Battle Strategy Meetings/Staff Meetings

[Frank]

It was the responsibility of a librarius consularis or librarius legati to write such orders e.g. an order forwarded to an auxilia cohors commander. The librarii of the tabularium legati legionis (actarius, librarii, excacti, exceptores, scribae) are reporting to the cornicularius, the highest rank of principales. The cornicularius was the leader of the office dealing with the commanders correspondence. Therefore the cornicularius was also responsible to guarantee the correctness of form and content of transcriptions. In some cases (of high importance?) the cornicularius wrote the entire document or a part of it personally, in order to prove this. Therefore i guess that the cornicularius and one of his exceptores (stenography) was attending staff meetings.

A detailed statement like this requires some authority to support it. Do you have a source that you can quote?

Sure. Unfortunately the most books like "The complete roman army on 200 pages" don't deal with details. For a first deeper look into the subject of roman military administration I recommend the books below. Further articles and ancient sources are found over there.

Alfred von Domaszewski, Brian Dobson
Die Rangordnung des römischen Heeres, 3. Aufl. 1981, oder 2. Aufl. 1967
Beihefte der Bonner Jahrbücher Bd. 14
ISBN 3-412-05280-9.
http://archive.org/details/dierangordnungde00domauoft
(this is the full original of 1905, still not so much disputed or corrected. Imho, a MUST READ for everybody interested in details about the roman army strucure, if able to understand german. I recommend the pdf-version and a good pdf-reader, beause ebup is a mess regarding the footnotes)

David Breeze, Brian Dobson
Roman officers and frontiers, Mavors Reihe, Steiner Verlag 1993
ISBN 3 515 06181 9

Joachim Ott
Die Benficarier
Historia Einzelschriften Heft 92
Steiner Verlag 1995
ISBN 3 515 06660 8
http://books.google.de/books?id=iMQhiKRc...&q&f=false

K. Stauner
Das Offizielle Schriftwesen des römischen Heeres von Augustus bis Gallienus (27 v. Chr.–268 n. Chr.): eine Untersuchung zu Struktur, Funktion und Bedeutung der Offiziellen militärischen Verwaltungsdokumentation und zu deren Schreibern.
Bonn: Habelt, 2004. Pp. 500.
ISBN 3-7749-3270-0

Especially Stauner focuses on the librarii and offices of a legion and all the known document types solely on 500 pages including all epigraphs known regarding librarii. Of course a lot of statements and conclusions are disputable, as always. I just repeated/summarized the findings and opinions of these scholars.

For a first overview about details on the offices and the principales of the roman army the google-books I linked are sufficient. However, it is always better to get the full version from a library. Unfortunately some of these sources are in german. I hope that at least Domaszewski is available in english somewhere. I guess in english Birley, Breeze and Dobson as well as other authors dealing with the Vindolanda-Tablets in detail are a good start.