an unacceptable
amount of attrition to the arena fighters. The troops drilled for
over a year before finally marching out with Socii, the
aforementioned Roman allies, to finally face down the invaders.
Marius
fought in the front rank with his men, and the Romans crushed the
invaders at the Battle of Aquae Sextiae and Vercellae. They literally
annihilated both tribes, and Marius further angered the Senate by
summarily granting full Roman citizenship to the Socii, stating that
“in the din of battle, I could not tell an Allied voice from that
of a Roman.” This fostered fanatically loyalty to Marius. Romans
remained deeply patriotic, but now they identified with their legion
and general at least as much. Other generals followed suit, and soon
fought against each other as often as they fought enemies of Rome,
greatly weakening the Republic and fostering in the civilians
distrust of their own soldiers. The Social War soon erupted, which
saw the Allies gain full Roman citizenship, followed swiftly by the
famous Third Servile War. Led by the mysterious Spartacus, a man who
likely served as a Roman Auxiliary (these were NOT cannon fodder but
men trained to the high Roman standards) before taking a sentence as
a gladiator after, according to Livy, running loose on a
murder/robbery spree. Spartacus initially saw success against Roman
city militias and amassed a huge army of 75-120,000, but Marcus
Licinius Crassus defeated him and crushed his army with regular
legionaries, killing all. Pompey Magnus rounded up some fleeing
survivors, and all-told, 6,000 slaves were crucified.
Gallic
Wars
Gaius
Julius Caesar hold a well-deserved reputation as being one of the
finest commanders in the history of warfare. Gifted in all matters of
war, from tactics to logistics, he also innately knew how to command
men and how to gain their respect. He poured tremendous amounts of
energy into those troops, and in many ways restored to them their
honor. Dr. Antonio Santosuosso’s groundbreaking Storming
the Heavens
describes Caesar’s actions as “life changing. Caesar influenced
his men greatly, and they began to see themselves as the old legions
did, not as pillagers but as selfless servants of the people, an
important pillar of the state.” As noted, Roman legionaries were
already the best combat swordsmen in the world, but under Caesar,
they added fanatical patriotism, loyalty and a decade of experience
of constant warfare to their incredible training. Caesar and his
legions shattered every Gallic, Germanic, and Celtic tribe that went
against them, and when they turned on a Senate that they legitimately
felt betrayed Rome, they demonstrated their superiority even over
other Roman legions. Ultimately, their bid failed-Caesar died in the
Senate-but their capabilities inspired Octavian Augusts to directly
absorb Caesarian and Pre-Caesarian legions into the Army of the
Principate. All other legions formed after directly drew their
inspiration from Caesar’s men.
The
Gallic campaign itself was fought at a breakneck pace, at least for
the time. Caesar emphasized aggression and decisiveness to counter
vastly superior Celtic numbers, and he trusted the fighting skills of
his men so deeply that he automatically assumed they could battle
their way out of any tactical disadvantage he might land them in. He
was not wrong, and though he did make a few mistakes (mostly in
reconnaissance matters, where he distrusted his Germanic and Gallic
scouts,) the ability of his legionaries to defeat their Gallic,
Germanic and British adversaries in open combat, often in single
combat, carried him through to extensive victories. Notably,
scattered soldiers of the Tenth Legion at Alesia, caught in the open
by a rush of Celts and forced to fight a series of individual
battles, crushed the elite Arverni soldurii, also called Oathsworn,
in a fierce melee outside of the earthworks. They killed over three
thousand of the best individual Gallic fighters with shocking ease,
something that Dr. Kate Gilliver attributes to superior swordsmanship
in her work Essential
Histories: The Gallic Wars.
“The legionaries used their weapons as individuals, and so did not
depend on the depth of their formations to win…due to this skill,
and despite their shorter stature, the Romans were not individually
at a disadvantage, and in fact, the manner of their fighting put them
at the advantage
against their Celtic opponents. Roman technique almost always beat
Gallic flash.”
The
Battle of the Sabis River offers another example of this skill. Here,
Caesar’s 34,800 surprised and outnumbered legionaries faced around
56,000-71,000 men of the most feared Celtic tribe on the planet, the
Nervii, and their allies. Despite initial shock-many of the
legionaries had been scattered on foraging details- the Romans
rallied to whatever standards they could find and prevailed in a
desperate and vicious battle that ended with the almost-complete
annihilation of the Nervii. There are, of course, many more examples,
but those will be discussed later.
Imperial
Legions
Octavian
inherited over sixty legions after he defeated Antony and Ptolemaic
Egypt, a number that would likely bankrupt the treasury of his new
government. Called the Principate
by
modern scholars, it was officially just a restored version of the
Republic where Octavian Augustus stood only as First Citizen and
Imperator-victorious general,-a sort of “first amongst equals.”
In reality, it was a monarchy-a constitutional, limited monarchy but
one all the same-in all but name, and the Senate accepted Octavian’s
word as law in most cases. As such, the legions were stripped down to
28, a number that included Antony’s legions as well. He increased
the terms of service from six years to sixteen, which eventually
turned into twenty, and formally established both the auxiliary corps
and the Praetorian Cohorts (the term “Praetorian Guard” is a
modern creation.) Three of these were betrayed by Arminius and
destroyed, a defeat that was avenged, and a few more were created by
other emperors, but on the whole, 28-31 Cohort Legions of 4,800 men
each existed until Diocletian’s reforms three hundred years later.
These men were trained to extremely demanding standards in individual
combat and in unit combat, day in and day out, for years at end, and
we will discuss the training an organization of the legions,
Praetorian units and Auxilia regiments with the next section.
Part II to follow tomorrow...
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