Legion reinforcements

[Nathan Ross]

Nathan,
When Sabinus' & Cotta's force of 15 cohorts was destroyed it is my opinion that the 5 cohorts aside from those of Legio XIV were probably detachments from one or two of the other legions. Do you agree?

I remember this thread, but sadly the older one I linked to in it seems to have evaporated! We still don't know the origin of the mysterious extra cohorts with Legion XIV (or whatever they were called) - I think the most interesting suggestion is that they were non-citizen troops raised as cohorts rather than legions, like the 22 cohorts raised in Transalpine Gaul at around the same time. The unfortunate legion themselves had been under arms for over a year and were able to conduct themselves effectively on the battlefield, so there's no particulat reason to assume that they needed stiffening with veterans from elsewhere.

Reinforcing a legion, while perhaps useful during a campaign, would create an administrative nightmare, especially if no system was in place to swiftly replace the outgoing veterans.

Absolutely! And notice that during the 47 mutiny Caesar offers to disband the entire tenth legion - he later went back on it, but disbanding a legion whose members had been recruited at different times would indeed be a nightmare: handing out rewards and land grants to some of them, while trying to allocate others to different legions depending on time served, and so on... I think this demonstrates that all the men of the tenth had served for the same period, and all of them had indeed been recruited at the same time.