Free A Brief History of the Private Lives of the Roman Emperors by Anthony Blond

to ride – not very
effectively because they had no saddles or stirrups – and allocated six tribunes to each legion to serve as aides-de-camp rather than as commanders. A well-connected young officer – and
only exceptional men like Marius got anywhere if they were not – would be taken up by the general, perhaps an old boyfriend of his aunt, and mess with him and then be appointed colonel of a
regiment of auxiliaries. These were the third prong in the Roman military system – the Praetorian Guard and the legions being the first two – and were equal in number, but not prestige,
to the legions.
    Auxiliaries were what we might call ‘colonial’ troops, recruited in the provinces, sent elsewhere, less well paid, longer serving, but ending up with citizenship and a vote for
themselves and their family, a more generous dispensation thanthat afforded to, say, the Gurkhas, who fought for the British in two world wars. (In 1991 when so many English
and Scottish regiments were reduced or abolished it was suggested that the Foreign Office compensate these fierce little fellows, who had had to be restrained from presenting their British
commanding officers with the genitalia of their enemies in the trenches of the Somme.) As we know, the Roman soldier was essentially a heavy infantryman and the functions of cavalrymen, archers and
slingers were often performed by auxilaries. It was all part of the ‘artful system’ of the ‘artful founder’, phrases used by Gibbon three times in describing the remodelling
of the army by Augustus. He realized that local affiliations could be dangerous, so Gauls served in Spain and Macedonia and Spaniards served in Britain and Judaea. So Romanized was Gaul that no
legions were needed there.
    Mobility within the Empire was one of its greatest achievements. The Roman roads were so good that Harold was able to march (down Ermine Street) from Yorkshire to Hastings in three days. British
roads, on the other hand, were so bad that George III, having once been overturned, never in his long reign ventured further north than York.
    Long distances therefore were no bother to the Roman army, so cohorts – they were never called legions – of auxiliaries, often using their own tribal weapons and sometimes with
special skills, like the slingers from the Balearics, the horsemen from Numidia (Algeria) and the archers from Crete, could be moved readily around the Roman world. They were always commanded by
Roman tribunes or prefects, were supposed to understand orders in Latin and could eventually benefit from the perks of the Roman legionary. The eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Englishmen,
steeped at Eton and Winchester in Roman history – did not one cable the Foreign Office from India,
peccavi
(‘I have Sind’)?– copied the
‘artful’ system of Augustus. William Pitt, in inventing the Highland regiments, was following a Roman precedent.
    The discipline of the Roman army was legendary, retailed with relish and approval by nineteenth-century historians echoing their Roman predecessors Livy and Polybius. Most famous, or infamous,
was the punishment of decimation, whereby one in every ten soldiers in an offending cohort was chosen by lot to be clubbed or stoned to death by soldiers from another cohort. In fact it
didn’t happen very often and hardly at all in the Empire, though Octavian had employed it in the Dalmatian War of 34 BC . (He was not, as we shall see, a very nice
man.) Caligula, of course, tried to inflict decimation but his orders were ignored. Flogging was a more usual punishment and, for larger bodies of men, the substitution of barley for wheat in the
diet; this latter, with a reduction of share of booty, was the favoured punishment of Julius Caesar. A modern German historian propounds the view ‘that mutiny and insubordination were
surprisingly prevalent in the Roman army . . . that the Roman legionary arrogated to himself an independence of thought and action