03-23-2014, 08:12 PM
Quote:[My latest number crunching is leading me to believe a numerus or numerii (excuse my bad Latin or lack of it), is a body of men selected from the various units in the army.
It's possible that a mixed detachment could be referred to as a numerus, but the term more usually connotes an individual unit - some auxilia units being actually called by that name, for example the numerus batavorum and numerus mattiacorum that appear on the Concordia inscriptions.
Quote: It states that the targeteers are scutarii. Hmm, is there anyone I can trust?
As Adrian says, 'targeteers' is a bit of silly antiquarianism on the part of translator Rolfe (whose version appears on the Lacus Curtius site). Walter Hamilton's 1986 Penguin translation uses the correct scutarii, although still talks about the 'first division' of the unit! Many times I have wished that translators would drop the daft habit of trying to gloss Roman military terms into 'modern' English - or, still worse, into outdated English, which just confuses everybody. A 'targeteer' was a type of 16th-century Scottish swordsman, I believe...
The correct term is scutarii, as found in Ammianus (e.g. XXVI.4 - scholae primae Scutariorum), and as Adrian further says, was a unit of the guard, probably cavalry.
Nathan Ross