05-21-2011, 05:35 AM
Quote:I really don't get it when people who try to depict 1st century legionaires insist on using versions of Maurice's drill. It is half a millenium too late. Would you accept someone showing up with equipment half a millenium out of period?
I realize that people really, really want foot drill for their displays, and that written sources sadly are rather scarce on the subject, but I think a far more useable method would have been to use contemporary descriptions of battle manouvers and work backward from them instead.
Your skepticism is understandable, Endre. At face value, it does look like a severe anachronism.
The practice of Maurice-based drill by 1st cent. Roman reenactment units goes back almost 20 years now in the US; however, the rationale and justifications for the use of Maurice as a source are not well known, nor have they been explained in any depth, until recently.
The short explanation is that the system of infantry drill outlined by Maurice was not a Byzantine innovation, but had been around and well known for some 700 years by the time the Strategikon was written.
Phillip Rance and others have noted that the Strategikon draws heavily on earlier works on tactics (Maurice even says in his preface that he consulted the "ancients") and that clues in the text hint that much of the infantry drill was copied from a much earlier source, quite possibly a Latin drill "handbook" that is suspected to have existed.
To tie Maurice's drill to the early Imperial era you have to look at the still extant works by authors of earlier tactica, which were written for Roman audiences: Asclepiodotus (ca. 50 BC), Aelian (ca. AD 106), and Arrian (ca. AD 135). These describe the same principles of infantry drill as Maurice: the doubling and undoubling of files to change depth and width of formations; changes of front by facings and pivots, and countermarches. These principles can be used by heavy, medium, and light infantry, and unit formations of almost any size.
These tactica have long been dismissed as antiquarian works on the Macedonian phalanx, and obsolete at the time they were written. However, Nik Sekunda in his 2001 work Hellenistic Infantry Reform in the 160's BC convincingly argues that the Imperial era tactica were all derived from The Art of Tactics written by the philosopher Poseidonius of Rhodes circa 110 BC. Furthermore, he demonstrates this was not an antiquarian work on Alexander's army but was based in part on the contemporary Seleucid army, which had undergone some 40 years of "Romanization" — the adopting of Roman style arms and armor, unit formations and organizations, ranks, and methods.
Poseidonius was the most eminent philosopher/polymath in the Roman world in his day, and was pro-Roman in political outlook. He was known personally — and greatly admired — by Cicero and Pompey the Great. Julius Caesar almost certainly drew source material from Poseidonius' treatise on the Celts of Gaul; Caesar probably read The Art of Tactics as well.
Poseidonius not only described the dominant tactics of his day, but influenced infantry tactics throughout the rest of Roman history — and beyond.
Elements of the tactica show up in Onasander and Frontinus' Stratagemata. Vegetius acknowleged the tactica, but chose not to include them, either out of bias or an inability to read Greek. Nonetheless, some descriptions of tactics appear in his Epitome, probably derived from Frontinus' lost Art of War.
I don't think a reasonable reconstruction of 1st cent. Roman drill, and the Latin commands used, could be derived from contemporary descriptions of battle maneuvers alone. I believe the best approach is to meld the historical record with the principles and theories from the sources outlined above.
