Gallienus’ cavalry resurrected

Today, I discovered a twenty-two-year-old Japanese paper entitled “Regarding Emperor Gallienus’ Cavalry Reforms”.

In brief, the author, Professor Fuminori Inoue of Kyoto, attempted to reconcile two opposing theories: on the one hand, Emil Ritterling’s famous 1903 proposal that the late Roman cavalry units designated as Illyriciani had originated in a special type of independent cavalry (“ever-battle-ready”) created, he conjectured, by Gallienus; on the other hand, Hans-Günther Simon’s 1980 criticism, suggesting that Gallienus had simply fielded “strong cavalry units” alongside legionary vexillations in mixed battle-groups.

I discussed both of these scholars’ ideas (amongst many others) in my 2025 book Phantom Horsemen.

A hybrid fantasy

Professor Inoue admits, in his 2004 paper, that Gallienus’ successor, Claudius II, had multiple cavalry units and explicitly not a unified cavalry force, so he casts doubt on whether Gallienus’ general Aureolus could have been “commander of the entire cavalry” (as the Byzantine writer Zonaras alleges). In my book, I presented what I think is rather an elegant solution to this dilemma, but Professor Inoue ’s rather less nuanced answer is to assert that “the entire cavalry” simply referred to whatever cavalry units happened to be under the emperor’s direct command at the time.

He argues that there was no unified cavalry force under Aureolus’ command, since Zonaras records that Gallienus’ general Aurelian was also in command of cavalry. But, hold on — wasn’t it Zonaras who told us that Aureolus was indeed “commander of the entire cavalry”? Confused? No wonder.

Of course, Professor Inoue follows the herd in his refusal to relinquish the “fact” of Gallienus’ cavalry reform. (Professor David Potter’s Roman Empire at Bay, with its “Gallienic cavalry corps”, appeared in the same year.) But it doesn’t sit well with Inoue’s ideas. His solution is to claim that the “commander of the entire cavalry” (a phrase also used by the late writer Zosimus) was simply whoever grouped a few units together at a given time on an ad hoc basis. Only thus is he able to make sense of the even later writer Cedrenus’ (clearly erroneous) remark, that Gallienus invented cavalry units (plural), not a unified cavalry force (singular).

Myth upon myth

Professor Inoue is convinced that the Roman army absolutely required highly-mobile independent cavalry forces that could suddenly be deployed wherever the emperor wished. (I have questioned the logic of this in my book Phantom Horsemen.)

There is no evidence that this ever existed, so he creates a parallel myth of highly-mobile independent infantry forces under the guise of legionary vexillations — he cunningly gives the false impression that, rather than deployed to perform a particular task at a particular location (as all vexillations were), legionary vexillations were, in reality, roving armies in their own right. Hmmm.

And in a final bizarre twist, he argues that this reform of Gallienus was aimed at creating a permanently functioning mobile army composed of both cavalry and infantry forces, whose powerful officers governed the empire.

To sum up, Professor Inoue proposes that Gallienus did indeed create a cavalry army, but it was an ad hoc grouping of separate units, which somehow became combined with mobile infantry units to create mobile field armies for deployment on widespread battlefronts.

Bringing it up-to-date

This twenty-two-year-old farrago of misplaced ingenuity only came to my attention because of the XIV Convegno Romeno-Italiano 2025 held in Iaşi (Romania), the proceedings of which have just appeared as Volume 21/1 of the journal Classica et Christiana.

I was intrigued by a paper entitled “El ejército romano de Aureliano y Probo en la Historia Augusta”, by Miguel Pablo Sancho Gómez of the Catholic University of Murcia.

The summary of his paper implied an investigation of how the emperor Probus (AD 276–282) capitalized upon Aurelian’s successful military reunification of the empire (AD 270–275), drawing upon evidence from the Historia Augusta.

Crisis and cavalry

Browsing through the paper, my attention was drawn to a four-page section entitled “Crisis of the Third Century and the Rise of the Roman Cavalry”. The scene is set with the usual hyperbole of “fifty years of assassinations, rebellions, secessions, plagues, invasions, and usurpations”. (I have put this kind of pessimistic exaggeration into perspective in my book.)

We then read that, because Rome was where the emperor was, swift and rapid campaigning was required, which in turn made cavalry essential. (I have examined this flawed logic in my book, but you can probably see where this is going ...)

The result was inevitably “the creation of new, large-scale formations of cavalry, previously a relatively secondary arm, which abandoned its almost exclusive auxiliary role in liaison, scouting, and skirmishing to spearhead many of the attacks of the Roman army”. This cavalry also became, we are told, “the emperor’s armed retinue, a training school and an officers’ academy for extracting experienced commanders who enjoyed total confidence owing to their affiliation with the sovereign’s entourage”.

And what is the evidence for this cataclysmic transformation? Why, the 2004 paper by Professor Fuminori Inoue (mentioned above), of course!

Once more the Schlachtenkavallerie

Although all of this mythology has been debunked in Phantom Horsemen, Señor Sancho Gómez may be excused for having missed it. His bibliography is predominantly pre-2010, though he lists Michael A. Speidel’s paper on “The Military in the Third-Century Roman Empire”, which appeared at the same time as Phantom Horsemen.

But he should surely be aware of his fellow Spaniard José Antonio Magdalena Anda, whose book (pictured here) El emperador Galieno y la supervivencia del Imperio romano (Madrid 2022) at least deserves to be cited, particularly in a Spanish discussion.

Like Sancho Gómez, Señor Magdalena Anda seems convinced of “the fact that Gallienus created a cavalry corps at some point between 255 and 260” (El emperador Galieno p. 265).

In his recent, broadly positive review of my Phantom Horsemen book (mentioned here), he doesn’t commit himself on the subject, appearing content to note that I have “identified several (not all) researchers who reject Gallienus’ battle cavalry thesis”. These are, of course, the writers who (like Professor Fuminori Inoue) embrace some form of Hans-Günther Simon’s equally flawed solution.

Señor Magdalena Anda, in fact, seems to equate my position with the one that Yann Le Bohec adopted in his 2009 book L’armée romaine dans la tourmente (a book that I read only recently, as explained here). But Le Bohec mentions neither Ritterling nor Cedrenus in this book. How, then, can he address an ongoing argument that has those two authorities at its root?

Round we go again ...

Let’s see what Professor Le Bohec actually does say. He tells us, first, that cavalry would not have been the answer to any problems experienced by the third-century Roman army. (Note that this is not the same as disproving the prevalent theory that it was the answer.) Secondly, he tells us that the notion of a “mobile army” is absurd, because no army is “immobile”. (Note, again, that this is not the same as addressing the prevalent theory that Gallienus developed a roving, ever-ready task force.)

On the other hand, he tells us that Gallienus created new auxiliary units, “some recruited from the Dalmatae and the Moors, others called scutarii and stablesiani” and a special guard of protectores, and he increased the legionary cavalry from 120 men to 726. I notice that Professor Le Bohec gives no clear references for any of this. (Gallienic scutarii and stablesiani, at any rate, are a theory of M.P. Speidel’s, and H.M.D. Parker can be blamed for the legionary cavalry. I’ve dealt with the protectores in my book.)

Señor Magdalena Anda, for his part, seems to favour the mixed battle-groups theory, though he does at least address the evidence. But predictably, he has not yet shaken off the fundamental myth that equates Gallienus with cavalry in some form. No doubt it will take a while.

Odyssey redux

I recently read an article in The New Statesman claiming that last year’s The Odyssey – Homer by Daniel Mendelsohn “will probably be the authoritative translation for years to come”.

Having finally made its acquaintance, I can see why some might believe this, but how can they avoid the Emily Wilson steamroller? For example, when questioned about “The Odyssey”, Google’s AI Overview doesn’t even mention Mendelsohn. It certainly should.

Sheer poetry

Mendelsohn has gone to enormous lengths to render The Odyssey in as faithful a version as possible, maintaining something of the feel of the original, both rhythmically and stylistically.

Not only has he retained the six-beat rhythm of the original dactylic hexameter in his line-by-line version, but he makes every effort to reproduce Homer’s alliteration and assonace. The effect is simply wonderful.

My favourite epithets

In stark contrast to Wilson (pictured here), Mendelsohn has also realized the crucial importance of Homer’s repeated formulaic epithets — “Odysseus, that man of great cunning” (πολύμητις Ὀδυσσεύς, polymêtis Odysseus), for example, or “Penelope, clear-thinking woman” (περίφρων Πηνελόπεια, perifrôn Pênelopeia) — epithets that Wilson mostly omits entirely in her drive to simplify.

Omits them, or elides them into her narrative. For instance, in conversation with Kalypso, Mendelsohn’s “ever-inventive Odysseus” (πολυμήχανος Ὀδυσσεύς, polymêkhanos Odysseus) is simply “Odysseus”. And when “Odysseus of the many ruses replied to her in turn” (Mendelsohn’s six-beat line — try it), Wilson simply reports that “Odysseus with tact said ...”

Omits, elides, or, worst of all, twists them, as when Mendelsohn’s “Odysseus, that man of great cunning” (see above) becomes, for Wilson (in the opening line of Book 9), “wily Odysseus, the lord of lies”! (She really doesn’t like her protagonist.)

But then, in the same Book 9, “the Cyclopes, an arrogant, lawless lot” (in Mendelsohn’s translation) become, for Wilson, “high-minded Cyclopes, the mavericks”. (Homer’s two adjectives are ὑπερφίαλος — hyperphialos, “arrogant” — and ἀθέμιστος — athemistos, “lawless”, just as Mendelsohn wrote.) Many more of Wilson’s anomalies could be mentioned.

Interestingly, Mendelsohn (pictured here) argues for “Athena of the bright owl-eyes” (γλαυκῶπις Ἀθήνη, glaukôpis Athênê), which I have always believed should be “grey-eyed Athena”. Mendelsohn conjectures that γλαυκός (glaukos, “shining”) is derived from γλαύξ (glaux, “owl”), and refers to that creature’s unnerving stare. I’m not entirely convinced — the logic seems to miss a step —, but I’m willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

Homer’s text

My thoughts also turned to the source text, not only for Mendelsohn and Wilson, but for all the many translations and versions that fill our bookshops. Whenever I read an ancient text, I like to know whose authority I am relying upon. This is important when dealing with texts that have few source manuscripts: the discovery of a new one can throw everything into disarray. However, The Odyssey (like that other venerable text The Holy Bible) is based on a myriad of original manuscripts, ancient and medieval (the Oxford editor Thomas Allen’s list, published in 1908, runs to two-and-a-half pages). So the appearance of a variant at this late date is vanishingly unlikely.

Meanwhile, as pundits of all kinds seek to benefit from the appearance of Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster movie this month, the University of Manchester’s John Rylands Library have taken the opportunity to reveal their ownership of a truly ancient copy of The Odyssey: An incomplete parchment codex from around AD 300, in which 79 of the (estimated) original 207 leaves have survived with varying levels of damage. Initially acquired in Egypt at the turn of the twentieth century and published in 1911 as P. Rylands I.53, the codex, containing parts of Books 12–15 and 18–24, was probably the second of a two-volume set — ancient precursor of the Loeb edition!

The Manchester Odyssey

Pictured here is the front face (or recto) of folio 81. Carrying lines 140–171 of Book 22, it matches a single page of the Loeb edition almost exactly.

We are near the end of the story. The scene is the megaron hall of Odysseus’ palace in Ithaka. Having revealed himself by stringing the mighty bow and shooting an arrow through the axe-heads, the hero turns on the crowd of suitors. His son, Telemachus, brings weapons for himself, his father, and two loyal bondsmen (the swineherd Eumaeus and the cowherd Philoetius). But he has left the door to the storeroom ajar.

As this page begins, Melanthius the disloyal goatherd runs to Odysseus’ storeroom (you can see the name Ὀδυσεὺς in the middle of the second line — Melanthius’ name is below it in the third line) and seizes twelve sets of weapons for the suitors.

Eumaeus spots him returning for more weapons and asks Odysseus whether he should try and kill him or capture him. On the last line of the page, Odysseus replies that he and Telemachus (you can see the name Τηλέμαχος halfway along the bottom line) will keep the suitors occupied, while the two bondsmen capture Melanthius.

Pictured here is the recto of folio 82, with lines 238–271 of Book 22. With Melanthius captured and trussed up, Odysseus (named in the top line) and his three companions stand with spears ready against the remaining suitors. Six of the boldest suitors now decide to throw their own spears, but all miss their mark. (Their names appear on the badly damaged fourth, fifth, and sixth lines of the page.)

The heroes, in turn, target four others. “Taking careful aim” (in the three six-beat lines of Mendelsohn’s translation) “Odysseus hit Demoptolemos” (Δημοπτόλεμον μὲν Ὀδυσσεύς), “Telemakhos hit Euryades, the swineherd hit Elatos” (Εὐρυάδην δ᾿ ἄρα Τηλέμαχος, Ἔλατον δὲ συβώτης), “and the man who had charge of the cattle was the one to slay Peisandros (Πείσανδρον δ᾿ ἄρ᾿ ἔπεφνε βοῶν ἐπιβουκόλος ἀνήρ).

“So all of them together bit the dust of the wide-spreading ground”. I feel that Mendelsohn’s translation, with its six-beat line, is so much more Homeric (as in so many other places) than Wilson’s weak version: “They all fell and bit the earth”. I can well imagine that, if he were to read Wilson, “Odysseus would cover his head and start lamenting once again” (Book 8, line 92). For we miss the great beauty of Mendelsohn’s Odyssey, which truly deserves to be “the authoritative translation for years to come”.

A voyage around the Odyssey

As we wait, breathless, for “Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey” to be released next month, thoughts turn once again to Homer’s original 24-book epic.

When I last wrote about The Odyssey over a year ago (here), I lamented the fact that Emily Wilson’s 2018 version had taken over as the translation of choice for the modern generation.

I much preferred Lattimore’s 1965 treatment, with its richly poetic vocabulary, though Fagles’ 1996 translation (in my opinion) gave it some stiff competition.

The Odyssey is above all a seafaring epic, and we get our first taste in Book Two, as Telemachos sets sail from Ithaca, searching for news of his lost father. These 400-odd lines of Greek are a microcosm of Homer’s storytelling language.

Homeric language

One of Homer’s best known epithets is surely “rosy-fingered Dawn” (ῥοδοδάκτυλος Ἠώς, rhododaktylos Eôs). Lattimore, true to form, gives us “Dawn with her rosy fingers”. Similarly, Fagles gives us “dawn with her rose-red fingers”. But Wilson merely tells us that “her fingers bloomed”. Ingenious, perhaps. But not what Homer wrote. So we miss one of his famous trademark phrases.

Then there is Odysseus’ guardian deity, the goddess Athena, who is always “grey-eyed” (γλαυκῶπις Ἀθήνη, glaukôpis Athênê), from glaûkos, meaning “bluish-grey” (though many scholars prefer glaukòs, which means “bright, shining”). Lattimore, again true to form, has “grey-eyed”. Fagles, though, describes the goddess “with flashing sea-gray eyes”, thus having his cake while eating it. But for Wilson, she is always “bright-eyed Athena”. (That’s too Watership Down for my liking.)

Telemachos winds up at Sparta, home of “golden-haired Menelaus” (ξανθὸς Μενέλαος, xanthos Menelaos), husband of the infamous Helen of Troy. Fagles prefers to translate the epithet as “the red-haired king Menelaus”, though the adjective elsewhere suggests a lighter colour, like a chestnut horse or a tawny lion. Curiously, Wilson again breaks ranks with “ruddy Menelaus”, which she alternates with “flushed” or “high-coloured Menelaus”. This simply won’t do.

Another classic is the “wine-dark sea” (οἶνοψ πόντος, oinops pontos), which Fagles duly gives us. Wilson, too. Amazingly. (Lattimore preferred “the wine-blue water”.) Diggle, in the excellent Cambridge Greek Lexicon (2021), glosses the term as “having the appearance of wine”. If there’s one word in Homer that cries out for explanation, it must be this one. Of course, the language is meant to resonate. But it is also meant to evoke a mental picture, like the rosy fingers of dawn across an early morning sky. It’s notable that Telemachos is setting sail at dusk, precisely when the sea will appear purplish and dark. Only a few lines later, Homer tells us that the “purple wave” (πορφύρεον, porphyreon) sang along the prow of the ship, ingeniously using a word that encapsulates both the colour of porphyry and the action of surging or heaving. So the “wine-dark sea” is specifically an evening phenomenon.

Finally, I couldn’t leave the subject without mentioning Homer’s epithet for Helen of Troy, which is always “white-armed” (λευκώλενος, leukôlenos). If the rumour of Nolan’s audacious casting choice for Helen turns out to be true, perhaps his Athena will have rosy red eyes and his Menelaus will be bald.

When is a siege not a siege?

Archaeology is full of mysteries. The best we can expect of scholars is that they set aside personal prejudice and weigh up the available evidence, presenting it in a way that permits logical analysis. But there is a major caveat in this last phrase, because it’s the contemporary logic that we must apply, not our preferred twenty-first-century logic. And this is where the sheep diverge from the goats.

Fifteen years ago, I devoted a whole series of articles in the magazine Ancient Warfare to this very phenomenon. The series was entitled “The Debate”, because each article presented the available evidence to illuminate a particular topic, and assessed the ongoing debate about how that evidence should be analyzed.

For “The Debate” in December 2011 (in Ancient Warfare vol. V, issue 6), I took as the theme the Roman military operations at Burnswark in south-west Scotland (known as Birrenswark in the older literature), where the upstanding remains of two camps are imprinted on the landscape.

The article (available here) was called “Hillfort under attack: Roman siege warfare or training exercises at Burnswark?”, because these were the two explanations that had been put forward in the ongoing debate. (I say “ongoing debate”, but it has always been a little one-sided, as proponents of the “training exercises” theory insist that all evidence favours their case.)

From antiquarians to archaeologists

Over a century ago, in 1914, Francis Haverfield, the pre-eminent Romano-British archaeologist of his day, had voiced the opinion that “the well-known and remarkable earthworks at Birrenswark have long been explained as Roman siege-works round a native hill-fort” (though he failed to name those authorities by whom it had “long been explained”).

A year earlier, the site had been visited by the German archaeologist Adolf Schulten, who — fresh from his eight seasons of excavations at the elaborate Roman Republican siegeworks of Numantia (see here) — immediately confirmed Burnswark as the site of a Roman siege. (It should be mentioned, however, that it was his belief in a circumvallation, disproved soon afterwards, that prompted his analogy with Caesar’s siege of Corfinium in 49BC, a comparison that is still occasionally mentioned to this day.)

Only a decade later, Haverfield’s pupil R.G. Collingwood, investigating the site in 1925, confirmed that “the siege theory gives the only possible explanation of the camps and their relation to the hill-fort”.

In the swinging sixties, anything goes

Then, at some point in the 1960s, the peculiar idea took root — popularized by Roy Davies in a 1972 paper entitled “The Romans at Burnswark” — that the only siege at Burnswark had actually been a practice siege!

When I was researching my PhD in 2001, I identified a lecture delivered in 1963 by Kenneth Steer (Secretary General of the Royal Commission on the Ancient and Historical Monuments of Scotland) as the first time this idea was mentioned. “It is at least arguable”, Steer pronounced, “that the camps were simply training-quarters for troops engaged in storming native fortifications”.

Indeed, Roy Davies’ PhD thesis (entitled Peace-time routine in the Roman army, Durham 1967) — for which he began research in 1963, the very year of Steer’s lecture — has a chapter on “Manoeuvres”, in which he admitted that “the theory that Burnswark may not in fact be the scene of a siege carried out in time of war was suggested to me by Mr G. Jobey”, an archaeology lecturer at Newcastle University who had been excavating there in 1965 and 1966.

For the next forty years, the “practice siege” theory held sway, despite the fact that — unlike other Roman army manoeuvres — there was not a single jot of evidence to support the existence of such a thing.

For example, Gordon Maxwell gave it prominence in his 1998 book A Gathering of Eagles, from which this illustration (right) is taken. Here we see the north rampart of the South Camp, where the author has depicted catapults mounted on mounds in the open area outside the camp.

Siege or no siege?

In 2003, I published a paper — “The Roman Siege of Burnswark” (available here) — in which I restated the case for a genuine episode of warfare. I rather foolishly imagined that this might have put the entire matter to bed. But I hadn’t reckoned with the argumentative energy of those who had set their minds and staked their reputations on the “practice siege” theory.

That is not to say that my research went unheeded. In 2009, for example, Nick Hodgson appealed to “the convincing demonstration by D. Campbell that there is no reason to believe that the siegeworks at Burnswark were not intended to function in earnest”.

But while the “training exercises” proponents insist on having the last word, I find their dogmatic belief in a “practice siege” curious. Even if we suppose for a moment that such a phenomenon ever existed, how would we tell it apart from a genuine siege?

A misconceived argument

Whenever anyone claims support for the “practice” theory, discussion always comes back to the “Three Brethren”. These are the earthworks positioned in front of the three north-facing gateways of the South Camp (depicted on the plan above).

In 1925, Collingwood pronounced them “emplacements for artillery bombarding the hill-fort”, which he (erroneously) called ballistaria. These were a particular hobby-horse of Collingwood’s, an obsession that he bequeathed to his student and collaborator, Ian Richmond. They were keen to find such “gun-platforms” in any camp or fort that they happened to be investigating. (I disproved five of them in a 1984 paper.)

The “Three Brethren” struck Collingwood as particularly suitable for this function, as his 20th-century logic told him that artillery should be thrust forward and elevated as far as possible. But to a Roman, neither of these characteristics appears to have been at all desirable.

Advancing artillery beyond the safety of the camp was foolish and reckless, while elevating it above ground-level was only necessary if its purpose was to shoot at the parapet of high fortifications. We can see this from the ancient technical manuals. Any self-respecting Roman engineer would have constructed a siege-tower for this purpose. But in the case of Burnswark, we may add the clinching fact that the “Three Brethren” are too small and precarious to be used as “gun-platforms”.

Maxwell’s illustrations (above and right) cleverly show a solid mound, carefully constructed from layers of turf, with a large consolidated surface area to support his catapult with a crew of four or five men. In reality, the mounds appear, on the contrary, to have consisted of piled up earth measuring some 10–12 feet (3.5m) in diameter at the top, which is a tight fit for a 2-pounder ballista, with no spare room for the crew to work effectively. (How did they even get the catapult up there to begin with?) In the case of this one-armed onager, it is unclear how the rear of the machine would be supported, far less operated.

Back in 2003, I gave a talk to the Trimontium Trust in Melrose on this subject, in which I plotted the trajectory of a missile from a 2-pounder Roman stone-throwing catapult located safely behind the rampart of the South Camp, where it ought to be. I demonstrated that the hillfort of Burnswark was well within the range of such machines, without having to position them precariously on mounds dangerously exposed outside the Roman defences.

The cross-section view of the terrain at Burnswark also demonstrates very clearly the danger posed to the Roman camp by an enemy located on the hilltop. The gateways were especially exposed, in this regard, and required robust protection. In fact, we know of a genuine Roman description of such robust defences being employed to deflect heavy and destructive objects rolled downhill against Roman fortifications. There is even an illustration of this on Trajan’s Column.

But the “training exercise” proponents object on principle to any contrary argument. David Breeze cannot disprove my interpretation of the “Three Brethren”, so he simply asserts that “this, of course, is based on the assumption that Burnswark was the location of a siege”. Thus, any suggestions may be swept aside on the grounds that Burnswark is a “practice siege” — a classic case of circular reasoning. Alan Wilkins likewise claims that “the design of the Three Brethren and their position immediately in front of the three gateways is the most important evidence that this is not a real siege”. For him, the catapult balls and copious quantities of sling bullets are “the types of missiles that might be expected at a training camp”. There is no replying to this level of debate.

How rumours start

In 2011, Rebecca Jones published a book entitled Roman Camps in Scotland. I recently acquired a copy (thank you, Ruth and Ruairi) and was surprised by her discussion of Burnswark (pages 154–156). It wasn’t her characterisation of the “practice siege” theory as the most likely interpretation, as I fully expected this. Rather, it was her allegation — in the context of the “Three Brethren” — that “he [meaning me] has accepted the possibility that they are ‘ballistaria’!

This is quite impossible, for two reasons. First, I have never wavered in my scepticism of Collingwood and Richmond’s “gun-platforms”. Over forty years ago, I demonstrated that the variety of archaeological features that they wished to identify as “artillery platforms” were no such thing. The “Three Brethren” fall into this same category.

And second, more importantly, in my 2003 book on Greek and Roman Artillery 399 BC–AD 363, I explained the meaning of the word ballistarium: “for a long time scholars interpreted this as an ‘artillery platform’, but it was probably a storehouse or workshop for catapults”. So, definitely not a large pile of earth defending a camp gateway!

Postscript: A siege fantasy

Today, I came across a still image from the “Burnswark VR Experience”, a cinematic experience hosted by Trimontium Museum in Melrose. Under the lowering skies of Roman Scotland, waves of legionaries ascend the hillfort of Burnswark under fire (literally) from their own heavy-calibre artillery.

The foreground is occupied by an enormous gun-platform, fenced in, massively fortified, and protected by a deep trench. On top, three legionaries can be seen operating an old-style pre-Antonine stone-throwing ballista, which — from its size — appears to be something like a 40-pounder, designed to project stones weighing around 13kg. Such stones are larger, far larger, than those discovered at Burnswark. Moreover, the missile just launched from this machine is somehow capable of leaving a smoking trail.

Unfortunately, viewers of this fanciful scene will take away quite the wrong idea about any military action that might have taken place on Burnswark two-thousand years ago.

A book by any other name

In 1994, I wrote a somewhat critical review of Yann Le Bohec’s L’armée romaine sous le haut-empire, which had recently appeared in an English-language version. (The review is buried in a long-forgotten edition of Liverpool Classical Monthly.)

The original book was published in 1989, and apparently appeared in a second edition in 1998, a third edition in 2002, and a fourth in 2018 (all unbeknown to me). These later versions don’t seem to have been reviewed anywhere.

Having already purchased the original (twice) — and having struggled to enjoy Le Bohec’s book about the third-century army —, I am understandably reluctant to buy the new one, which (in paperback) retails for around £32 (€40).

Imagine my surprise, then, on finding (in my favourite online lending library) a 2004 Spanish version, El ejército romano, with “revisión científica” by the historian (mostly prehistorian, it seems) Francisco Gracia Alonso of Barcelona University. Could this be Le Bohec’s third edition?

Textbook or manifesto?

In 1989, L’armée romaine sous le haut-empire wasn’t just a book about the Roman army. Rather, it was a book about Le Bohec’s vision of the Roman army. These turned out to be two different things.

Here, in this edition, Le Bohec still promises to follow “a principle that we shall call ‘totality’”. (Incidentally, I have translated all quotations from El ejército romano for convenience.)

In fact, I found, thirty-odd years ago, that this wasn’t the comprehensive handbook that Le Bohec’s globalité (‘totality’) suggested. The question is, has anything changed in this (let’s call it the third) edition?

(And if you protest that this is all very academic, as Le Bohec’s fourth edition might be a completely new book, please remember that there will surely be enough people still reading the third edition, Spanish or not.)

Archaeology, but not as we know it

One of my original criticisms was about the lack of archaeological discussion, or even an appreciation of the contribution of archaeology. Unfortunately, this shortcoming has not been addressed.

Actually, Le Bohec has a peculiar idea of archaeology, summed up in his opening comment, that “excavations provide us with more than just inscriptions”. But for him, inscriptions are definitely the highlight, along with monumental sculpture, which is also subsumed under “archaeology”. (Later in the book, he remarks that “archaeology has revealed some interesting reliefs”, in reference to Trajan’s Column!) Great importance is also accorded to aerial photography, chiefly by Père Poidebard (whose 150th birthday is coming up soon — couldn’t he think of someone more recent?).

However, admittedly, a new paragraph has been added, with the revelation that “Recent work has drawn attention to a previously overlooked reality: soldiers need not only weapons, but also a range of items that constitute military equipment”! This has, at least, prompted Le Bohec to excise his original reference to Paul Couissin’s vintage Les armes romaines of 1926 (though it still appears in his bibliography) and replace it with Michel Feugère’s Les armes des Romains, a book that (as I pointed out elsewhere) has its own problems.

Having introduced the subject of military equipment, Le Bohec has added a paragraph to the “Tactics” chapter, explaining that “legionaries and auxiliaries possessed equipment that was much more similar than previously thought, although it did exhibit great diversity”. So ... the same but different.

Otherwise, archaeology is only deployed, as it was in 1989, in a facile attempt to gauge the size of the Praetorian Guard by providing a “decisive argument” (p. 29 = 1989 p. 21): the praetorians cannot have been as numerous as a legion, because their fort in Rome is smaller than a legionary fortress!

And archaeology is briefly mentioned in the section on sieges. But it is symptomatic of this idiosyncratic book that the original perfectly-judged footnote referring to the work of Adolf Schulten on the siege-works at Masada, and the comments of archaeologist Sir Ian Richmond based on aerial photographs taken by the RAF, have been replaced by a reference to a 1995 book by a French historian: Mireille Hadas-Lebel’s Massada.

Changes, but not for the better

Le Bohec displays a pride in French scholarship. We can see that in his preference for French publications over more pertinent non-French publications. That’s perhaps understandable. But references like “Carcopino, Mél. P Thomas, 1930” are not very helpful for Spanish (or, for that matter, any non-French) readers.

But this example serves a dual purpose.

It is one of the many niggling inaccuracies that permeate the book. The reference accompanies the statement that “Auxiliaries served twenty-five years in the time of Augustus, twenty-six from the middle of the 1st century onwards, and twenty-eight from the time of Caracalla”. Any moderately well-informed editor would immediately have realized that this is a description (admittedly, somewhat garbled) of the terms of service not of auxiliaries, but of fleet personnel.

(The 1930 Carcopino article, incidentally, is his publication of the military diploma of 30 April AD 166 that became CIL XVI, 122.)

Another peculiarity is the tendency to present insufficiently explored ideas as facts. For example, in one of the few newly inserted paragraphs, four sentences are added (on p. 17) on the subject of military diplomas, essentially repeating what already exists on p. 14 (= 1989 p. 10, where diplomas were first mentioned, with a blanket reference to L’Année épigraphique, as if each volume of that journal were packed with diplomas), although the citation of “M. Roxan, Roman Military Diplomas” has been updated to reflect the availability of “4 vols., 1978–2003”. (Six have now been published.)

However, Le Bohec takes this opportunity to repeat his peculiar belief that discharge from service entailed the issuing of an epistula missoria (no evidence is provided) before the lex data (the edict preserved in the military diploma) was enacted. (He has perhaps muddled up the handful of ‘discharge certificates’ that Nesselhauf gathered in 1936 in the Appendix to CIL XVI, which are quite obviously distinct from diplomas and nothing to do with them. But nor are they epistulae. The mystery remains unsolved.)

Addenda?

There has certainly been an attempt to mention more recent publications, even if their content is not reflected in the text. New footnotes appear, for example, in the Introduction, flagging up Le Bohec’s 1998 article about Onasander (but not C.J. Smith’s paper from the same year), C.R. Whittaker’s Les frontières de l’empire romain (but not the English translation), S. Perea Yébenes’ Collegia militaria (sensible for Spanish readers), M.A. Speidel’s Die römischen Schreibtafeln von Vindonissa (which are not discussed anywhere in the book), and the Mons Claudianus ostraca graeca et latina volumes I–II (likewise; incidentally, a third volume appeared in 2000).

But the main text seems rarely to have been altered. The paragraph that previously discussed the peregrini as spies and assassins who occupied the castra peregrina in Rome has been redrafted and now denies the existence of these men, but includes instead a class of “displaced soldiers” who “do not have Roman citizenship and correspond to the Latin term peregrini”, which all seems rather odd.

All of this gives the impression of a book that has been tinkered with, rather than revised.

No corrigenda?

Near the beginning, Le Bohec’s complaint that “researchers occasionally rely upon erroneous information” seems deeply ironic, given that the same mistakes that I noted thirty years ago (and there were many) are still there and the whole book now feels curiously outdated. To name a few examples, Le Bohec’s auxiliaries still wear leather tunics “sometimes covered with metal plates”, his trierarchi are still “undoubtedly” the same as centurions of the fleet, we are still told that the equites singulares “constituted a reserve and a training school for non-commissioned officers”, and the emperor Antoninus Pius still enjoys “a great reputation as a general”. None of these errors has been corrected.

Likewise, although he continues to scold those who “enjoy using Latin terms for any reason — and, naturally, most of the time for no reason at all — the precise meaning of which they do not know”, his own usage (which, as I charitably observed in my 1994 review, “occasionally lapses”) remains uncorrected.

The discussion of the three-element Roman name still includes the praenomen “Caius”, although (as I explained here) no such name ever existed. Readers are still (mis)informed that the trecenarius took his name from having commanded the 300 Praetorian speculatores. And the word vallum (“rampart”) is still translated as “palisade of timber”. More examples could be given.

But it is tedious to go through all of this again, and a little depressing.

To do list

Whatever is in the new edition of the book, I truly hope that any outdated bibliography has been excised. When the subject is soldiers’ epitaphs, we really shouldn’t be sent in search of Jean-Jacques Hatt’s 1951 book on La tombe Gallo-romaine or Jean-Marie Lassère’s mammoth 1973 paper in Antiquités africaines. There simply must be something more appropriate by now.

Le Bohec’s temptation to cite his own (rather specialized) 600-page tome on La Troisième Légion Auguste on the subject of dating inscriptions may be understandable. But perhaps the likes of Lawrence Keppie’s 1991 book Understanding Roman Inscriptions might better fit the bill?

We can only hope that the fourth edition will bring “a readable, informative and well-balanced work that will be of interest to scholars as well as general readers” (as one reviewer of the first edition rashly claimed).

The Rest is Controversial?

I am often preoccupied by the question of how we know what we know — and the related question of whether we might unwittingly be misled by an ill-informed source.

This came to mind today, as I was listening to a podcast recommended by my (non-archaeologist) son. It is called “The Roman Conquest of Britain: To the Ends of the Earth”, and forms part of The Rest Is History, in which historians Tom Holland and Dominic Sandbrook (according to the blurb) “interrogate the past and attempt to de-tangle the present”.

Their jolly approach to each topic makes the whole enterprise very entertaining.

On a more serious note, their methodology rests on the assumption that, for any given subject, there will be a body of agreed facts that have been handily gathered together in an easily accessible textbook. Can we trust that they have chosen the right book? Does this matter? Is there a danger that misconceptions might thereby be given a new lease of life amongst an unsuspecting audience?

This particular episode seeks to cover events in Britain from AD 69 until AD 84, a period that ought to be familiar to Romano-British archaeologists and historians (and let us be clear at the outset that neither presenter falls into either of these categories). It is also a period close to my heart, as aspects of it were discussed in my book Mons Graupius AD 83 (2010), and (long before that) in my undergraduate dissertation in 1983.

In assuming the role of “expert” for this episode, Holland relies on David Mattingly’s An Imperial Possession (2006), which at one point he describes as “a brilliant book”. (It is definitely an interesting take on the subject, and one that sticks in my mind for its repeated use of the quaint word “specie” where coinage would surely have sufficed, and also for its author’s refusal to provide the usual footnotes to signal where fact becomes theory.)

Rome and the Brigantes

Holland introduces the character of Cartimandua, pro-Roman queen of the Brigantes, whose wide territories encompassed northern England, from coast to coast. (In fact, we met her here last March.) Listeners are informed that she resided in “an extraordinary stronghold in north Yorkshire”, which (I feel) conveys the wrong impression of Stanwick. The great ramparts (see picture) which Holland mentions (“four miles long in length”) were surely a prestige project, as they would have been impossible to defend effectively.

Incidentally, full marks to Holland for presuming that Stanwick was Cartimandua’s capital, an identification that Historic England, as custodians of the site, still warily tiptoe around (but then, they also recommend Cartimandua: Queen of the Brigantes as further reading, a book that left me singularly unimpressed). For what it’s worth, Mattingly dodges the issue as well.

Holland then explains that “ten years earlier, Venutius and Cartimandua had had a massive bust-up”. (Venutius, by the way, was the queen’s consort.) In Holland’s words, “Cartimandua had kicked him out after he’d gone to war with her; the Romans had come to her rescue; but Venutius was still lurking there on the margins, keen to make a come-back”. For ten years? “And he’s all the more aggravated as Cartimandua has massively sassed Venutius by having an affair with his armour-bearer, a man called Vellocatus”.

Certainly the last bit happens to be true (as far as we know), but the entire falling-out was surely a matter of months, not years, and may (or may not) have been precipitated by the queen’s infidelity. There is no need to imagine Venutius going to war for some unspecified reason, and certainly not ten or twelve years earlier. Of course, Holland is not alone in accepting this bizarre sequence of events. He probably found it in Mattingly, but any one of the rival modern accounts carries the same unlikely narrative, up to and including Richard Hingley’s Conquering the Ocean (2022), which is the last Roman Britain textbook I read.

The reason for the confusion is that the Roman historian Tacitus — he is the sole source of information for these events — records the whole thing under AD 69 in his Histories (which he was writing around AD 105), and then gives a similar account, but with slightly different details, under the mid-50s in his Annals (which, confusingly, he wrote a decade or more later).

Few historians have bothered to question — or even investigate — this glaring coincidence.

The Annals account — written later, but describing an earlier period — relates Cartimandua’s role in surrendering the renegade Caratacus to the Romans in AD 51, and since Tacitus admits that he has briefly departed from his chronological scheme here, it is reasonable to assume that he simply wished to round off the Cartimandua episode by including the events of AD 69, which already appeared in the Histories.

This is basically Stephen Mitchell’s explanation, which he published in Liverpool Classical Monthly in 1978 and which I gratefully incorporated into my 1983 dissertation (and would still stand by today). It has the enormous benefit of removing that awkward decade-or-more of limbo to which Venutius is consigned, only to reappear as Cartimandua’s husband again, and fall out with her again, requiring the queen’s rescue by the Romans again. And I was gratified to see that the Tacitus scholar Herbert Benario at least noted (in the same year as my dissertation) that “it has been suggested that these two narratives refer to the same sequence of events, which are properly placed in the year 69”.

Coming back to the podcast, “Venutius is really furious”, Holland continues, “and he takes full advantage of the turmoil in AD 69 to have another crack at Cartimandua, to finish off his ex-wife”. Or, in my opinion, a first crack at her. So much for Cartimandua and the Brigantes.

Agricola

The second half of the podcast concerns Julius Agricola, the most famous governor of Britain and the subject of a biography by Tacitus, who happens to have been his son-in-law.

Holland’s discussion of this biography is very interesting, although I wouldn’t necessarily agree with Sandbrook’s summary of it, that “the mission which the emperor Vespasian has given him [is] the conquest of Caledonia”. After all, he was still sorting out the mess in northern England, and Vespasian (who died in June AD 79, right at the start of Agricola’s third season) may never have heard the news that Agricola had finally encountered new peoples in his drive north into present-day Scotland.

Holland is sure that the emperor Titus similarly shared this desire to conquer Scotland (although it is during Titus’ reign that Agricola calls a halt at the Forth–Clyde isthmus — even Mattingly concedes this). Be that as it may.

Incidentally, Holland’s suggestion that the name Caledonia means “hard men, hard land” (probably actually “rocky land”), and that the inhabitants are “orange-haired” (properly “reddish golden”, the same adjective used to describe the Golden Fleece), at least gives Sandbrook the opportunity to affect an amusing Glaswegian-style accent.

It all makes a jolly splendid chat, and we probably shouldn’t get too worked up by Holland’s shaky grasp of the archaeology (Inchtuthil, for example, is definitely not “the best preserved legionary fortress to be seen anywhere in the Roman empire” since it’s entirely buried underground).

Or his inaccurate but stirring version of the Battle of Mons Graupius as a two-day affair — “shennanigans with chariots zipping up and down”, and then, on the following day “the cavalry finish them off after the legions have cut them to pieces” (the legions famously took no part in the one-day battle).

The podcast format, of course, requires a more relaxed, informal discussion of history, but the original model, Melvyn Bragg’s In Our Time, ensured that the listeners received top-notch information by involving three knowledgeable academics in each episode. Of course, for the Roman conquest of northern Britain, there’s a very good book that any interested listeners can turn to!

A Spanish disquisition

In May 2024, quite out of the blue, I received a message from a Spanish researcher named José Antonio Magdalena Anda, offering me a copy of his 2022 book El emperador Galieno y la supervivencia del Imperio romano (“The emperor Gallienus and the survival of the Roman empire”).

The book duly arrived, a weighty tome of 482 pages based (apparently) on the author’s doctoral thesis submitted to the Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia in Spain.

I’m afraid that, sadly, Spanish is not one of my languages, and the book lay unread on my shelf. A year later, my own book about Gallienus appeared: Phantom Horsemen, a considerably slimmer volume than Señor Magdalena’s.

All of this came to mind today, when I discovered that Dr Magdalena had reviewed my book in the Spanish journal Studia Historica, Historia Antigua (Vol. 43, 2025).

An invaluable book

Dr Magdalena is broadly complimentary, favourable even. He uses words like “rigorous” (rigoroso) and “skilful” (hábilmente), and recognizes that Gallienus’ battle cavalry was based on “mere conjecture and a biased interpretation of the few available sources” (meras conjeturas con una interpretación sesgada de las pocas fuentes disponibles).

He concludes his three-page review with the verdict, el libro de Campbell constituye una muy valiosa aportación a los estudios historiográficos sobre Galieno (“Campbell’s book constitutes a very valuable contribution to the historiographical studies of Gallienus”).

He continues: La obra ofrece datos sólidos y argumentos convincentes para avanzar en la investigación histórica, por lo que considero su consulta imprescindible para los especialistas (“The work offers solid data and convincing arguments to advance historical research, which is why I consider it essential for specialists to consult”).

Essential reading? Who wouldn’t be happy with an endorsement like that?

And yet ... Dr Magdalena claims that I have made “certain omissions and glaring errors”. Let’s look at them.

The reform of the legionary command

Dr Magdalena’ criticism centres on the replacement of senatorial legionary legates (the legati legionis) with non-senatorial prefects (praefecti legionis) drawn from the equestrian order. This act was masterminded by Gallienus — so the story goes — and forms a major plank in his supposed military reforms. I have begged to differ.

It is, I think, an important part of my book. Gallienus has been credited, in modern scholarship, with five military reforms. My main purpose was to expose one of these as a fiction — the creation of a battle cavalry —, but the reader is entitled to know that all five are false. Dr Magdalena thinks, on the contrary, that I have gone beyond my remit; that my book has “lost its guiding thread”.

His complaint stems from my statement that, in 1883, the scholar Hermann Schiller cited three prefects supposedly put in charge of legions by Gallienus, and my observation that, to this day, only six such men are known. Dr Magdalena accuses me of “denying the very evidence of the change” (i.e. from legatus to praefectus), citing his own book as proof (but without any page reference — I think it might be the table on p. 280).

It would be instructive to look at those examples of men supposedly installed by Gallienus in pursuit of his alleged reforming agenda (“from 260 onwards”, says Dr Magdalena).

Third-century prefects

Schiller already gave us three men, starting with Valerius Marcellinus in AD 267, although his two other examples fell after Gallienus: Aurelius Superinus (under Gallienus’ successor, Claudius II), and Aelius Paternianus (some decades later, under Diocletian). I pointed out that he could have added Publius Aelius Aelianus (undated under Gallienus). Also Aurelius Frontinus (inscription pictured here), but he is another later example under Claudius II. The sixth man whom I mentioned is Aurelius Montanus, attested in the final months of Gallienus’ reign.

Dr Magdalena has a much longer list, running to seventeen items. From this evidence, he assures us that, under Gallienus, “the change began by affecting six legions stationed on the Danube front and in Africa”, and notes that they are “specifically the legions that remained under Gallienus’ control after the rebellion of Postumus”.

Readers might wonder how on earth I managed to miss seventeen of Gallienus’ legionary prefects. But all is not as it seems. The late Brian Dobson long ago observed that there was a habit, as early as the second century, of shortening the title of the post of praefectus castrorum (legionis) (“prefect of the (legionary) camp”, the legion’s senior equestrian officer) to praefectus legionis. For example, Marcus Porcius Iustus calls himself interchangeably by the two titles in CIL VIII 2587 and AE 1942–43, 37 (AD 180–181).

Several of these praefecti are known to us. One example is Marcus Cocceius Severus, who was promoted from primuspilus legionis VIIII Hispanae (“chief centurion of the Ninth Hispana legion”) to praefectus legionis X Geminae (“prefect of the Tenth Gemina legion”), demonstrating the normal advancement of senior centurions to the post of praefectus castrorum. A similar progression can be seen in the career inscription of Marcus Apicius Tiro, who was primuspilus legionis XXII Primigeniae then praefectus legionis XIII Geminae.

Another man, named simply Donatus, oversaw the completion of a building project at the legionary fortress of Potaissa in AD 257 or 258, during the joint reign of Valerian and Gallienus. Dr Magdalena presents him as the first of his seventeen equestrian legionary commanders. But he was most likely another praefectus castrorum, and cannot, in any case, represent a reform enacted (according to Dr Magdalena) in AD 260.

Also doomed to failure is his contention that the reform extended to the African legion, the Third Augusta, as this is based on a certain Aurelius Syrus, another man who is, in all likelihood, the legion’s praefectus castrorum. (Note that the inscription can only be dated broadly within Gallienus’ sole reign, and not “260–263” as claimed by Dr Magdalena.)

Turning to the others, it is difficult to say for certain, but Marcus Aurelius Dionisius, whose undated sarcophagus came to light in 2010 at the fortress of Aquincum, was probably another praefectus castrorum. Likewise Marcus Aurelius Veteranus, the praefectus legionis XIII G Galleniana who erected an altar to the health gods in deepest Dacia. Although Veteranus wasn’t sure how to spell his legion’s epithet (Gallieniana, “Gallienus’ own”), it at least dates him to some point within Gallienus’ sole reign (and not necessarily “260–262” as claimed by Dr Magdalena).

As for Titus Flavius Victor (Dr Magdalena calls him Victorinus), I deliberately omitted him because the inscription (CIL III 3426, now lost) is known only from a rather unclear sixteenth-century handwritten transcript (from which several letters must be missing). Although it appears to mention a prefect of the Second Adiutrix legion, it is undated (despite Dr Magdalena’s confident dating of “268–269”) and may be much later than Gallienus.

Permanent change or temporary measure?

So far, we have three prefects commanding legions very late in Gallienus’ reign — the three already mentioned in my book: Publius Aelius Aelianus, Valerius Marcellinus, and Aurelius Montanus — and another three who are later than Gallienus — again mentioned in my book: Aurelius Superinus, Aurelius Frontinus (unless he, too, was a praefectus castrorum), and Aelius Paternianus (inscription pictured here). That’s six. Dr Magdalena would like to throw in another four (named above) who, in all likelihood, were actually praefecti castrorum serving under a legatus legionis, and a fifth who remains problematic but is, in any case, likely to be much later than Gallienus. We’re still six short of Dr Magdalena’s seventeen.

Notice, incidentally, that his claim that Gallienus enacted his reform across the legions under his direct control crumbles to dust under this cursory inspection. On the contrary, it looks very much as I stated in my book, that the replacement of senatorial commanders by equestrians was desultory, temporary, ad hoc — a response to unforeseen circumstances, rather than a blanket policy — and certainly not a “military reform”.

It only remains to consider the other six men listed by Dr Magdalena. For one thing, they’re all later, much later, than Gallienus. One of them, Aurelius Victor, belongs to the First Pontica legion, created by Diocletian at some point in the period AD 284–288 and probably (like Severus’ Parthica legions) placed under the command of prefects from the start. It is likely that other legions under Diocletian were similarly placed under the command of praefecti. None of this proves, as Dr Magdalena claims, “the effective removal of senators from legionary command” by Gallienus!

In actual fact, the opposite case is all but proven by five of the six men whom I identified in my book. All of them are scrupulously specific that they are agens vice legati (“acting in place of the legate”). We may definitely draw two conclusions from this. Firstly, these prefects are keen to emphasize that they had been entrusted with additional responsibility, over and above the usual duties of a praefectus castrorum legionis. And secondly, they confirm that this role was usually entrusted to a legatus, in the normal course of events. We may legitimately infer, then, that the legate was absent or otherwise unavailable, necessitating the transfer of his role to the prefect. We may also infer that, once normality had been restored, the command would return to a legate.

This must have been the case right up to the accession of Diocletian in AD 284, since the last known praefectus legionis agens vice legati is Aelius Paternianus (mentioned in my book), who served under Carinus (inscription pictured above, where the emperor’s name has been defaced).

The last legionary legate

On a related point, it is often asserted that (in Dr Magdalena’s words) “the last senatorial legates are dated under Valerian and Gallienus”, providing the oft-quoted terminus of AD 260 for the alleged transfer of all legionary commands to equestrian praefecti.

The same point was made by Byron Waldron, in his recent review of Phantom Horsemen (in Classical Review Vol. 75), where he stated that “Davenport has shown that in the 260s Gallienus ceased to appoint tribuni laticlavii and legati legionis, preferring to appoint equestrians as praefecti legionis”. In support, Waldron cites a lengthy section of Caillan Davenport’s 2019 book A History of the Roman Equestrian Order, specifically pages 534–545, where it is claimed that “no senator is ever again attested as a legionary legate after the reign of Gallienus” (p. 536).

Notice that Davenport commits himself only to the period after the reign of Gallienus. And his discussion is, in any case, marred by his belief in Gallienus’ field army and his assumption that its equestrian officers were earmarked for rapid promotion. Here, it is sufficient to note that there was no field army, and thus, no special promotion of its officers.

Waldron seeks to rebut my thesis, that legati legionis could still be found after the reign of Gallienus, by discrediting the testimony of Aurelius Marcianus, which I cite in my book. This man’s heirs, who erected his tombstone — his wife, his nephew, and his colleagues —, knew that he was serving as stator legati legionis (“groom of the legionary legate”) when he died in AD 270 (long after the time of Gallienus).

Dr Waldron thinks that “the fact that Marcianus had been serving since 244/5 problematises the chronological significance of the title”. (In passing, we may note that Marcianus had not been serving since 244/5 — the inscription is unclear but seems to suggest 12 years’ service, which places his enlistment in AD 258.) But more importantly, Dr Waldron seems to want Marcianus to have been appointed to his post before the reign of Gallienus, and to have retained an outdated and incorrect title when the legate was allegedly removed and replaced with a prefect.

Dr Waldron appeals to the evidence of the Second Parthica Legion, which he describes as “always led by praefecti”. However, its commander under Severus Alexander describes himself as praefectus legionis vice legati (“prefect of the legion in place of the legate”), suggesting that this is another example of an ad hoc temporary measure. (Why would the commander of a legion that was “always led by praefecti” specify that he was deputizing for a legate?) Moreover, inscriptions from around the same time mention a stator legati legionis (“groom of the legionary legate”) and a librarius officii legati legionis (“scribe on the staff of the legionary legate”).

Dr Waldron’s claim is that men who had, once upon a time, been attached to a legate would continue to emphasize that attachment even after the legate had been replaced by a prefect. (Worse than that, men who had only ever been attached to a prefect, he suggests, would nevertheless call themselves the legate’s men.) It sounds far-fetched to me. On the contrary, none of this special pleading can alter the fact that, in AD 270, when Marcianus died, he was serving on the staff of a legionary legate. Not a praefectus legionis, but a legatus legionis. During the reign of Aurelian. So Gallienus had not banned them.

Nevertheless, Dr Magdalena is strictly correct when he writes that “the replacement of the legati by the praefecti is a fact proven epigraphically” — after all, it did happen eventually —, but it is perfectly clear that he is mistaken to date this event to the reign of Gallienus.

It is a pity that researchers are still constrained by their belief in Gallienus’ supposed ban on senatorial legates, since it informs their interpretation of the evidence. Any mention of the staff of a legatus legionis is blindly dated to the pre-Gallienic period, although it is clear that the terminus should actually be AD 284.