Thread Rating:
  • 0 Vote(s) - 0 Average
  • 1
  • 2
  • 3
  • 4
  • 5
Roman Army Drill
#16
All those records were saved and transcribed onto wax tablets and put in the Library in Herculaneum for safekeeping in AD 78.

All we know for sure of what Vegetius knew of the "military step" is that it took 3 months for a recruit to learn. But for what it's worth, (and we'll not solve this argument here) every metope that shows soldiers marching on the Adamklissi monument, and practically every coin shows soldiers marching in step. Did they do that all the time? No, certainly not. Were they able to do that when the situation prompted? I believe they were, and that they did.
M. Demetrius Abicio
(David Wills)

Saepe veritas est dura.
Reply
#17
From what I am picking up from the later manuals, they were all based on the earlier maunuals, which must have been lost! REcopied over and over, the originals wouldsurely have perished, or perhaps been destroyed as the newer ones took precedence?
Visne partem mei capere? Comminus agamus! * Me semper rogo, Quid faceret Iulius Caesar? * Confidence is a good thing! Overconfidence is too much of a good thing.
[b]Legio XIIII GMV. (Q. Magivs)RMRS Remember Atuatuca! Vengence will be ours!
Titus Flavius Germanus
Batavian Coh I
Byron Angel
Reply
#18
For what it's worth, the Ludus Militis Tactica is very well footnoted with sources for just about every command. PM me with an email address and I'll fwd you a copy. You can see that there WERE older than Mauritius' Strategikon commands listed, and find the documents that our list was compiled from. Draw your own conclusions from that.

It's in a .pdf file.
M. Demetrius Abicio
(David Wills)

Saepe veritas est dura.
Reply
#19
Quote:I appreciate I am playing devil’s advocate, but I think with some cause.

If a military step was in fact a syncopated step, it would be easy to learn. But I don’t know when it was adopted. Was it used by the early Imperial army?

I’m sure their weapons drill was excellent. Also their discipline, valour or whatever was better than most of their opponents. And they certainly had an order of march.

But compared to the manuals of mid 3rd century onwards, where are the manuals of the early Imperial period? Of course they may not have survived, but did they ever exist?
I believe Cato the Elder is known to have written a Tactica. Pliny the Elder wrote de iaculatione equestri ("About Cavalry Shooting") and Vegetius cites ordinances of Trajan or Hadrian among his sources.

I was intrigued by a passage in Josephus which someone posted a year or so ago, where a rebel leader told his men "I can't teach you to fight like Romans fast enough, but I can teach you to drill as well as them in time." But the various changes in forum software make it hard to find.
Nullis in verba

I have not checked this forum frequently since 2013, but I hope that these old posts have some value. I now have a blog on books, swords, and the curious things humans do with them.
Reply
#20
first post so hi all.

on this subject of drill manuals. the post pointing out that there area no written manuals is a moot point, they may have just used training i've been a drill instructor and i hardly used the manual to teach, it won't have been much different for the roman army in any time period. centurians and other NCO types (sorry but not familar with correct military titles for early roman army) these men would train the troops in the same way they had been trainned if a formation was altered or new drills came in like wwith the use of horse wings then someone came up with it. trained one group to do it then they moved to the different units most likly teaching the senior ranks then in turn they would teach their own men on any changes. you don't need a actual manual because the manual would be in the minds of the men that carryout the drill itself. marching or combat drill is reaction to commands. be they vocal, musical or someone waving a flag.

i guess those troops of the 3rd centry onward may have needed written manuals as form the little i understand the shape and standing of the army altered alot but i could be mistaken.

so there is my first post, been reading this stuff for ages and this forst subject i felt the need to comment on. i hope i put my point across clearly other wise feel free to jump up and down and go "na na na your wrong.":-P
Putting the heavy in to Heavy infantry.
Reply
#21
Hi,
It's my first post too ^^.

So I've read pratically all the post of this topic, but i would like to discuss the theory of no manual for the early roman. Gary's post Wink
I'm disagree, because i think it was more complicated that just oral exercise and transmission in vocal type.
With this type of, the drills could be probably too much personalized by the men (centurion and other officer) in charge of train the troops, for the roman army.

In more, with your suggestion in a moment like Varus in AD 9, the roman army could be probably lost a lot of his instructors and would have lost a big part of a military knowledge hard acquired in the past.

Because of that, I think roman army had a lot of drill, depending of the Legion instructor, and the localization of this one. But in manual, gathering of an unknown number of older document.

For the main subject of this topic, I have not a lot reference in different roman author... so i can't pronounce myself for one of them.

P.S : Sorry for my english, it's not my native language.
Sebastien THIRIET

"Si vis pacem para bellum"

Blog on history (FR):
http://unehistoirepourtous.over-blog.com/
Reply
#22
Quote:Iunge: [yungay]
Move: [moo-way]
Ad dex / sin depone: [day-po-nay]
Signo sequute: [say-cue-tay]
Pila infige: [in-fee-gay]
Pila pone: [po-nay] Lay down your pila.
Pila tolle: [tol-lay] Pick up pila.
Gladium stringe: [strin-gay]...

What are those "-way," "-tay," "-nay," "-lay," and "-gay"? Is that how Latin should be pronounced? Sounds like the American way of pronouncing foreign words carried over to Latin.

About "ad gladium" - would not that be confusing considering that soldiers wore swords on the left as well?
M. CVRIVS ALEXANDER
(Alexander Kyrychenko)
LEG XI CPF

quando omni flunkus, mortati
Reply
#23
Quote:
Gaddius Agrippa post=283301 Wrote:Iunge: [yungay]
Move: [moo-way]
Ad dex / sin depone: [day-po-nay]
Signo sequute: [say-cue-tay]
Pila infige: [in-fee-gay]
Pila pone: [po-nay] Lay down your pila.
Pila tolle: [tol-lay] Pick up pila.
Gladium stringe: [strin-gay]...

What are those "-way," "-tay," "-nay," "-lay," and "-gay"? Is that how Latin should be pronounced? Sounds like the American way of pronouncing foreign words carried over to Latin.

It's a (mostly) reasonable attempt at mimicking what's known of classical pronunciation.

Quote:About "ad gladium" - would not that be confusing considering that soldiers wore swords on the left as well?

I think that one's been queried (and rightly so) already up-thread.

I do wonder, though, why all those commands are 2nd person singular imperative active. Surely they should all be 2nd person plural imperative active if you're addressing a squad.


PS. Isn't there some way to better highlight a quoted text? Posts can get quite hard to read sometimes since everything is in the same font on the same background. Or am I missing something obvious?
Hello, my name is Harry.
Reply
#24
Quote:What are those "-way," "-tay," "-nay," "-lay," and "-gay"? Is that how Latin should be pronounced? Sounds like the American way of pronouncing foreign words carried over to Latin.
Not just American, the commands of the brethren of Legio II Augusta sound very similar. In The Netherlands we pronounce these words differently (I think, I guess each person pronounces them in their own unique way), and in France and Italy they sound diggerently, too.

Quote: It's a (mostly) reasonable attempt at mimicking what's known of classical pronunciation.
Is it? Does this pronounciation exactly match the Greek phonetic writing?

Quote:I do wonder, though, why all those commands are 2nd person singular imperative active. Surely they should all be 2nd person plural imperative active if you're addressing a squad.
That's an old question, and I always answer it the same: it doesn't matter if the grammar is correct, it matters whether the soldier understands how his reaction must be. Modern commands in both the Dutch and British armies can curl the toes of many a language teacher. But they are clear to the soldiers.Big Grin

Quote:PS. Isn't there some way to better highlight a quoted text? Posts can get quite hard to read sometimes since everything is in the same font on the same background. Or am I missing something obvious?
You could add a color if you are quoting more people. I have done so in this post, as an example.
Robert Vermaat
MODERATOR
FECTIO Late Romans
THE CAUSE OF WAR MUST BE JUST
(Maurikios-Strategikon, book VIII.2: Maxim 12)
Reply
#25
To begin with, we really don't know exactly how Classical Latin in Julius Caesar's or Cicero's, or the Kings' era, or Hadrian's day was pronounced, or how these might have differed. There are no voice recordings, of course. The best reference we have is the Latin Vulgate of the medieval Roman Catholic church and the Latin Vulgate Bible. Were they similar? Probably so. Were they identical? Doubtful. Consider the language of whatever country you are from, and ask yourself: 500 years ago, was the grammar, spelling and pronunciation the same? Odds are, not at all. The English of the 1500s would be almost not recognizable today, and the English of a thousand years ago would be mostly indecipherable to our modern ears, and vice versa.

The phonetics that were listed below are what these words are thought to sound like without using diacritical marks, which are really a language all to themselves.

Along with what Robert says, the singular and plural uses are just how they used them, sometimes singular, sometimes plural, with very little pattern that we can determine. But it doesn't matter, really, the idea of the drill in Latin is to try to make it sound out of the ordinary, and to try to quote the words that the Latin-speakers would have used. By Mauritius' Strategikon, the Latin had been fairly well mixed up with Greek, and some words had changed from what we think the older Romans used.

One example of this is ad contum, or "to the spear (pole)", meaning "to the right". Earlier sources, such as Vegetius said "to the spear", but did not use the word contus(which is a Latinized form of the Greek kontos). As Gaddius Agrippa says below, "ad gladius" (which should probably be "ad gladium") could be confusing, as some soldiers and all officers wore their swords on the left, and later on, pretty much all soldiers wore their swords on the left.

Is any set of drill commands perfect? No, not until we find one list from ancient source, and it is doubtful that we will, though it would be wonderful if we did. Are some sets of commands fancifully made up by different reenactment groups? Yep. And that's ok, if it works for that group. The list I alluded to before was brought into being because we had several years of having many different lists being used by the several groups that attended multi-group events. It was a little like the workers on the Tower of Babel. The troops heard the words, but didn't know what to do. So the Tactica we finally produced was an attempt to bridge that gap, and create a usable list that multiple groups would understand. It's fairly successful, though limited to those commands that we could find referenced in ancient documents, and we totally realize that mixing Vegetius, Mauritius, Asclepiodotus, Arrianus, et al., into a single list is at best a strange brew. But our aim was to include the commands that were findable, and footnotable, not necessarily to try to set them into a "century-correct dialect".

We admit it is not a perfect work, but we also agree it was a heckuva lotta work, arrived at after hundreds of hours of research, argument, compromise, gritted teeth, and finally, hopeful smiles of satisfaction. If you can make use of it, we hope you will. If you can't, well, that's how it goes sometimes. The file is too big to upload here, but if you contact me via PM or at dwills777 at yahoo dot com, I will email you one
M. Demetrius Abicio
(David Wills)

Saepe veritas est dura.
Reply
#26
Quote:To begin with, we really don't know exactly how Classical Latin in Julius Caesar's or Cicero's, or the Kings' era, or Hadrian's day was pronounced, or how these might have differed.

True, but I know that native English speakers say "-ay" for long "e" for Spanish and French words, for instance, while a native Spanish or French speaker does not (please correct me if I am wrong). Hence the suspicion that this tendency/error was carried over to Latin.
M. CVRIVS ALEXANDER
(Alexander Kyrychenko)
LEG XI CPF

quando omni flunkus, mortati
Reply
#27
On reconstructing ancient latin verso church latin:
i only ever did 6 months latin before laziness won out. However i do clearly recall my teacher (Trevor Bryce- famous for his knowledge of all things hittite)
saying that the pronunciation was able to be reconstructed due to rhyming schemes in poetry etc and that church latin was responsible for the sound change in things like the letter 'c' losing its k sound. maybe i made that last bit up?
:?:
regards
richard
Reply
#28
Some things you could learn by way of poetry, but really, all you could tell is that word A rhymed with word B, not really how they both sounded. Somewhere along the way, though, the C stopped being pronounced like K. AFAIK, all Romance languages use a soft C when followed by I or E (and sometimes Y when it's used like a vowel). I wondered why/when that happened.
M. Demetrius Abicio
(David Wills)

Saepe veritas est dura.
Reply
#29
As for pronounceation, I would like to add my two bits. Are there any people here who actually did some proper research into this? I've seen a booklet some time ago about all this and had a quick read through it, but I can't remember which booklet it was.

However, to summarise what I remember is that we actually know more about pronounciation of Latin as most of use think. Modern church Latin is something different, as well. However, it's complicated and a lot of work to 'reconstruct' these things. What some researched did, as I recall correctly, was looking at all sources they have for texts. Some schools of scribes did copy directly, others corrected their work, or translated. Using this knowledge, all taken into account, scholar have attempt to reconstruct 'language patterns' and that is quite interesting. Especially when things are only phonetically written down in Greek.
________________________________________
Jvrjenivs Peregrinvs Magnvs / FEBRVARIVS
A.K.A. Jurjen Draaisma
CORBVLO and Fectio
ALA I BATAVORUM
Reply
#30
Quote:
True, but I know that native English speakers say "-ay" for long "e" for Spanish and French words, for instance, while a native Spanish or French speaker does not (please correct me if I am wrong). Hence the suspicion that this tendency/error was carried over to Latin.

Just to add for the pronounciation part ... in Spanich and Italian language you have the sound "-ay" for the letter "e" ... in French it's not the same sound it's more like the sound for the first letter "a" in the word -> "a-way".
In Latin language i think it's the same way of Spanich and Italian language for the "e" letter ... in fact it's the right pronounciation with "-ay" in english.

A little confusing my explication ^^

I'm agree with you Jurjenius, we have a good idea of the pronounciation of the Latin Language, different of the modern church latin, of course.
But have you any source for that, a document or an adress on the web ? I would like to have more informations about that.
Sebastien THIRIET

"Si vis pacem para bellum"

Blog on history (FR):
http://unehistoirepourtous.over-blog.com/
Reply


Possibly Related Threads…
Thread Author Replies Views Last Post
  Roman Drill. Anonymous 3 1,761 08-31-2002, 01:12 PM
Last Post: Muzzaguchi

Forum Jump: