07-23-2009, 08:19 PM
Quote:If I recall correctly, the Cohortes cR were recruited immediately after the battle in the Teutoburg Forest, there were 17 of them, which were used for the first time in the spring of 10. I am not sure whether this is correct; it's merely how I've always understood things.You raise an interesting subject, Jona.
As Tom says, the Varian disaster followed on the heels of the Pannonian Revolt, and scholars have made a number of assumptions about Augustus' response to the general crisis. Reaching for my colleague Lawrence Keppie's Making of the Roman Army (as I usually do, for questions about the pre-Flavian military), I find the statement:
Quote:Now [viz. AD 9], if not also in AD 6, slaves and freedmen were enrolled and formed into cohortes voluntariorum. At least 32 such cohorts were formed, and some despatched at once to guard the Rhine frontier.In fact, Suetonius (Div. Aug. 25.2) just says that freedmen were enrolled and sent to defend Illyricum and the Rhine. He adds that Augustus "kept them under their original vexillum, neither mixing them with citizens (ingenui) nor arming them in the same way". (The allegation that they were not mixed with ingenui has interesting implications for the cohortes ingenuorum. These were presumably a result of the separate dilectus ingenuorum, attested epigraphically.)
So it seems simply to be an assumption that the various cohortes voluntariorum date from this event. (Unless someone knows differently ..?)
