Authors: Stephen Dando-Collins
Tags: #Historical
A few years later, Cicero took two new Italian-raised legions to Cilicia when he became governor there in 51 b.c. They, too, may have had names, but none that is recorded. When Pompey the Great took them over in 49 b.c., these two units were simply known as the Cilician Legions, because they were based in Cilicia. Pompey’s father-in-law, Metellus Scipio, commanded two Italian-raised legions based in Syria at this time, survivors of Carrhae, and in the same way they were known as the Syrian Legions.
Between 49 and 48 b.c. Caesar created nineteen new legions for use in the civil war against Pompey, numbering them 17 through 35. After he defeated Pompey at the Battle of Pharsalus, he took two cohorts of one of Pompey’s surrendered legions, the 6th, into his army, and had his officers seek volunteers from Pompey’s other legions, giving the resulting two new legions created from POWs the numbers 36 and 37.
By 31 b.c., after Caesar’s assassination on the Ides of March, 44 b.c., and the new civil wars that followed, at least fifty-nine legions were in the field—some accounts suggest as many as sixty-two—most with their Pompeian and Caesarean numbers.
Once Octavian had defeated Antony and Cleopatra in 31 b.c. he inherited all fifty-nine legions, most of them well understrength after years of fighting.
Augustus reduced these to twenty-eight, abolishing some of the old legions, or sometimes combining two legions into one.
When Pompey the Great combined men from two so-called Cilician legions in 49 b.c., he named the resulting single legion the Gemina, meaning “twin.”
Several legions folded into each other by Augustus in 31–30 b.c. also took the name Gemina. Two Augustan Gemina legions were still in existence in a.d. 233—the 13th Gemina and the 14th Gemina Martia Victrix. The Gemina tradition was to be continued by later emperors—a legion created in a.d. 68, the second 10th, became the 10th Gemina two years later via combination with another. In the same way, Galba’s 7th, also founded in a.d. 68, was likewise combined with another legion in a.d. 70, to become the 7th Gemina.
Four legions created in the changes of 31–30 b.c.—the 14th Gemina, the 20th Valeria, the 21st Rapax, and the 22nd Deiotariana—bore titles as well numbers from that time. This was because Augustus gave the old Martia Legion, one of the most celebrated of its day, the number 20 when he discharged the Italian bapp04.qxd 12/6/01 9:24 AM Page 283
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legionaries of the 20th in 31 b.c. and allowed the legion to keep its famous old name in addition to its new number. Likewise, the equally famous Valeria Legion, raised by Pompey, took the number 20. That legion’s second title, Victrix, was added a few years later. And when the Galatian legion called the Deiotariana was given the number 22, it also retained its title, until the reign of Claudius, in deference to the memory of King Deiotarus of Galatia, the legion’s founder. The 21st Rapax also seems to have taken a pre-30 b.c. title with it.
Early in his reign, Augustus bestowed titles on legions as a reward, or to celebrate their land of origin, no doubt an honor and a reward to the province concerned. Later emperors granted titles to legions for varying reasons. Some, like the 15th, were never granted a title, despite having played important roles in major campaigns. And the 12th Legion wasn’t granted its title of Fulminata until a.d. 174.
There was one blip in the Augustan numbering system. After three legions were wiped out in Germany in a.d. 9, Augustus retired their numbers. One, we know, was the 19th. There are good reasons to believe that the others were the 25th and the 26th. Augustus never replaced the annihilated legions and never used their numbers again, a step respected by every subsequent Roman emperor, none of whom used the numbers retired by Augustus, even though many of them raised new legions. For the next twenty-five years the Roman army consisted of twenty-five legions, still bearing the numbers 1 through 28 but minus 19, 25, and 26.
Nero raised a new legion in Italy, the 1st Italica, in a.d. 66–67, setting the scene for the overuse of the number 1 in coming years. In a.d. 68, Nero created the 1st Legion of the Fleet as one of his last, desperate acts as emperor. That same year, Servius Galba, Governor of Farther Spain, built an army to challenge Nero.
Galba levied new legions in the traditional recruiting grounds of established Spanish legions. Within a few months he had created second the 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, and 10th Legions in Spain.
There was a logic of a kind to his system, but the numbering of some subsequent new legions applied a logic all their own. For example, in a.d. 68, the city of Vienne in southern France created a 1st Adiutrix Legion to “support” the 1st Italica Legion, which was stationed nearby, to prove the town’s loyalty and to discourage the 1st Italica from sacking their city. When the 1st Adiutrix subsequently fought on the losing side, the people of Vienne hurriedly raised a 2nd Adiutrix to prove their loyalty to the new emperor—the original 2nd, the Augusta, was also raised in their province, hence the duplication of its number, as a “supporter” to the original 2nd.
The 3rd Gallica Legion takes its name and number from the fact that it was the third new legion raised in Gaul at that time, after the 1st Adiutrix and the 2nd Adiutrix. There are in fact explanations for the numbering of all but one of the many legions created in 68–69. The exception is the 3rd Cyrenaica. There is no obvious reason for the new legion raised in Cyrenaica to be yet another 3rd Legion. It is possible that Syrian veterans of the 3rd Augusta Legion discharged bapp04.qxd 12/6/01 9:24 AM Page 284
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eight years before had settled in Cyrenaica and formed the basis of the new legion hurriedly recruited in a.d. 68, but there is no proof of this.
Vespasian consolidated the army once he came to power at the end of a.d. 69, abolishing some of these new legions created during the civil war and merging others, in the first major reorganization of the Roman army since the time of Augustus. Occasionally Vespasian’s successors raised new legions, and almost always they chose to keep the numbers they allocated these new units within the bottom end of the existing number range, so that we find several new legions taking the numerals 1, 2, or 3 over the next 150 years.
The reasoning behind the numbering of these later legions varies. Domitian raised one legion and called it his 1st—the 1st Minervia, named after his patron deity. Severus Alexander founded the 1st, 2nd, and 3rd Parthicae Legions for operations against the Parthians. Marcus Aurelius raised two new legions in Italy, so they naturally became the 2nd and 3rd Italica, since Nero had raised the 1st Italica.
Yet Trajan complicated matters with the numbers he gave the four new legions he raised in a.d. 100 for his campaigns in Dacia. Only two of the these lasted into the third century—the 2nd Traiana and the 30th Ulpia, both named after Trajan. Their numeration means there were also at one time a 1st Traiana and a 29th Ulpia Legion.
A full listing of the legions of the late first century b.c. to the early second century a.d. is given in Appendix A.
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T h e T i t l e “ F r e t e n s i s ”
It has been suggested that the 10th Legion carried the title “Fretensis” while serving in Judea. No classical author confirms this. The 10th Legion, famous in its heyday, is the most referred-to legion in all the classical histories, yet never once does the meticulous first-century historian Tacitus or any other writer of the classical period give the legion a title of any kind. Tacitus in particular is cited because he made a habit of giving both the titles and the numbers of legions, unlike some classical writers. And when Cassius Dio listed all the legions in existence in his day, in about a.d. 233, he made a point of giving the official titles, present and past, of every legion. Although the 10th Gemina, a different legion, is mentioned, no title is ascribed to the 10th.
This does not necessarily mean that the 10th did not perhaps carry the name Fretensis as a sort of unofficial nickname, used by its own men but not by offi-cialdom. Official or unofficial, does the Fretensis title stand up to examination?
The word Fretensis is said to come from
fretum Siciliense
and means “of the Straits of Sicily”—the modern Strait of Messina. For a legion to carry such a title is, to say the least, odd. The titles that other legions bore—and not all imperial legions carried titles as well as numbers—came via four routes. It was the title the legion carried with it in 30 b.c. from the civil war and was retained by Octavian; or it took the Gemina title because of combination with another; or it was granted a title in imperial times either in recognition of its valor or loyalty or both; or, less often, it took its title in recognition of its place of origin.
In terms of both its origin and its ongoing recruiting, the 10th Legion had no known connection with the Strait of Messina. The 10th Legion originated in Spain, and all evidence points to it being recruited there continuously until its recruiting ground was changed to northern Turkey in the second century. The 10th Legion is believed to have served in the Middle East throughout the imperial era, going nowhere near the Strait of Messina.
Yet, a possible explanation can be conjured for the Fretensis title, suggested by a tile found in Palestine in the twentieth century that bore the inscription
“LEG X F.” A galley was depicted above the inscription, a boar below. The 10th Legion’s symbol is thought to have been the bull, and that of the 6th Ferrata,
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which joined it in Judea in the second century, the boar. But assuming for a moment that the 10th’s symbol was the boar, consider the following scenario.
In 38 b.c. Octavian, ruling the western part of the empire from Rome, was locked in conflict with Sextus Pompey, Pompey the Great’s youngest son, who had occupied Sicily with substantial land and naval forces. At this time, all evidence points to the 10th Legion being based in the East, serving Mark Antony, who ruled Rome’s eastern possessions. Octavian launched a series of campaigns against young Pompey, suffering several naval defeats, one in the Strait of Messina from which Octavian only just escaped with his life. Two years later, Octavian’s admiral Marcus Agrippa would finally defeat Pompey in a naval battle off Mylae, on the northeastern coast of Sicily but some distance from the Strait of Messina.
It is possible that the 10th Legion was embarked on vessels of Octavian’s several fleets in 38 b.c., playing a particularly valorous part in this ship-to-ship fighting, and was granted the right to carry the galley symbol in the same way Julius Caesar granted the 5th Legion the elephant symbol after Thapsus. Following this defeat, Octavian swapped twenty thousand of his legionaries for 120 of Antony’s warships to cover his own naval losses, and perhaps in this way the 10th found its way back into Antony’s army, having served him a decade earlier, and where it remained until Actium.
Going against this theory is the following. First, while legions were in later times occasionally granted titles in celebration of their parts in one battle or another, it was in celebration of a victory, not a defeat. Further, before about 25 b.c. no titles were granted to legions that were already identified by a number, that we know of. After Octavian was himself granted the title Augustus by the Senate in 27 b.c., it appears he began the habit of entitling legions by soon giving titles to the seven legions that eventually won the Cantabrian War of 29–19 b.c.
for him. As for the 38 b.c. sea battles in the Straits of Messina, Appian, who gives a very detailed account of these campaigns and names several legions involved, including the 1st and the 13th, makes absolutely no reference to the 10th in any context, let alone describes a performance that would earn the legion distinctions. Yet it is Appian who tells us of the 5th Legion’s distinctions as a result of its part in the victory at Thapsus in 46 b.c.
For all this, the 10th Legion may have been known colloquially as the Fretensis. There is simply no evidence to support a suggestion that this was an official title.
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I m pe r i a l R om a n M i l i ta ry
R a n k s a n d T h e i r M ode r n - Day E q u i va l e n ts
(in order of precedence)
Rank
Description
Equivalent
Miles classicus
A soldier in the Roman navy’s marine corps.
Marine
Miles gregarius
Literally, a “common soldier” of the legion.
Private
Signifer
Standard-bearer for legion cohort and
Corporal
maniple. No real authority. Unit banker.
Aquilifer
Eagle-bearer of the legion. Most prestigious Corporal
post for a standard-bearer.
Tesserarius
Orderly sergeant; sergeant of the guard.
Sergeant
Optio
Second-in-command of a century and of
Sergeant major
a cavalry squadron. Unit training,
administration, and records officer.
Decurio
Decurion. Cavalry officer, commanding a
Second
squadron of legion cavalry. Several grades,
lieutenant
based on length of service.
Centurio
Centurion. Officer commanding a century,
First
maniple, and cohort. Sixty to a legion
lieutenant
(including six
primi ordines
). Eleven grades, including
primi ordines
and
primus pilus
.
Seniority usually determined by length
of service.
Primi ordines
Six most senior centurions of a legion, all
Captain
serving in the first, double cohort.