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Roman Resources

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a couple of academic articles -​
one from Classical Studies, 'tother from Medicine.​
What they have in common is a reminder that​
'we know less than we're tempted to think' we do about Crucifixion​
and other Roman/ ancient modes of execution -​
the conclusion of the first one is provocative,​
Crucifixion as we know it is an invention of the Church!​
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A couple of points.

First the Romans made extensive use of chain mail armor (hamata) as well as the more traditional portrayals (and it isn't that bad you guys. I've fought in it and worn it to renn fairs).

Secondly your main defense in a sword fight is your ability to move and NOT be where the enemy strikes at you. That's what gave the Republican/Empire heavy infantry such an advantage over most opponents. Not only was the tactical formation very flexible but the individual infantry man had sufficient room to maneuver. Unlike his opponents (phalanx, etal).

And thank you RR for reenforcing the point that I have made for years that a lot of the municipal work was done by local auxiliaries as the legions were too valuable (and for large parts of the Empire period not numerous enough) to be wasted away from the borders.

Cruxing was not a punishment limited to the Romans. The Greeks used it as did the Phoenicians and being those groups traveled extensively I'm sure the idea got around. So in your art (and yes I'm working on a couple of stories) don't restrict yourself to just Roman soldiers there were a lot of other thugs hanging around who could get the job done.

I suspect sometimes it was sloppily done. Think about it today. There are examples of botched hangings, firing squads and electric chair executions, no reason to assume executioners were any more proficient 2000 years ago. So for those of you who like bloody scenes, don't be afraid to go for the red.

kisses

willowfall

willowfall
 
I suspect sometimes it was sloppily done. Think about it today. There are examples of botched hangings, firing squads and electric chair executions- Willowfall

Tree hopes you are not referring to the recent mass crucifixions of the 'Great Slave Rebellion of 2013'. We are a small firm that bid high never expecting to be the only bidder on a mass crux...:oops:

T

...thee really aren't many competitors in this field...
 
very helpful Willowfall -
it's worth noting that the chain-mail found at Harzhorn
is dated 3rd century, showing that area (well east of the Rhine)
was still a war zone, long after the battles recorded by Tacitus et al.,
and 'Roman' troops were still wearing chain armour
(which wasn't necessarily saving their lives,
against barbarians on their home ground ;))​
 
At the time of the Battle of Teutoburg Forest (9CE), the Roman Legions were transitioning from mail (lorica hamata) to the Lorica Segmenta.The Roman Army had no objection to a soldier using armor & weapons handed down from their father or grandfather - provided it was in good repair - so there would have been many soldiers at the time still wearing mail. Also, Varus's army included 6 cohorts of auxiliary troops, who continued to wear mail or scale armor & 3 squads of cavalry. The Roman cavalry never wore the lorica segmenta which would have been brutal on horseback.

A Roman soldier - despite what you see in movies - avoided one on one sword fights. The gladius hispaniensis was was really too short for that. His main defence was the shield (scutum) linked together in battle formation. Body armor was only to protect against arrows, javelins & any spear point that past the shield.
 
willowfall said:
A couple of points.

.....

willowfall
Click to expand...

Naraku said:
At the time of the Battle of Teutoburg Forest (9CE), the Roman Legions were transitioning from mail (lorica hamata) to the Lorica Segmenta.

A Roman soldier - despite what you see in movies - avoided one on one sword fights.
Click to expand...

Thanks Willowfall for the points you raised, I did mean to get back to you sooner. Naraku also once again thank you for your in put.

As to the Lorica Segmatae, it's use even within the legions never seems to have become universal. While Rome seems to have developed several centres of production across the Empire it was never even close to the kind of industrialisation that modern commentators take for granted. Segmented armour seems to have been an effort to gain the protective qualities of plate without using expensive bronze which contrary to popular opinion, including mine for many years, was actually stronger than existing grades of iron for centuries to come.

It was always expensive, being both time consuming to produce and it had to be produced by craftsmen and difficult to keep in good repair. Hence after the Third Century AD as central logistic support declined it went out of fashion.

Chain-mail is likewise not exactly easy to produce but it is easier to do than any form of plate. Modern re-enactors frequently use wire coat hangers as their source of iron wire :D Properly cut and pinned or abutted it does give a fairly decent level of protection though smiths who produced the real deal for military purposes likely used better grade metal.

Now as to the point of formation raised by Willowfall and Naraku. The Romans benefited from adopting a fairly unique formation. According to available source the Romans seem to have realised that in order to move a large body of men in close order you actually needed to leave roughly man size gaps between each man.

The phalanx and the shield wall formations that you see in most cultures of the same and later periods were ideal for low skilled and erratically trained militia. Yet the Romans (who started with militia armies recall) adopted a formation that could only have required the utmost discipline and drilling to maintain.

The famous scutum shield may have contributed to this. In the examples found the arrangement of the hand grips is unusual compared to most forms of shield as it would position the arm down the length of the shield. Now this might be a reaction to the fact that Roman style scuta weigh in the region of 10 kilos or 22 pounds but it would have been awkward to use facing the enemy in an open fight. On the other hand in close formation the level of protection provided to yourself and to a lesser extent those around you, is massive.

By and large throughout history most armies do not appear to have interpenetrated as seen on TV and film but used some kind formation even if only the mob of goons with the bravest at the front in actual contact with the enemy and more folks pushing up behind so they could not run away and actually had to fight.

The Romans just worked out the best way to get their mobs into contact with the foe. At that point the gladius comes into its own being perfect for lethal stabbing strokes in a confined space.

The auxiliary infantry mostly seem to have used the same general tactics as the legions but with slightly different weapons though we have to be careful in assuming degrees of difference because the archaeological record is not conclusive and the written sources even less so.
 
As a complete innocent in these matters,
wouldn't a spear be the weapon of choice for a foot-soldier
rather than a sword?
A 2' - 3' long sword, however splendid
wouldn't be a lot of use against an attacker with a 6' long spear?​
 
Eulalia said:
A 2' - 3' long sword, however splendid
wouldn't be a lot of use against an attacker with a 6' long spear?​
Click to expand...

Well the thing about a sword is it is dangerous to the hilt, the spear loses a lot of its potency once an opponent has passed the point. This makes a sword a lot more effective as an individual weapon but you would think that spears might be more useful in a formation fight.

And to a certain extent it is and why stop with a 6' spear when you can use a 16' sarissa...after all it was good enough for Alexander the Great surely it will see off those pesky Romans! Such was the primary weapon of King Pyrrhus' Army and numerous other Hellenistic armies that challenged Rome up until Pompey squashed Mithridates VI of Pontus.

The problem was that after a few initial victories in which phalanxes rolled over Roman legionaries to their front the Romans found that if they could only flank them while otherwise engaged the result was a massacre as the gladius did its close in thing. The Battle of Pydna being just one example of this happening.
 
The biggest problem with the phalanx was it's inflexability. The Romans came up with a system of three loose ranks with gaps in the line. At the begining of the battle, the first rank would hurl their pila (javelins) at the enemy then retreat through the gaps to the rear. The front rank would then close with the enemy. The commanders would rotate the ranks so that the front didn't become exhausted. Thus: Rank A mets the enemy & engages for a time, Rank B then moves up & Rank A falls back to the rear, Rank C moves up to replace Rank B who fall back to the rear, Rank A - now rested - moves up to replace Rank C & so on. The long spears used in a phalanx would have made such rotation imposible - Macedonian spears of Alexander's time were about 12 feet long. Using the gladius, which is a short stabbing sword, sacrificed long reach for mobility. The looser formation allowed to soldiers to form a solid line or a square for defence or form a wedge to breakthrough the enemy lines.

The pilum was brilliant weapon. It was about 2 meters long, but, unlike other javelins, at the tip was a 60 cm (24") long shank of soft iron ending in a hardened pyramid tip. The tip could penitrated shields & armor. But, if it penetrated a shield, the shank would bend, making it difficult to extract & rendering the shield virtually useless.
 
Tree installed a few after the 'Great Slave Rebellion of 2013' has yet to be a successful strike on my forests...

T
phalanx.jpg
 
Naraku said:
The biggest problem with the phalanx was it's inflexability. The Romans came up with a system of three loose ranks with gaps in the line.
Click to expand...

I think what you are describing is the triple acies which was the primary formation/tactical system used by the Romans at the time it was recorded by the Greek historian Polybius (possibly Polly Perkins with a fake beard ;))

It was not so much a system of ranks as of units, the legions at that time were divided into pairs of centuries (which awkwardly did not number one hundred men) called maniples, hence the modern usage manipular legion to describe the formations of this period. Normally each legion of Roman citizens would have attached an ala of the citizens of 'allied' city states though because Roman writers tend to forget them when handing out the glory so do a lot of modern historians. Still the ala are significant as they provided about half the infantry and maybe three quarters of the cavalry.

Interestingly in the system as described by Polybius the triarii or elite veterans retained their spears though the other grades of legionary used the pila and gladius combination we are most familiar with and the velites relied on lighter javelins making them roughly equivalent to Hellenistic peltasts though other weapons such as slings and bows are referenced so someone was using them.

The big problem with the manipular legion was coordinating so many different units and thus under the 'Marian reforms' which may have been a lot of people's ideas but Marius gets the credit, the legion was reorganised into ten cohorts which are previously referenced as a sub-division of the ala of unknown size but may have been the contingent from a discreet city.

Even into the Principate the triple acies remained a popular formation with the cohorts most often arranged with four in front and three in each of the subsequent ranks (assuming the legion was present in full strength this not always being the case).

Just a final note on centuries. Hastati and Principes were recruited in centuries of sixty men, Triarii in centuries of thirty men, under the Marian system centuries were of eighty men each until a reform some time in the Principate which saw at least some first cohorts of legions reorganised as five double centuries of one hundred and sixty men.
 
Writing 'Rome's Revenge' has made me think about the logistics of dealing with large numbers of captives after a Roman victory, e.g. transporting entire populations (at least several thousands) into slavery, as Julius Caesar claims to have done, or taking them to be paraded through the streets of Rome in Triumphs.

I've been intentionally vague about Roman military organisation in that story, writing from the point of view of a barbarian girl who wouldn't have known the proper terms for officers, military units, etc. But I'd be interested in learned contributions on the question of 'legions on the move'. As well as hundreds of footsloggers, some cavalry, and a good many specialists (smiths, cooks etc.), there must have been huge baggage trains, probably many camp-followers of various types, and, as I say, captives. Do history, archaeology, or re-enactments throw any light on how this side of military life was organised, e.g. how were prisoners controlled (slave-chains with linked collars?), how were they fed, watered, bedded (in more senses than one, if they were attractive ;)) on the move?
 
To Eul's point in movies they never showed the logistical support but even in 'modern' warfare, Patton thought he could have beaten the Russians to Berlin if he could have kept his tanks fueled (they get about zero miles per gallon) and part of the reason in gulf war I they did not go to Baghdad was they were waiting for fuel and public sentiment changed when they saw the highway of death.

In gulf war II they had helicopters ferrying huge bladders of fuel so the tanks could keep moving...

if you care...

T
 
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