Project- Influences of Roman military on modern day riot control

[MonsGraupius]

Discipline isnt sitting in class all day without flipping out.

What you are describing is the implementation of discipline. What I am suggesting is that whilst Romans could use far harsher punishment to enforce discipline, they started with a much much worse stock. It would be like "herding cats"

They came from a world where you inherently had to be far far more self-reliant. If you couldn't feed yourself you died and they would regularly see other children dying. Life was cheap (on average worth much less than even the worst gang areas of the US) Most children in poor households would be very used to going off into the wilds to gather food for themselves during the day. They would be like the worst feral children of today- many growing up with other children out the way of adults.

But as big a problem in the Roman world, is that the culture of recruits would be so varied, that many of the basic things we take for granted would be alien to them. For example, even simple body language may have been interpreted differently (we've all heard in some societies a shake of the head means yes).

Unless they lived near a soldier's barracks, some recruits would have never seen soldiers and have had no idea what was expected of them as soldiers. I bet the first night many of the recruits would just start walking out because it was totally beyond anything they had imagined given their previous experience.

With higher death rates in the family many recruits would have lost both sets of parents and would likely have lost siblings resulting in a range of developmental problems and "emotional scarring". Many would have been brought up by relatives - who couldn't afford to look after their own children, so they would be treated virtually as slaves and beaten very often.  But also many families could have been very idyllic loving caring families that had never lifted a hand to their darlings. So, there would be a huge range of responses to "discipline". Some would be very used to being beaten - and hardly respond to it at all. Some would be psychologically traumatised the first time it happened.

With more illnesses (i.e. no anti-biotics) and very few doctors in small rural villages, the recruits themselves would have various forms of physical scarring so many would have some form of handicap - where bones had not reset properly, where soft-tissue had not healed properly. Some would be tall and well developed, but others would have had a childhood of malnutrition and have undeveloped bodies and brains.

Then you would have the disparate range of religions - it would be like having a group from budist, muslim, orthodox Jewish, pagan, catholic, pentecostal

Of course - at the time of the Romans, this hardly mattered - because not only the Romans but everyone they were fighting started with a much inferior stock of men. Everyone started with a similar handicap. The problem is trying to translate from the behaviours we see in a crowd to that of a crowd at the time of the Romans.