02-17-2012, 03:53 AM
It's rare to pick up a book published in 1963 and find, within the opening two pages, a fresh and startling insight into the Roman army. Fresh and startling to me at least - that a barrack block at Novaesium was demolished in the third century and replaced by a vegetable patch might fit with changing patterns of legionary accomodation, perhaps, and be quite useful, but what are we to make of Hadrian's attempts to forbid the soldiers building 'banquet rooms... bowers, grottoes and gardens' in the fortresses? Grottoes! Probably with nice herbaceous borders and a spot of shrubbery... As Ramsey MacMullen puts it, Hadrian's 'accusing imperial finger was of no avail against the green thumb of the soldiery'.
Soldier and Civilian in the Later Roman Empire is only marginally about civilians, and while the focus is on the post-Severan period, much of the evidence comes from an earlier age. The core subject is the interrelation of civilian and military activity in the daily life of the Roman army - what the soldiers were doing when they weren't fighting battles, in other words. MacMullen argues against the notion of the Roman army as a finely-tuned 'military machine', dedicated to war and conquest. In his view, the army was a thin veneer, often only organisational and bureaucratic, over the lives of the peasant classes, from which most of Rome's recruits derived and to which they returned after their terms of service.
Since the vast majority of a soldier's life was probably spent in relative peace, this is an important subject; MacMullen's book is short, but packed with information. He also has a breezy and literate style, backed up with solid footnotes, which makes for a very readable relief from many more recent academic histories. The opening chapters ('Farmers' and 'Makers and Builders') cover the activities of the soldiers in camp, more or less - in particular how they fed and supplied themselves, and interacted with the local economy. Successive chapters deal with their role in local administration and the steady movement from military camps into cities and towns. Everywhere we see the spheres of military and civilian mingling, boundaries becoming blurred. Cities, villas and farmhouses came to resemble military fortifications, while military structures took on civilian aspects. At Aquincum, the legion employed an organist, while the troops in Dura had a troupe of actors, and apparently ran their own brothel (the names of 63 occupants are recorded, two thirds women...)
The liveliest chapters, however, deal with soldiers behaving badly. MacMullen describes the spread of soldiers away from their camps, either as stationarii (troops on outpost duty protecting roads and towns), or burgarii (occupying watchtowers or burgi along the frontiers), stratores, beneficiarii, even latrunculatores ('thief catchers'?). These essentially police functions caused soldiers to permeate civilian life, and often gave them opportunity for getting up to no good. Aside from squeezing their billet-hosts for 'pickles', or 'dinner money' (cenatica superstatum), the troops would also occasionally conduct a diaseismon ('shakedown' in MacMullen's apt translation), as at Mendechora in Lydia, early in the third century, where a gang of stationarii held the town to ransom, imprisoning nine local worthies until a bribe of 1000 drachmas had been paid...
There's plenty more of great interest in this book - on the rise of private armies and city militias, often under military leadership, for example, or the role of isolated garrison commanders in dispensing justice. The only point that lets the book down, and perhaps shows its age, is the conclusion. MacMullen's thesis is that this hybridisation of military and civilian was a cause of 'degeneracy', and led to the later army being far less effective. He traces this back to the Severan relaxation on soldiers' private lives (on legal marriage, for example, and trade): Severus 'turned troops into odd-job men'. In more recent decades, much work has been done on the late Roman army, and it now appear a far more formidable and effective force; few historians would now call 'the majority of the late fourth century army... a mere militia'. Besides, as we've seen, Hadrian had his problems with the gardening soldiers: if a source must be traced for the breaking of boundaries between civil and military life, it surely lies in the Antonine era of the Pax Romana, when soldiers starved of campaigning glory began to look across the walls of their forts at the enticing life outside...
Soldier and Civilian in the Later Roman Empire is only marginally about civilians, and while the focus is on the post-Severan period, much of the evidence comes from an earlier age. The core subject is the interrelation of civilian and military activity in the daily life of the Roman army - what the soldiers were doing when they weren't fighting battles, in other words. MacMullen argues against the notion of the Roman army as a finely-tuned 'military machine', dedicated to war and conquest. In his view, the army was a thin veneer, often only organisational and bureaucratic, over the lives of the peasant classes, from which most of Rome's recruits derived and to which they returned after their terms of service.
Since the vast majority of a soldier's life was probably spent in relative peace, this is an important subject; MacMullen's book is short, but packed with information. He also has a breezy and literate style, backed up with solid footnotes, which makes for a very readable relief from many more recent academic histories. The opening chapters ('Farmers' and 'Makers and Builders') cover the activities of the soldiers in camp, more or less - in particular how they fed and supplied themselves, and interacted with the local economy. Successive chapters deal with their role in local administration and the steady movement from military camps into cities and towns. Everywhere we see the spheres of military and civilian mingling, boundaries becoming blurred. Cities, villas and farmhouses came to resemble military fortifications, while military structures took on civilian aspects. At Aquincum, the legion employed an organist, while the troops in Dura had a troupe of actors, and apparently ran their own brothel (the names of 63 occupants are recorded, two thirds women...)
The liveliest chapters, however, deal with soldiers behaving badly. MacMullen describes the spread of soldiers away from their camps, either as stationarii (troops on outpost duty protecting roads and towns), or burgarii (occupying watchtowers or burgi along the frontiers), stratores, beneficiarii, even latrunculatores ('thief catchers'?). These essentially police functions caused soldiers to permeate civilian life, and often gave them opportunity for getting up to no good. Aside from squeezing their billet-hosts for 'pickles', or 'dinner money' (cenatica superstatum), the troops would also occasionally conduct a diaseismon ('shakedown' in MacMullen's apt translation), as at Mendechora in Lydia, early in the third century, where a gang of stationarii held the town to ransom, imprisoning nine local worthies until a bribe of 1000 drachmas had been paid...
There's plenty more of great interest in this book - on the rise of private armies and city militias, often under military leadership, for example, or the role of isolated garrison commanders in dispensing justice. The only point that lets the book down, and perhaps shows its age, is the conclusion. MacMullen's thesis is that this hybridisation of military and civilian was a cause of 'degeneracy', and led to the later army being far less effective. He traces this back to the Severan relaxation on soldiers' private lives (on legal marriage, for example, and trade): Severus 'turned troops into odd-job men'. In more recent decades, much work has been done on the late Roman army, and it now appear a far more formidable and effective force; few historians would now call 'the majority of the late fourth century army... a mere militia'. Besides, as we've seen, Hadrian had his problems with the gardening soldiers: if a source must be traced for the breaking of boundaries between civil and military life, it surely lies in the Antonine era of the Pax Romana, when soldiers starved of campaigning glory began to look across the walls of their forts at the enticing life outside...
Nathan Ross
