Weight of Marching Pack

[Matthew Amt]

Be careful of a lot of assumptions, here. Stepping on the feet of the men in front of you assumes that you are close enough together to do that. Do we have evidence for that? Compare to the frequent assumption that men were shoulder-to-shoulder in combat, whereas the historical sources indicate a wider spacing.

Can you march in step over rough ground, or even rutted roads? Sure, Roman roads *could* be exceedingly well-engineered and very solidly built, but documents from Vindolanda indicate that the roads were basically impassable in the winter, so I don't think we can assume the soldiers always had smooth pavement to march on. Armies in the 18th century routinely moved at the "route step", meaning not in step, until it was time to sharpen up the ranks for maneuvering.

I still think many weight estimates are a little high. People like to include palisade stakes, for instance, but the literary references to those seem to indicate that they were not a standard part of a man's load.

*Could* the Romans have marched with over 100 pounds per man? Sure, probably. But I don't think there is reason to believe they did so on any sort of regular basis. There just isn't that much they had to carry.

Valete,

Matthew