Cohorts, Cavalry and Whatever Goes

[Kegluneq]

How cryptic. :errr: A quote from your book? I hope there are annotations explaining what this is supposed to mean.

I'm assuming he's saying that the legions could be brought back to the original numbers by expanding the remaining ones, rather than reinstituting the lost ones?

Whilst I think the military organisation of the Empire took practical considerations alongside the more traditional, even 'miffic' religious practices, the significance of the former is always going to be more apparent than the latter. As Mark Hygate said, the underlying religious motivation for consistency had to have been apparent to everyone in command, especially given the very pragmatic concerns of the Roman military. Unless there's a clear continuation of explicitly Pythagorean beliefs into the Principate and Later Empire, I don't think it can really be relied upon as a structuring principle.