Authors: Stephen Dando-Collins
Tags: #Historical
Primus pilus
Literally the “first spear,” the most senior Captain
centurion of the legion, one of the
primi
ordines.
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Praefectus
Camp prefect. A former centurion, the
Major
castrorium
third-in-command of a legion, quartermaster, and officer in charge of major detachments
separated from the legion.
Tribunus
Tribune of the thin stripe, a staff officer, Lieutenant
angusticlavius
serving a six-month officer cadetship.
colonel
Navarchus
Commander of a warship in the Roman
Captain
navy.
(naval)
Praefectus
Commander of an auxiliary cohort or wing.
Colonel
Tribunus
Tribune of the broad stripe, second-in-
Colonel
laticlavius
command of a legion.
Praefectus
One of two commanders of the Praetorian
Colonel
praetoria
Guard, of equal rank. While, nominally,
Prefects of the Guard held the rank of
colonel, some rose through the ranks and
were former centurions, while others were
ex-generals, and on several occasions they
commanded field armies.
Praefectus classis
Commander of a squadron or a fleet in Admiral
the Roman navy. Frequently a former or
serving general, occasionally a freedman
with no military experience.
Legatus legionis
Legate of the legion. Legion commander.
Brigadier
general
Praetor/
A praetor was a senior magistrate in
Major general
propraetor
Rome. Former praetors—propraetors—
could hold the governorship of minor
provinces and command a legion and
armies in the field.
Consul/
A consul was the highest official in Rome
Lieutenant
proconsul
after the emperor. The two consuls for the
general
year shared the presidency of the Senate and gave their names to the year. Former consuls, proconsuls, could receive the most senior
provincial governorships, commanding all
military forces in their province. Roman
field armies were normally commanded by
men of consular rank.
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ROM AN MILITARY RANKS AND MODERN-DAY EQUIVALENTS
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The Roman Field Marshal or Five-Star General
Occasionally, emperors endowed generals of consular rank with special powers usually reserved for the emperor alone, on a temporary basis, for particular military operations. These powers made the generals involved senior to all other generals and officials in their sphere of operations, no matter what their seniority otherwise, and allowed them to lead troops across provincial boundaries. We would equate this special rank with a modern-day field marshal or five-star general. Agrippa, Tiberius, and Drusus would have been granted these powers by Augustus, Germanicus was under Augustus and then under Tiberius, Corbulo and Vespasian were under Nero, and Mucianus and Titus were under Vespasian.
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:
S o u r c e s
Primary Sources
Historians and historical writers are detectives. They seek evidence, they follow clues, they put 2 and 2 together, and hopefully they come up with a reasonably accurate picture of the people we have been and the events that have shaped the people we are.
Those dealing with Rome from the first century b.c. are fortunate to have a wealth of source material to refer to. That material takes two forms. There are inscriptions, most on monuments, slabs of stone that have lasted two thousand years of weather and war, some on slivers of bronze often unearthed in farmers’
fields in recent times. And, more numerous, the surviving writings of men who lived in the period and chronicled it—surely never imagining that two millennia later, people like ourselves would be reading their words.
The inscriptions tell us about the careers of men such as Gaius Mannius, legionary of the 20th Valeria Victrix Legion, from a village just outside Turin.
And Tiberius Maximus, the cavalry officer from Philippi who tracked down Dece-balus, the fleeing king of Dacia in a.d. 106 just as the Dacian put a knife to his own throat. And Gaius Minicius, the twenty-seven-year-old colonel from Aquileia thrust into the civil war in a.d. 69 in the service of Vespasian and soon to earn Rome’s highest bravery award.
The historical writings available to us are many and varied. Different classical authors writing of the same events often give different and sometimes differing information, so that Plutarch, Suetonius, and Dio, for example, each report the bloody demise of Emperor Vitellius a little differently. None was an eyewitness; each relied on other accounts to create his own. In the same way, no two reporters today will cover the same current event in exactly the same way. Each may choose to use different sources; each approaches the event from his or her own perspective.
Imagine an historian in a future time with the task of writing about a major news event that took place today. He or she will pull together all the different
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present-day reports and will then write a single account based on those reports. If they are fair-minded, they will endeavor to present the most balanced yet most informative view they can. So it goes for today’s historical writer.
The 10th Legion was probably the most written-about Roman legion of its day. It was certainly the most famous legion in the first centuries b.c. and a.d.
In the twenty-eight years of research preceding the two years of writing that went into this book, many contemporary and classical sources were consulted, and they are listed under “Additional Sources.” Some, such as Roman writers Seneca and Livy, provided valuable snippets. But, overall, this book is based on the works of the following, listed in order of relevance.
:
Julius Caesar.
Commentary on the Gallic War
and
Commentary on the Civil War.
Caesar wrote his memoirs, with the first book, dealing with his conquest of Gaul and covering the period 58–51 b.c., being published in his lifetime. He was still working on his account of the civil war, which leaves off after the Battle of Pharsalus, when he was murdered in 44 b.c. At the urging of Caesar’s private secretary, his former chief of staff Lucius Cornelius Balbus, these published and unpublished works were collated by Caesar’s loyal staff officer Aulus Hirtius shortly after the dictator’s death. Hirtius, promoted to general, would himself be dead within another year. Hirtius combined them with additional material, some which he wrote himself, the rest apparently penned by officers who had been on the scene for the last battles of the civil war, before they were published by Balbus.
Caesar’s own writings are in the third person, as if produced by an independent observer, and strive to paint him in the best light possible while denigrating his opponents. Despite the propagandist overtones, they still provide a fascinating insight into one of history’s greatest generals—and engineers—and his campaigns.
Most importantly to historians seeking data on the legions of Rome, Caesar regularly identifies the legions involved in his various campaigns and battles.
In the associated material, Hirtius strove to both emulate and praise his master, sometimes distorting the facts to paint Caesar’s adversary Pompey the Great in a bad light. Other authors, such as Plutarch, occasionally give us a truer picture, such as when Pompey loaned Caesar a legion in 52 b.c., without the approval of the Senate, when Caesar was in deep trouble in Gaul. Plutarch tells us Pompey was greatly criticized by the likes of Cato the Younger for helping Caesar like this, but you wouldn’t know it from Hirtius’s narrative.
Often, where there were passages in Caesar’s original text that depicted an error by Caesar, Hirtius—or possibly Balbus—simply cut it out. We know this because there are several instances where Caesar says “as mentioned before” or the like, and the before-mentioned material is missing. Fortunately, sufficient references were overlooked by the editors in their hasty edit for the truth to emerge.
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In their haste, too, the editors missed passages in the additional material that don’t exactly flatter Caesar, with a picture of an impatient and sometimes petty man emerging.
Another of Caesar’s loyal staff officers, Gaius Asinius Pollio, is quoted by Suetonius as writing that he felt Caesar’s memoirs showed signs of carelessness and inaccuracy. Pollio said that in his experience Caesar didn’t always check the truth of reports that came in and had been either disingenuous or forgetful in describing his own actions. But Cicero, also quoted by Suetonius, said that Caesar wrote admirably, composing his memoirs cleanly, directly, and gracefully. Cicero added that Caesar’s sole intention had been to supply historians with factual material, and that subsequently “several fools have been pleased to primp up his narrative for their own glorification.”
The fools in question would appear to be Hirtius and Balbus, and perhaps, like Cicero, we should be blaming them, not Caesar, for any distortions. As for myself, I have taken the middle view. The editors must certainly come in for criticism, but I suspect that, in addition, Caesar’s ego prevented him from being entirely honest in his writings, with himself as well as with his readers.
For all this, Caesar’s memoirs are still a lively and informative resource.
Among best of many translations:
The Commentaries of Caesar,
transl. W.
Duncan, Dodsley: London (1779);
Caesar: Commentaries on the Gallic and Civil
Wars,
transl. W. A. M’Devitte & W. S. Bohm, Bell: London (1890);
Caesar: The
Gallic War & The Civil War,
transl. T. Rice Holmes, Loeb series: London (1914–1955); also,
Caesar: The Conquest of Gaul,
transl. S. A. Handford (1951), rev. J. F.
Gardner (1967), Penguin: London; Caesar:
The Civil War,
transl. J. F. Gardner, Penguin: London (1967).
:
Plutarch
(a.d. 46–c.120). Plutarch was a Greek scholar who wrote in the reigns of Roman emperors Nerva, Trajan, and Hadrian. Shakespeare used his
Parallel Lives
as the basis for his plays
Julius Caesar
and
Antony and Cleopatra.
This, Plutarch’s great work, gives short comparative biographies of numerous historical figures and provides background material on key players in the history of the legions—Sulla, Marius, Lucullus, Sertorius, Cato the Younger, Crassus, Pompey the Great, Julius Caesar, Mark Antony, Brutus, Cassius, and emperors Galba and Otho.
Plutarch, who considered himself more biographer than historian, occasionally makes reference to his sources, most of which have not come down to us, such as Emphylus, a rhetorician and colleague of Caesar’s assassin Brutus, who, in Plutarch’s words, produced “a short but well-written history of the death of Caesar” entitled
Brutus,
an account that may have come from Brutus himself.
The author of hundreds of books and essays, Plutarch was well respected in his own day. Occasionally biased but only once in a while making a demonstrable error, he remains a valuable resource on people and events related to the legions.
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Recommended English translations: John Dryden’s
The Lives of the Noble Gre-cians and Romans,
publ. London, 1683–86, republ. 1952,
Encylopaedia Britannica,
Chicago; also J. & W. Lanhome’s 1875 transl.,
Plutarch’s Lives of Illustrious Men,
Chatto & Windus: London; B. Perrin’s Loeb series transl.,
Plutarch’s Lives,
London (1914–26).
:
Appian.
Born in about a.d. 95 at Alexandria, of Greek stock, Appian worked as an advocate in the courts at Rome and later served as a financial administrator in the provinces. In the middle of the second century he wrote a number of books on Roman history, of which his
Civil Wars
is the most helpful to writers interested in the legions. He is the least well regarded of the Greek historians of the Roman Empire, but for the historical events that took place between 133 and 70 b.c. he is considered the only continuous source of any quality. For the period from the foundation of the 10th Legion in 61 b.c. he is one of several sources. His work is at times disjointed, at others error-strewn. He sometimes also lapsed into what have been described as rhetorical flourishes, or just plain fiction. Despite this, Appian used many well-placed sources and provides a useful basis of comparison, particularly when his account can be considered alongside those of Plutarch, Suetonius, and Cassius Dio.
Recommended English translations:
Appian: Roman History,
transl. H. White (1889), rev. for Loeb series, I. Robinson: London (1913);
Appian: The Civil Wars,
transl. J. Carter, Penguin: London (1996).
:
Suetonius.
Biographer Gaius Suetonius Tranquillus was born in about a.d. 69, in the middle of the civil war that followed the demise of Nero. At the time, his father was serving in the army of the short-lived emperor Otho as a tribune, and probably second-in-command, with the 13th Gemina Legion. Suetonius went on to join the Roman civil service, rising to be briefly in charge of the government archives at Rome, which were closed to the public. For a year or two he worked at the Palatium as a correspondence secretary to the emperor Hadrian, but was fired for disrespect to the empress Sabina while Hadrian was away.