Decurion

[Matthew Amt]

My advice is to never bother looking at Wikipedia. As others have said, the decurion was a cavalry officer, not infantry. A tentful or mess unit was called a contubernium, and I do not know if there was a regular leader of that unit nor what his title might have been in the first century. I'd be a little leery of Vegetius on that score, but he may be the best answer we have. Certainly there's no reason to assume that "eight" means "ten" and then fill in with slaves or whatever.

What IS that silliness about the pugio??

Interestingly, as I understand it the 120 cavalrymen in a legion were kept on the rolls of the centuries they were drawn from. Makes you wonder whether they were still under the authority of their centurion as well as their decurion? But it does mean that when calculating the numbers of a legion, you do not add 120 to the infantry total. And every century (on average) will be a couple men short in battle array (not to mention men missing for artillery crews, casualties, sick list, detached duty, etc.).

What's also curious is that although we assume that 10 contubernia made up a century of 80 men, in some forts there are as few as 8 pairs of rooms per barracks block, in others there are as many as 14! As with so many other questions, we obviously don't have the full answer, here. Isn't research great?

Valete,

Matthew