Does Praetorian Guard play a role on battlefield?

[Nathan Ross]

You seem desperate to interpret the Praetorians as the ancient S.A.S., Nathan!

Far from it. In fact I've argued quite the opposite point before - they were not (contra the title of Sandra Bingham's book!) 'elite special forces'.

They were a military elite, due to their proximity to imperial power - a bodyguard, certainly. But they were also about ten thousand men (or so) armed and equipped for battle, known to have been in the vicinity of the battlefield and on certain occasions to have actively fought. This doesn't make them the S.A.S., but doesn't make them a bunch of purely ceremonial stuffed shirts (or stuffed cuirasses?) either.

As for evidence - very slender amounts of the stuff are often used to 'prove' (for example) the appearance of certain legions in certain places... but you seem eager, Duncan, to dismiss the inscriptions I cited earlier, which appear at least plausibly to connect praetorian soldiers with the Dacian wars of Domitian and Trajan. Is this not a case of circular reasoning? After all, dona awarded to praetorians cannot possibly have been won in battle, since clearly praetorians did not fight in battle, as we have no evidence of their doing so... ;-)

(Hist. 1.89: "the Praetorian and the Urban soldiers, as rarely happened, were led out to battle").

That's a good one! However - 'rarely' does not mean 'never'. I'd be interested to know what other occasions Tacitus might have known about...