11-15-2021, 06:19 PM
(11-14-2021, 08:03 PM)jmsilvacross Wrote: I find it fascinating that they started called centurions "ordinarius"... Wonder how that evolved?
The word comes from the Latin ordo, for a group, rank or company of soldiers - ordines plural. The initial term was centurio ordinarius, which appears on tombstones from the very late 3rd and early 4th centuries - meaning, approximately, a centurion 'in the ranks', or commanding an ordo.
This would be perhaps distinguished from a centurion on a staff appointment or controlling a district (centurio regionarius) or doing some other supernumerary thing - the centurionate greatly expanded its role in the later 3rd century after the decline of the equestrian 'offiicer caste'.
After a while centurio ordinarius just became ordinarius. Although we do occasionally come across references to centurions in the 4th century, and the word carries over into later Greek too, so it didn't entirely die out!
(I wonder whether the 'century' commanded by the ordinarius might actually have been called an ordo - and perhaps might have been rather larger or rather smaller than the centurion's command of the principiate - but that's a different debate! One writer - I think Simon James? - has suggested that the late Roman 'century' might have been called a familia, so who knows?...)
(11-14-2021, 08:03 PM)jmsilvacross Wrote: Do you think a limitanei unit would have had one of these?
Perhaps unlikely. In one sense a domesticus could be any servant of a household or retinue - the word just refers, I think, to the domus. But in the military sense of a sort of officer's orderly it doesn't seem to appear until fairly late - 6th century?
Nathan Ross
