Press Gangs

[Gashford]

Hello all, hope you are well?

Can anyone help me, I am trying to get a better idea of how a Roman press gang worked for military service. Presumably they did exist, I seem to remember being told they did, but does anyone know quite what they did and how they operated.

For example, in Nelsons Navy press gangs would often be made of a few good men, an officer and some local toughs who would be given immunity from pressed services for helping out. So feared were the gangs that apparently some spies wanting to avoid detection pretended to be a press gang and so everyone left them alone.

Does anyone know, under what legal circumstances a Roman Press might be carried out, the terms of service, techniques for pressing (where they as violent as later ones) and anything else about them?

All the best and thanks

[Tarbicus]

Plate B in Osprey's "Roman Legionary 58 BC-AD 69" shows a press gang in action. Ross Cowan says that the manpower crisis in the army after the Pannnonian and Dalmatian revolt in AD 6 led to Augustus levying recruits in Rome and the surrounding areas. The response was so poor he resorted to seizing property, removing citizenship and executions.

"Men were chosen by lot to serve, many considerably older than the usual ages of recruits (Dio, 56.23; Tacitus, Annals, 1.31).

[Carlton Bach]

I would doubt that a Roman press gang operated much like the Roal Navy, under most circumstances. I have no sources to back this up one way or another, but if the problems experienced in the Late Empire are in any way similar to earlier one it is more likely that the dilectus approached communities, not individuals. Such-and-such a place has to provide so-andf-so-many recruits, and if they weren't forthcoming, the dilector and his men would descend on the place and twist arms.

I also suspect that there was a considerable amount of quiet dealmaking and deferment purchase going on. Italy under Augustus can simply not have been that depleted of military-age males.