Later Roman Military Punishments

[Nathan Ross]

It would also be interesting to compare late Roman military punishment with the early stories about military saints.

That's a good angle, yes. Sergius and Bacchus (suppoedly c300) were initally stripped of their military insignia and ordered to parade in women's costume; Julian did the same to his cowardly troops, and this is presumably an example of the 'shameful and degrading' punishments mentioned by Phang.

Marcellus (c298), of VI Gemina, was executed in North Africa by beheading after throwing away his weapons and centurion's staff - he was charged with 'defiling his oath as a centurion', and so was presumably divested of his military rank and status before execution. The crime may have been seen as desertion (which, if this took place during Maximian's Mauretanian campaign, was a capital offence in wartime) or simple refusal to obey orders.

But there do seem to have plenty of cases of torture and execution of civilian honestiores too during the persecutions; I believe the terms of the imperial rescripts involved removal of the civil rights of offenders. So perhaps these military martyrdoms should not be seen as representative of the army as a whole.

I'm still curious about the lesser punishments of the period though - we often read of the later Roman soldier being 'brutalised' by harsh discipline, and stories of conscripts being held in jails, branding (or 'marking') and so on do suggest a punitive culture. But once a man was a soldier, was he really immune from physical punishment for most offences, or was there an additional 'military law' that cancelled these privileges when under arms?

Considering that flogging was still used in most European armies until the mid-19th century, it seems extraordinary that the Roman soldier might actually have lived under a milder regime!