Life in the Roman army

Earlier this year, from February until June 2024, the British Museum hosted an exhibition entitled “Legion: life in the Roman army”. (Tickets were priced at £22.) Richard Abdy, curator of Roman and Iron Age coins at the museum, has written a 300-page book to accompany it (available in hardback from the British Museum book shop for £40).

It seems a little odd for the project to have been entrusted to someone who describes himself as “peripheral to Roman army studies”. However, it presents an interesting opportunity to see how good a job has been done by those people who would describe themselves as “central to Roman army studies” in communicating their knowledge to Mr Abdy.

He credits, amongst others, David Breeze and Simon James for having “hacked through various drafts of the entire book”, while others “provided enthusiastic support and advice” or “valuable advice and insight”. Has this support network proved successful?

At the outset, we should give Abdy credit for his writing style. He can turn a good sentence and has an ear for a pithy phrase (Trajan’s Column and the Marcus Column are “frozen filmstrips of Rome”, Lucius Verus is “the hairiest of those hairy Antonines”, and the Roman army is a “citizenship machine”, though this last one rests on Le Bohec’s observation that “l’armée a fonctionné comme une machine à fabriquer des citoyens romains”). But readable prose doesn’t guarantee sound content. In short, Abdy lacks authority.

Real soldiers

It is an intriguing conceit, to attempt to wrap a discussion of “life in the Roman army” around the lives of two Roman soldiers from Egypt (Apion and Claudius Terentianus), but ultimately unsustainable, given the paucity of evidence. After introducing the two characters, they recur only sporadically. That’s natural, given that only two letters from Apion survive (BGU II, 423 and 632), and ten letters from Terentianus, five in Latin and five in Greek, in a cache (the so-called “archive of Claudius Tiberianus”) discovered at Tebtunis (P. Mich. VIII, 467–471 and 476–480).

Readers cannot know this, because of Abdy’s peculiar reticence, here and elsewhere, to cite primary evidence. This is perhaps a symptom of having drawn facts from secondary publications (Le Bohec’s L’armée romaine sous le haut-empire, cited in its 1994 English translation, is a favourite, but he also leans on David Breeze’s slim The Roman Army volume) rather than (apparently) studying the sources at first-hand.

Some readers may find it useful to know that fig. 1.2 on p. 28 (“Letter of Apion. Egyptian Museum of Berlin, P. 7950”) is BGU II, 423. At least fig. 1.20 (p. 46) is labelled P. Mich. VIII, 468, but there is no indication that this is the famous letter in which Terentianus asks his father to send him caligae cori subtalares (“under-the-heel leather sandal-boots”) and udones (“socks”), which might usefully have been cross-referenced to the paragraph on footwear on p. 167.

Curiously, Abdy claims (on p. 53) that “Terentianus expected to wear out two pairs of shoes a month”, but the Latin in P. Mich. VIII, 468 is not at all clear. (Does Terentianus actually wear calcei, “shoes”, twice a month, and would prefer to have hard-wearing caligae, the soldiers’ hob-nailed sandal-boots?) Equally, his throwaway comment about Terentianus’ “felt socks” (p. 66) requires explanation; the poet Martial, for one, seems to think that socks were normally woollen (Epigrams XIV, 140). Incidentally, for all clothing-related matters, Graham Sumner’s Roman Military Dress (2009) is unaccountably absent from Abdy’s bibliography.

Real pay

It is quite clear that many men will have enlisted in order to benefit from food and board and regular pay. Abdy, as a coin specialist, is naturally attracted to the last of these. However, his frame of reference is a peculiar one. It seems overly simplistic to accept that “The Bible suggests that a fair day’s wage for a day’s fair labour was a denarius” (p. 21), even with the caveat that the vineyard work in question was “sporadic and seasonal”, since evidence from Egypt consistently shows that day-labourers made do with closer to a sestertius (one-quarter of a denarius) per day, and might expect to work, at most, 250 days per year. This casts the auxiliary soldier’s 1,000 sestertii per year in a different light. Compare the foundation charter of the colony of Urso in southern Spain, which set down annual salaries for each magistrate’s staff, including 300 sestertii for clerks and 400 for messengers, and 1,200 for an educated scribe (ILS 6087, section 62). This (more effectively, I think) puts the contemporary legionary pay of 1,200 sestertii into perspective.

For Abdy, the veteran legionary was a man of means, since he was “eligible for a retirement lump sum worth around a decade’s pay” (p. 260), a fact that he illustrates with the Didcot hoard (not known to have belonged to a soldier, it should be noted). Readers need to have a good memory, though, for the evidence was given over a hundred pages earlier, where we read that “an ordinary legionary received a praemia (discharge bonus) of 3,000 denarii” (p. 128, based on Cassius Dio, Roman History LV, 23.1).

Illustrated artefacts

The book is lavishly illustrated in colour on heavy-grade paper. There is a picture of everything from the exhibition, and much else besides. Coins feature prominently, from the museum’s own collection, and casts of Trajan’s Column (provided by the National Museum of Romanian History in Bucharest), identified by Cichorius’ scene numbers. A map has been specially prepared, showing “the Roman Empire at its greatest extent, c. AD 117” (though its greatest extent was actually eighty years later under Septimius Severus); confusingly, both Hadrian’s Wall and the Antonine Wall (neither of which existed in AD 117) are included, and boldface numerals represent the number of legions in each province “c. AD 200” (i.e. under Septimius Severus). Why not just map the Roman empire in AD 200? (Incidentally, I noticed an odd no-man’s-land at the junction of Cappadocia, Assyria, and Syria.)

The main strength of the exhibition, in my opinion, was the opportunity to see the various items face-to-face. For example, the wooden “practice post” from Carlisle, often depicted in discussions of Roman military training, is disconcertingly large (broken at the base, it still stands a shade over 5 feet tall with a one-foot-diameter disc at the top, surely representing a human assailant), while the diplomas (I counted four on display) are beautifully delicate. (The training post is figure 1.28 on p. 52, and only one diploma has all four sides illustrated as figure 0.5 on p. 21.)

It is difficult to gain a sense of scale from the book illustrations, although dimensions are given in the captions. For example, the sheer size of the well-known Carvoran modius or grain measure cannot be appreciated from the printed image (fig. 8.2, occupying half of p. 247), although the caption states that it stands 28.6cm tall. By contrast, the turricula or dice tower found at Vettweiss-Froitzheim seems enormous in fig. 7.13, which occupies the whole of p. 219, although shorter than the grain measure, at 25cm.

These latter two items perfectly encapsulate the ecclecticism of the exhibition, since neither (like the Didcot hoard, above) is particularly military and couldn’t really be said to represent “life in the Roman army”. It is almost as if the curator has taken the opportunity to assemble as many eye-catching items as possible. Certainly, it’s difficult to justify the inclusion of the crocodile-skin outfit from Manfalut in Egypt, here labelled as “armour or religious costume” (fig. 5.4 on p. 150). Surely no self-respecting Roman soldier would ever have worn such outlandish gear.

Some random idiosyncracies

A two-page timeline lists key dates, beginning with 27 BC (“Augustus founds the Roman principate (empire)”), though AD 142 is probably too late for Antoninus Pius ordering the advance into Scotland, and “c. AD 180–192” for Roman marines slaughtering the Colosseum crowd (for 12 years?) is surely mistaken! Abdy has decided to draw matters to a close in AD 238, with the death of Maximinus Thrax (“the first ‘soldier emperor’”), though the army he discusses continued in existence until the reforms of Diocletian and Constantine.

If a timeline is of questionable utility in a book about “life in the Roman army”, so too is a list of “Rulers of the Roman empire”, in which most emperors (not all) are labelled as having had an “offensive military reign” (Augustus, Claudius, Nerva (!), Trajan, Septimius Severus) or a “defensive military reign” (Marcus Aurelius and Lucius Verus), or having had a “military career before accession” (Tiberius, Vespasian, Titus, Hadrian) or “military activities widely criticised” (Domitian, Caracalla, Maximinus Thrax).

The five-page glossary (pp. 282–286) is oddly unbalanced and doubles as a who’s-who. We learn about Arminius, Arrian, Julius Civilis, Julius Caesar, Marius, and the writers Galen, Josephus, Juvenal, Pliny (Elder and Younger), Suetonius, Tacitus, and Vegetius. “Apion, son of Epimachos, also known as Antonius Maximus (b. c. AD 130s)” merits an 11-line description, and “Terentianus / Claudius Terentianus (AD 90s–after c. AD 136)” thirteen lines, but these are Abdy’s main characters. Couldn’t the descriptions have been given in the text? After all, the index shows that Apion recurs on pages 20–21, 26, 34–37, 48–49, 67, and 98. Similarly, Terentianus recurs on pages 19, 21, 46–47, 60, 66, 109, 186, 221, 222, 258, and 260. Is that not sufficient? (In this connection, it is surprising that Abdy doesn’t actually quote any of the correspondence that tells us so much about his two protagonists.)

The glossary also includes definitions of the Augustan, Flavian, Antonine, and Severan periods, along with the “First Jewish Revolt” and “Second Jewish Revolt”. There is a handful of geographical terms (Batavians, Dacia, Misenum, Parthia, and Sarmatians — could these not have been shown on the map?), the main coin denominations (aureus, denarius, sestertius — the as and dupondius are not mentioned), and some basic English (cuirass and governor!).

Some random misunderstandings

While browsing, I jotted down some questionable facts. Caesar was responsible for the establishment of named legions long before Augustus (p. 16). It is a misnomer to characterize military diplomas as “military retirement diplomas”, as this was not their function (p. 19 and elsewhere). The term numerus does not imply “a unit even lower in status than the auxiliary cohorts” (p. 58) — the elite equites singulares Augusti were a numerus. Hamian archers are not “Arabian” (p. 140). And it is not particularly helpful for Abdy to refer to hard-to-find publications (such as the companion volume to the 2021 Nero exhibition) rather than to the primary sources themselves (e.g. p. 143 for Nero depicted as cavalry commander).

All in all, I wonder if it might not have been a better idea simply to issue a standard exhibition catalogue?