Inside the Roman Legions: The Soldier’s Experience 264–107 BCE

By Kathryn Milne

Takes the career of Spurius Ligustinus, detailed by the Roman historian Livy, as a focus, giving a very human and empathetic approachability to the author’s lucid and thorough analysis.

Inside the Roman Legions aims to tell the story of the Roman soldier through a holistic, empathetic examination of what the experience of military service in the Middle Republic was really like. It traces real examples of soldiers described in the ancient sources to reveal how they traveled, how they were organized and what campaign objectives they faced. Specifically, the author follows the ordinary soldier Spurius Ligustinus, whose life is related by the historian Livy, as an example, detailing the experiences of his career. The book begins by discussing the young future soldier’s background and what military values were conveyed to him through the prevailing culture of the time. It then follows him through a range of potential experiences, examining camp conditions and training with various types of weapons and armor, and proceeds to take the reader through the experience of fighting in a pitched battle step by step. It also addresses experiences that only some soldiers would have had, such as escaping a total defeat, deserting, or being subject to unusual punishments. Throughout, the focus of the book is on how the individual might be shaped by the experiences as they are described.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pen and Sword
• Release date: Jun 13, 2024
• ISBN: 9781399070676

Kathryn Milne

Dr Kathryn Milne was born and raised in Scotland but studied in the USA. She earned her PhD in Ancient History from the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia and was a Postdoctoral Associate in Military History at Cornell University. She taught ancient history for eight years at Wofford College in South Carolina. She has previously published work in various academic journals and contributed to scholarly edited volumes in her area of speciality, the military of the Roman Republic.

Book preview

Introduction

The main aim of this book is to explore the experience of military service in the Roman legions of the Middle Republic through the perspective of the ordinary soldier. In order to do this, we will follow the soldier in his journey through military service from his life and cultural environment as a Roman boy, through his recruitment and first military campaign, to his eventual discharge from the legions. The period of the Middle Republic offered a variety of different experiences depending on the times and campaigns in which a soldier fought, making it difficult to distinguish an average or typical soldier. The book therefore centres on one particular soldier, from whom we can extract a narrative of the progression of a real campaign with details like how he travelled there, the objectives of the operations in which he fought, and what the different military units were called to do on that campaign. This core example of a soldier’s experience is supplemented throughout by reference to soldiers who took different paths or served in significantly different circumstances at other times or in other places.

The soldier who forms the core of the narrative is a man named Spurius Ligustinus, whose military experience is detailed by the historian Livy. He may or may not have been a real person, a question which we will consider in detail when he is introduced in Chapter 1. His story has been chosen because we have good evidence for the period of time in which he served, and in particular for the first two campaigns in which he took part. This began in 200

BCE

with five years in Macedon and Greece, followed by a year in Spain, in the province of Hispania Citerior. These first years provide the most common experience of a Roman soldier of the era because the beginning of a soldier’s career and the first campaign was the part that was shared by all soldiers. It would have been a more common experience to be in the divisions of the velites and hastati, where young men served first than to rise to become a first centurion or to stay with the army long enough to serve in the division of oldest men, the triarii. In addition, the sources for these two campaigns are particularly good, since we have extant works of the historians Livy and Polybius covering all or some of this period and Plutarch’s biographies of the two generals who commanded the campaigns, among other sources. The general M. Porcius Cato, who commanded in Spain, was also an author. Parts of his works survive and his speeches and treatises were used as a source by other ancient writers.

The principal reason that there is not one typical soldier’s experience during this era is because there were three phases within it that represent different characters of warfare. The Middle Republic as a period is usually dated from 264

BCE

, the date of the beginning of the First Punic War. It is generally considered to extend to either 146

BCE

, the date of the sack of Carthage that closed the Third Punic War, or 133

BCE

, which is a date that marks a turning point in Roman political life. The first phase of warfare is the Punic Wars, which began with the Romans still fighting close to home and in a limited number of places further afield like Sicily, Spain and Africa. The Second Punic War involved the defence of Italy and saw Rome’s most dramatic losses. It is from this phase that we have the most evidence about what happened to soldiers in the case of defeats. The next phase is the period 200–168

BCE

, which is the period in which Ligustinus fought. This period was essentially expansionist and was one of the most rewarding periods to be a Roman soldier, especially in the lucrative campaigns in the East. The campaigns of this period were not defensive and soldiers spent much of their time engaged in the siege and takeover of cities in foreign provinces like Macedon and Spain. Lastly, there was the period of the wars mostly in Spain from the 160s to the 130s

BCE

, which were notoriously harsh and unpopular wars spent overcoming fierce and determined warrior tribes engaged in desperate defence of their land. It is clear that there were different motivations involved for those who repelled the invasion of Italy by the Carthaginians, and those who were sent as invaders themselves to strip land from others. Soldiers found the Spanish wars prolonged and unrewarding and, as a result, military service became an undesirable option. All three of these phases are part of the landscape of Mid-Republican warfare and an astute reader might notice that the greatest amount of literary evidence that is extant belongs to the first two, while the greatest part of the archaeological evidence belongs to the third.

The Sources

The author widely considered to be our best source for the Mid-Republican army is the Greek historian Polybius. Polybius was from Megalopolis in Greece, which in the second century

BCE

was part of an alliance known as the Achaean League. Polybius was very interested in military matters and had served as a cavalry commander for the League by the time that the Romans fought and won the Third Macedonian War in 168

BCE

. At that point he and a thousand other prominent statesmen of the League were sent to Rome as hostages, for assurance of the league’s good behaviour in that region. Polybius became friends with some of Rome’s most prominent aristocratic families of the time, many of whom were magistrates and commanded armies. In particular he describes in the Histories how he came to be friends with the statesman Scipio Aemilianus when the latter was around eighteen, after the two had a conversation while leaving the house of Scipio’s brother. This happened probably in the city of Rome in 166

BCE

.¹ Two decades later, Scipio took Polybius along with him when he was a general during the Third Punic War. Polybius saw Roman armies in action and mentions that he personally witnessed the forces of Scipio sack the city of Carthage in 146

BCE

.² Polybius has therefore always enjoyed a very good reputation for the reliability of his account, especially on military matters.

Polybius wrote his Histories not for the Romans themselves but an audience of educated Greeks, aiming to explain how Rome had come to dominate the Mediterranean region in a period of just fifty years. The start of this period is the Republic’s least promising moment, in 216

BCE

after defeat at the Battle of Cannae during the Second Punic War, when it seemed that destruction at the hands of the Carthaginians was all but ensured. Polybius wished to document the remarkable ascent of Rome from this terrifying low, through the slow climb back to eventual victory in the war, and finally to Rome’s domination of the Mediterranean, which was widely thought to have been accomplished by victory in the Third Macedonian war in 168

BCE

. As a key part of this story, in book six of the Histories Polybius wrote at length on the Roman military system as instrumental to Rome’s ability to endure. There is, however, one problem that is central to this account, which is that his description of the Roman army in book six does not accord well to his own time period. Most suspect in this regard is his account of the levy, which Polybius may not have witnessed himself. The levy as he describes it would work well if all Rome’s eligible soldiers were local, but implies long, superfluous travel for many soldiers in an era where citizens were spread all over Roman Italy. This has led some scholars to suspect that his account is not his own contemporary observation but derived from an earlier source, such as a handbook for tribunes or an earlier historian.³

One other note of caution about using Polybius as a source for the Roman armies of this time period is that he seems to have viewed a large swathe of Roman religious practices as mere superstition.⁴ At the beginning of book six he warns, ‘I am quite aware that to those who have been born and bred under the Roman Republic my account of it will seem somewhat imperfect owing to the omission of certain details’ (6.11.3). Many of these details were religious rituals that we will come across as we follow the soldier on campaign. The Romans used divination extensively to check for opposition to their actions from the gods. Later we will see that the period during which the army fought a battle was marked by religious ceremony both before and after. Polybius usually fails to mention acts of divination or sacrifice that would have been important to soldiers, although he states that he knows that such matters were both pervasive and important to the state as a whole (6.56.6–8).

The second main source for Mid-Republican warfare is the historian Livy. He wrote a history of Rome ab urbe condita, ‘from the foundation of the city’ at the end of the first century

BCE

at the time of the first Emperor Augustus. This was originally in over 140 books, but only 1–10 and 21–45 are extant. For the lost books, we have summaries of their contents known as the Periochae. Books 1–10 deal with early Rome up to 293

BCE

, and books 21–45 from the Second Punic War to 167

BCE

. The surviving books are not all of the same quality. While about a hundred manuscripts have survived for books 31–40, only a single one bears books 41–45, and where it is damaged or there are copying mistakes, it is very difficult to reconstruct.⁵

For about two thirds of the narrative in books 31–45, Livy has based his writing on the Histories of Polybius, especially for events in the East.⁶ It is harder to tell if he has done so for the period of the Punic Wars because the extant parts of Polybius’ narrative break off after the battle of Cannae in 216

BCE

. There were excellent sources available to Livy, however, including two writers who had served in the Second Punic War, Fabius Pictor and Cincius Alimentus, and two Greek authors who had accompanied the Carthaginian general Hannibal, Silenus and Sosylus. In all parts of the work he sometimes used the earlier historians Coelius Antipater, Valerius Antias and Claudius Quadrigarius. All of these works are now lost to us, but from the parts of the narrative where both Livy and Polybius’ work is extant, it is apparent that sometimes Livy embellished or exaggerated what he found there. This has made some scholars deeply suspicious of the historical reliability of some of his work, and it serves as a warning that we must always use his evidence with caution.⁷

One source used by Livy is of particular interest to us, and that is the dispatches or litterae, ‘letters’ sent by commanders from the field back to the Senate. Livy narrates an occasion in which these dispatches were received and read out in the Senate in 177

BCE

. Letters came in from two commanders, with one reporting that he had won a victory against two named tribes, citing the number of enemy killed, the location of the battle, the capture of the enemy camp, that he had burned the enemy arms as an offering to the god Vulcan, and that the soldiers had retired into winter quarters in the allied cities (41.12.4–6). In places in the narrative where the litterae are not specifically cited, their use as a source is suggested by Livy’s formulaic language.⁸ The very mundanity of these details is a good argument for their authenticity, for they are not literary tropes, and usually serve no purpose in the narrative except as historical record. Livy will thus often provide details of routine army activity that have been omitted by other ancient writers. In Chapter 7 these kinds of details are instrumental in examining when ordinary soldiers were in action and when they were left behind. Livy frequently specifies the location of sub-units of the legions, such as where garrisons were stationed in provincial towns or where the wounded were left when armies moved on. Behind these details are the stories of thousands of ordinary men whose wars looked a little different from the picture we would see if we only followed the largest body of the legion.

All of the sources for the campaign in Spain in the year 195–4

BCE

, Ligustinus’ second campaign, seem to have been influenced by the work of the commander himself, M. Porcius Cato, known also as the Elder Cato to distinguish him from a famous great-grandson. He was an author himself and wrote a work entitled De Agricultura (‘on Agriculture’) which has survived, but much of his other writing has been lost, including a handbook on military affairs that was the first such work in Latin. A number of his speeches were available in antiquity. Polybius may have used these works as a source, especially his military treatise, and Livy certainly used his account of his military campaign for the years 195 and 194.⁹ Some fragments of speeches and other works are used in this book directly.

A number of more minor sources are also referenced throughout the narrative. The Greek biographer Plutarch, who lived in the Roman Empire in the second century ce, wrote a biography of the commanders of the first two of Ligustinus’ campaigns, T. Quinctius Flamininus and the Elder Cato. Some references are from the works of the playwright Plautus, who was active in Rome in the early second century

BCE

. The fourth century CE writer Vegetius wrote a treatise on the military that is valuable because it refers often to the practices of the Romans of the Republic. Valerius Maximus was a compiler of exempla, or historical anecdotes, and noted in particular a number of stories about Roman discipline from this era. Appian is a Greek historian of the second century CE who wrote a history of Rome and is particularly useful for the campaigns in Spain. The last major source of information for the Mid-Republican army is not literary but archaeological, or what is now commonly called ‘material culture’. This is of interest particularly for the soldiers’ arms and armour and the Roman military camp. Real examples of equipment not only fill in details about dimensions and appearance, but allow for recreations that can answer difficult questions about its capabilities. The archaeological remains of army camps, most importantly the numerous camps around Numantia in Spain, give concrete examples of the model Roman camp described by Polybius.

Themes

The main theme of this book is to simply discover what happens when we turn our attention from leaders to followers, from large-scale politics to individual experiences, from the famous and the elite to the ordinary. This approach will highlight a number of themes that are worth introducing here.

Firstly, the real world of soldiers on the ground is a messy one. There are very few areas in which practice accords to any specific set of rules, let alone every time. Partly this is to do with gradual change, so for example, when discussing the techniques of wielding a sword, the evidence suggests that soldiers sometimes stabbed and sometimes slashed, and had different swords depending on the decade and circumstance. Soldiers in this era were conscripted, but at the same time it becomes clear that it was in the best interests of both soldiers and officers that there was a degree of self-selection to allow choice to those who wished to rush forward and those who wished to hang back. The basic unit of the army was the maniple, but sometimes the troops operated in cohorts. Polybius lays out the rules of the Roman camp with precise measurements, while the excavations of the camps at Numantia show that the Romans in real life simply did the best they could in order to accord with the terrain. When we come to questions where there is less evidence, such as how individual soldiers moved up and around divisions, or how promotion worked, the lesson from the lack of neatness elsewhere may well be that these things depended heavily on time and place and circumstance.

The importance of visual and oral culture

The ordinary soldier in the Roman Republic relied on both spoken words and visual signals for communication, with very little depending on something written down. This is what we would expect in a world where few outside of the elite could read and write, and it also means that these ways of communicating were more significant for Romans than for us. This began at home even before service, when exemplary tales of Roman military heroes and the stories of relatives started to prime the Roman boy for what would be expected of him. At recruitment, he would be required to take an oath of obedience to become a soldier, with the recitation of the oaths important both for announcing the terms or rules that were to apply as well as the verbal confirmation that the soldier accepted them. Equally important to oaths were witnesses, as men were needed who could independently verify that the oath had been taken by a particular individual. Through this action, the soldier’s comrades were implicated as future witnesses and even deterrents for moments when the soldier might contemplate breaking his oath. Words that were spoken aloud were also important for rituals, where the declaration of the result of divination, for example, was spoken out loud, and the commander was relied upon to announce that these things had been done.

At other times, visual signals were the primary means of conveying meaning. These were things like the movement of military standards that showed men the location of the front line on the battlefield, or the colour-coded system of flags that provided reference points for the soldiers to build their camp while on campaign. There were also less obvious sets of visual codes, like the correspondence between awards given for bravery in battle and the particular acts that they represented, which allowed soldiers to see a man’s decorations and know what he had done to earn them. Other types of symbols allowed the soldier to recognize the identity of individuals or groups, like the commander who wore a red military cloak, or division of velites marked by a piece of fur and the tall feathers on the helmet of a member of the hastati. In the wider context, the importance of visual and oral means of communication made the in-person attendance at ceremonies and events important too, as the communal nature of religious rituals and oaths helped to cement a sense of group identity.

Religion

Religion is another facet of Roman campaigns that was important to the soldier’s experience. Many modern works on the Roman army make the same editorial choice that Polybius made thousands of years ago and omit religious ceremonies completely or mention them only in passing. It should become evident, however, that elements of religious obligation contribute profoundly to areas that have been of greater interest to scholars, like the level of cohesion that a Republican army might be able to achieve. Religion was tied to community, in the sense that most religious rites were communal events. There were a number of religious obligations that formed part of conducting an army in this period.

Many facets of group identity were fostered in processes that were essentially religiously based. Oaths, for example, depended upon the individuals who took them respecting the same deities, who as supernatural beings were able to guarantee oaths by observing behaviour when no human was around to do so. Similarly, there was the lustratio, in which the commander asked the gods for protection and success before the army departed on campaign. As part of the lustratio the whole army was physically and ritually encircled, emphasizing the unity of the group inside the circle.

Class and Elitism

One inescapable problem of the literary sources for this period is that a huge gulf of class and wealth separated the ordinary Roman soldier from the wealthy and aristocratic elites. Those who engaged in literary and intellectual pursuits, like writing historical accounts, belonged to the latter class and their audiences did too. Many of these authors had little concern or liking for soldiers. Their views are from the top down, as they empathized with the commanders of the age in matters like how to manage a legion of soldiers or compel the unruly to obedience. The discrepancy in perspective between ordinary and elite is nowhere more vividly shown than in the rules, punishments and demands of the Roman military disciplinary system. The idea of a harsh and unforgiving discipline appealed greatly to many later authors, for whom the high standards served as a mark of exclusivity and distinction. As a result, many of the authors of our sources have greatly romanticized incidents of harsh discipline that would have seemed to those suffering them as arbitrary and unjust. The instances of the horrifying punishments cited, such as the fustuarium, in which the soldier’s comrades bludgeoned him to death, and decimation, in which one out of ten men in a unit was executed, are few and far between. Nevertheless, it seems that ordinary soldiers had little power over their circumstances once out on campaign, something which is especially evident in the disciplinary system.

Chapter 1

Mid-Republican Military Culture

Creating a Military Culture

The Roman boy who would become a soldier grew up in a culture in which military values were extremely important. Before he ever picked up a sword, the way that Roman armies, soldiers and wars were perceived and valued by those around him had already shaped his viewpoint and attitude towards his future endeavours. In order to understand what the soldier’s experience was really like, this chapter looks at his life and influences prior to army service and examines what a Roman youth of the Mid-Republican period was likely to know, and how he might have approached his service. Messages from all directions about how to conduct himself while in the legions would have allowed him to develop an understanding of what was required to succeed as a soldier of Rome. We will examine what kinds of actions, attitude and person were regarded positively, rewarded, and glorified, what behaviours were discouraged, and how messages about military values reached the future soldier. Boys living in the Roman and allied communities around Italy in the Middle Republic become eligible to serve in an army at the age of seventeen. Serving in the army was an entirely normal and expected life stage, not a one-time response to a particular conflict as it has been for citizen soldiers in modern times. A citizen militia was levied annually whether there was a current war or not. The potential soldier’s father and grandfather had served before him and he would expect any sons he had to serve after him, as well as older friends and local men in the community with whom his family traded, socialized, and celebrated religious festivals.

Although not all new recruits would have joined at exactly seventeen, the vast majority of tirones, ‘recruits’ or ‘novices’, would have become a soldier for the first time when they were young and unmarried. The Roman male would then go on to pass his remaining teenage years and his twenties serving in Rome’s campaigns abroad. This fitted into the patterns of Roman society, since unmarried men were the group whose absence could be borne best by both small landholdings and the agricultural economy as a whole.¹ Most of Rome’s soldiers came from families around Italy and the average recruit would have spent his early life on the land, growing up on a family farm. There was a property requirement for army service, but it was never very large, and so many of these farms would have operated on a subsistence level.² The childhood and youth of boys, therefore, would have been mainly engaged in helping with a farm’s labour, from the ploughing, hoeing, weeding and reaping of cereal production to the cultivation of beans and olives and the management of animals like oxen, sheep and goats.³ It was thought then, as it is often thought now, that the hard labour and sheer physical effort involved in farming produced hardy and enduring men and so forged the best soldiers.⁴

The amount of time that a soldier would spend on campaigns is difficult to pin down. Polybius recorded the number of years that a man was required to serve as a soldier in the second century, but the number has become corrupted in the surviving manuscripts of the Histories and may have been six, ten or sixteen.⁵ There are examples of legions dismissed after six years of service, perhaps in special circumstances, but also some left to languish in provinces for much longer. During the Punic Wars some soldiers certainly served for more than sixteen years. Despite Polybius’ statement that there was a rule, it was likely not a hard and fast one, perhaps adjusted according to circumstance. A lot may have depended upon when the soldier was first called to service and to which campaign he was originally attached, whether this was one where the legions were detained for an extended period abroad or a short period closer to home. Soldiers could be conscripted between the ages of 17 and 46, and we would expect them to spend an average of twelve to fourteen years in a succession of different legions.⁶

Usually our sources tell us that after their service, they would return to their villages and regions to become husbands and fathers. This was certainly not true for every soldier, but one of the most persistent themes in the ancient sources is the idea that military values were created and sustained in a cyclical way by veterans who brought home with them the memories, spoils and tokens of their military experiences. These became integrated into both the historical and contemporary culture of communities. The intention was that the veteran would return as a living, aspirational example of a soldier, who could promote the value of courage and successful service by means of any decorations he had earned for valour and the narratives that accompanied them. The positive values attached to military prowess had the clear and practical aim of encouraging the young to anticipate their own military careers and, from early in their lives, form ambitious ideas about how they would perform. The first military virtue, no less key to the Roman conception of the soldierly ideal than bravery, was a deep attachment to ancestral lands.

Spurius Ligustinus

The fundamental Roman connection between land and the military brings us to the example of one particular Mid-Republican soldier, whose experiences will help us to structure our examination of the typical experiences of soldiers of this era. His name is Spurius Ligustinus, and he is attested only once, by the historian Livy. He appears during the recruitment of two legions for a campaign in Macedonia in 171

BCE

to fight what would come to be named the Third Macedonian War. The consul of that year, Publius Licinius Crassus, was put in command of two legions that he would raise himself and take to Macedonia, and he received a special dispensation from the Senate to recruit veteran soldiers for his campaign.

The officers of this new army had the task of appointing volunteers to serve in various positions as they formed up the legions. A volunteer’s rank in a new legion would not necessarily be the same as he had held in his last army, and so a group of twenty-three men who had previously served in the highest rank of centurion, as primi pili or ‘first spear’ centurions, protested that they had been placed in too low a rank. The consul was asked what he wished to do. Licinius replied that he did not want to hamper the ability of his military tribunes to enrol any soldier in any manner that benefited the Republic. One of the centurions, hearing this, asked and was granted permission to speak.⁷

This is when we meet Spurius Ligustinus, who tells us that he is a veteran of twenty-two years. Despite his wealth of military experience, instead of beginning by declaring his martial talents, he begins his speech by describing his circumstances prior to joining the army in 200

BCE

. Ligustinus voices the idea that his previous home life and his relationship to his own land underpins his motivation for undertaking and persisting in military service:

I am Spurius Ligustinus, a Sabine by birth, a member of the Clustuminian tribe. My father left me a iugerum of land and a small cottage in which I was born and bred, and I am living there today. As soon as I came of age my father gave me to wife his brother’s daughter. She brought nothing with her but her personal freedom and her modesty, and together with these a fruitfulness which would have been enough even in a wealthy house. We have six sons and two daughters. Four of our sons wear the toga virilis, two the praetexta, and both the daughters are married.⁸

Ligustinus, we learn, has a strong patriotic commitment to his lands, which he has demonstrated in a lifelong attachment to his family home. Ligustinus’ wife is a reflection of his own character, poor in terms of money but rich in moral value. Her virtues, ones valued by Roman men, were her chastity at marriage and her fertility, providing many children, the majority of whom were boys, which is a reflection of typical Roman patriarchal values.⁹

The tribe and area from which Ligustinus comes are evocative of both typical Roman soldiers and ideal ones. He was not an urban Roman from the city of Rome, who, by the time that Livy wrote during the time of the Emperor Augustus, had gained a reputation for quarrelsomeness and were not recruited very often.¹⁰ Ligustinus was a Sabine.The Sabines had been, by legend, integrated into the Roman state at the time of Romulus, although historically Ligustinus’ tribe, the Clustumina, originated sometime between 426 and 396

BCE

.¹¹ The most common Sabine tribe was the Quirina, and in order to belong to the Clustumina, Ligustinus’ home town must have been Forum Novum.¹² This was a Roman settlement in Sabine territory, modern Vescovio, about 38 miles to Rome’s northeast. Ligustinus’ father’s iugerum of land was probably in this region rather than at Forum Novum itself, which, like many settlements named ‘forum’ had probably been created or taken over as a Roman centre of administration for the surrounding area.¹³

At the very end of the second century

BCE

when Ligustinus would have grown up, the region around Forum Novum was sparsely populated. Many of its inhabitants were in fact quite wealthy families, who had bought the land after the Roman conquest in the third century

BCE

, both ‘Romanized Sabines’ and Roman nobility seeking to take advantage of the rich agricultural land.¹⁴ The large villas that took over the area in the course of the second century, however, were probably not what Livy’s audience envisioned when they thought of a Sabine soldier. Sabine territory was famous for being rural and harsh, providing the backdrop for the kind of hard-working rural life that was thought to toughen men. The Sabines themselves were famous for living austere lives. The poet Horace writes that the soldiers who fought and won Rome’s third-century wars were of this tough stock, whom he calls ‘the masculine offspring of rural soldiers, taught to turn the clods with Sabine hoes.’¹⁵

Ligustinus’ glowing war record, which he goes on to detail, is exemplary as might be expected of such a background, but it takes more than this to create the perfect soldier. His idealness also rests in his willingness to perpetuate Rome’s military culture, to return to his farmland and to create the next generation of soldiers in his own tough image, and so his exemplarity begins with his attitude about the end of his service. Only by having the desire to return to his origins, and making it through service successfully enough to return, could he fulfil the whole cycle and make his experiences mould the world in which other males grew up.

It is unfortunate that we cannot say for certain whether or not Ligustinus really existed. It is possible that Livy, writing in the time of Augustus in the very late first century

BCE

, perhaps 150 years after this scene, might have consulted an earlier source which had preserved a genuine record of the speech.¹⁶ On the other hand, the story could be a rhetorical device, with Ligustinus invented out of whole cloth to serve as representation of the ideal Mid-Republican soldier.¹⁷ Or he may be a bit of both, a real soldier that Livy has embellished with some extra heroism. The advantage of following his story, despite this lack of certainty, is that it gives us an example to turn to for every stage of a soldier’s potential career. Every campaign in which Ligustinus says he fought was a real campaign, and every one of those campaigns involved a real soldier at the rank he claims to have held. Even if Ligustinus’ career as detailed in Livy might not truly reflect the experience of one man, it most certainly does contain within it the experiences of many real Roman soldiers.

We will continually return to Ligustinus’ career as we move through the Roman military experiences in sequence, from recruitment, through deployment, training, combat, and finally return. For now, we can observe that his introductory words illustrate the idea that the beginning of a soldier’s experience in the army was rooted in the end of the experiences of others. The individual gained societal esteem by sharing his story and so received a secondary benefit from it. He had been honoured in the army, and in being honoured again at home he became a perpetuator of military culture and a key part of a system of ennobling certain military actions.

Instilling Military Culture in the Young

In the modern world, most nation states maintain a permanent standing army which builds organizational continuity over time. Armies are entities, with tangible characteristics like physical buildings and permanent personnel distinguished by their uniform. While military culture can spread beyond the organization, it is largely centred on and stems from it, and so the study of military culture today distinguishes ‘organizational culture’ from ‘national culture.’¹⁸ The armies of the Roman Republic had no organizational continuity and maintained not even one permanent military building, and in fact, only had a real tangible existence at all as long as there were legions in the field. Roman armies were temporary citizen militia and there was widespread eligibility for service through the citizen and allied population. Roman military culture was not centred on a well-defined organization, as there was simply not one. It existed in a much more diffuse form across many aspects of the Roman daily experience. In other words, Roman military ‘organizational culture’ was inseparable from the wider context of Roman ‘national culture.’¹⁹

We are told that particular care was taken to educate young men about what behaviour would be appropriate and desirable while in military service. Examples of individuals and armies performing deeds that were judged positively were publicly rewarded and commemorated, in order to show young men the kinds of behaviours to which they ought to aspire. A major proponent and documenter of this theory of military exemplarity was the Greek historian Polybius. Just as we see in Livy’s account of Ligustinus, for Polybius, being attached to particular lands was an integral part of the motivation of Roman soldiers. He writes that unlike Carthage’s army, which was largely built of mercenaries, the Roman citizen soldiers fought for their own homes and lands. In Polybius’ estimation this gave them an edge, as with their homeland and children at stake, they could never give up.²⁰ The attachment to land, however, was more than this, because the soldier had to return to his homeland in order to reap the full rewards of success in the military for himself and to be an exemplar for others. Polybius outlined certain practices and traditions that he believed ‘encourage[d] the young soldier to face danger.’ He envisioned these practices as a kind of cycle, in which the awards given for certain deeds would make a man ‘famous in the army and at his own home’, and so the young would be inspired to face dangers in emulation of these deeds so that they, too, could enjoy fame and esteem.²¹ For Polybius, the Roman army’s tradition of awarding prizes and decorations to the brave was a kind of deliberate social engineering.²² We will come back to this as a set of actions that reflected individual desirable acts on the part of ordinary soldiers. First, though, we will look at his second example, the practice of exemplary storytelling.

Exemplary Narratives

As a means of cultivating