Collections: Phalanx's Twilight, Legion's Triump, Part IIb: Handfuls of Maniples

Bret Devereaux

February 16

This is the second part of the second part ~~of the second part~~ of our four part look at the great third and second century BC contest between the Romans and the heirs of Alexander, asking the question, "What can defeat a Macedonian sarisa-phalanx?" Last time, we started looking at the Romans with an in-depth look at the Roman tactical system. This week, we're going to slide up the systems of military analysis, looking at the operational and strategic advantages the Romans also enjoyed, in addition to their tactical edge.

Now I think at the beginning it is worth saying something about 'edges' and 'advantages.' As Clausewitz famously noteswar is the "play of chance and probabilities" - an unpredictable creature by nature. As a result, it is rare for any one advantage to be truly decisive in every possible case. Generals, armies and soldiers can and do get wildly lucky or wildly unlucky, though I would argue that at some point 'repeated luck' is, in fact, skill. And the Romans certainly have 'repeated luck,' edging out Hellenistic armies (and everyone else) over and over and over again with a consistency that begins to suggest something rather more than luck (as, indeed, the ancient historian Polybius spends his entire history arguing).

Instead, what I would suggest is that the Romans have a series of advantages, of 'edges,' any one of which might not be enough to ensure their eventual victory, but the compounding effect of which is to make Roman success extremely likely in most conditions. We've covered the tactical system, its attritional focus and how that might give Roman armies an 'edge' in winning battles. Now we're going to look at Roman logistics, operational art, as well as Roman strategic depth and how these pile up more 'edges' for the Romans on top of that tactical advantage.

Suddenly it isn't enough to just get lucky once and defeat a Roman army: rather one must get lucky many times - Hannibal and Pyrrhus, at least, show us the number is greater than three times - in order to secure forward momentum against the Romans. Meanwhile, the Romans are often just one victory away from resetting the game in their favor.

But first, as always, if you want to broaden the ever expanding recruitment base and manpower advantage of ACOUP, you can share this essay and others and if you want to support the growing economic-military resources of ACOUP, you can contribute your tributum by supporting the project on Patreon. If you want updates whenever a new post appears, you can click below for email updates or follow me on twitter (@BretDevereaux) for updates as to new posts as well as my occasional ancient history, foreign policy or military history musings, assuming there is still a Twitter by the time this post goes live.

Legionary Logistics

We'll start with my favorite topic: logistics! The Roman reputation for logistical excellence was well-earned and it gave the Romans the ability to operate larger forces in more distant theaters, as well as to maneuver more freely. The impact on logistics on the ability of armies to maneuver over long distances is often unappreciated, but marching speeds and routes of march are often dictated by the ability of an army to support itself on those routes - better logistics means faster armies (in an operational sense) and greater freedom to maneuver (again, operationally).

Fortunately, we've discussed the basics of pre-industrial logistics quite extensively. For ancient armies, logistics was mostly a question of food supply, with water as a secondary issue because for the most part water logistics are so difficult that armies simply couldn't go anywhere a local supply of water wasn't available.

Now it is important not to oversell the Romans here: they had to operate under the same general logistical constraints (the tyranny of the wagon equation) as everyone else. It's hard to say if Roman logistics were more than marginally better than the logistics of a Hellenistic army; certainly, Roman logistics in the Middle Republic were radically better than, say, polis logistics in the classical period, but then so were Hellenistic logistics. Improving on polis logistics isn't hard, most polis armies were frankly logistically primitive. Still, the Romans seem to have had a mild, but significant, logistical edge on their opponents, able to operate armies at greater logistical reach and keep them in the field year-round (Roman warfare stopped being seasonal relatively earlier, some time in the fourth century at least), as well as having mastered the coordination of logistics between disparate theaters. Roman commanders regularly and casually did the sorts of things that for other logistical systems might require more exceptional leaders.

We can start with rations. Direct comparison here is difficult because we don't have attestation for standard rations for Hellenistic armies and the smattering of reported rations figures we have are often in exceptional circumstances like armies in sieges or captured prisoners, whereas Polybius (6.39.13) gives us the standard Roman wheat rations (but excludes non-wheat rations). It's very clear that the wheat rations listed by Polybius (6.39.13) would have been supplemented with meat, dairy, vegetables, fruit and so on under normal circumstances and efforts have been made to compose a 'typical' Roman ration package; the evidence to do the same for Hellenistic armies or indeed any other ancient army doesn't really exist. However, one thing we can note right off: the grain in our sources for Roman armies is always wheat grain, whereas a lot of rations for Greek armies (classical and later) are in cheaper barley, an immediate suggestion that Roman rations may have been unusually ample. If Roth is right about the rest of the Roman rations package (though uncertainty here is significant), it also would seem that Roman soldiers tended to get a larger slice of their nutrition from things that aren't grain as well - relatively more meat, vegetables and dairy. Certainly it is the case, as Roth notes, that while Roman soldiers complain loudly and often, one perennial soldier's complaint, about insufficient or insufferable food, does not appear in our sources.

Photo by R.B. Ulrich, detail of scene CX on the Column of Trajan (c. 110 AD) where Roman soldiers harvest grain near a camp under construction. This is quite a bit later than the period we're discussing in our sources, but the way we see Roman armies work in Principate isn't all that different from how armies worked in the Middle Republic and this capability is attested in the sources in the third and second centuries BC too.

The supply situation of the army in turn was managed by the quaestor, overseen by the Roman magistrate commanding the army with imperium (generally a consul), with some of the nuts and bolts evidently handled by military tribunes. Because of the way the Roman career path works, functionally all Roman generals will have had extensive experience handling logistics before being given command of an army, while of course the Roman quaestores will all have served in the army, probably as military tribunes (who handle foraging). Consequently, Roman generals tend to be very good at handling the basic workmanlike demands of logistics - it is vanishingly rare to hear of Roman armies outrunning their logistical tethers or otherwise getting into catastrophic food difficulties. That isn't a flashy kind of command skill, but it matters.

In short, the quaestor seems to have handled the basic questions of storage, book-keeping and ration allotment. For the sake of keeping his life simple, the socii received their rations (by and large, same as the Romans) as a 'free gift' of the Roman state, while Roman soldiers had the value of their rations deducted from their pay, something that Polybius notes (6.39.12-14) for the army of the republic and which the Romans still do in the imperial period (we see it in papyrus evidence). This is in stark contrast to the system in many Hellenistic armies, where soldier pay included an extra ration allowance (called variably, σιτος, σιτομετρία, σιτώνιον, or σιταρχία), seemingly on the assumption that soldiers having to buy food from outside the army or state's central stores was a regular occurrence. By contrast it was a trope of good Roman commanders to limit or even ban this sorts of purchases and instead to run their army's logistics entirely out of central stores (e.g. App. Hisp. 85; critiques for allowing soldiers to buy food, Sall. Iug. 44.5, Tac. Hist. 2.88).

Where did the food come from? Foraging and local contributions would have been the main source, with foraging operations generally overseen by the military tribunes, though we hear of almost every position of authority within a Roman army leading foraging expeditions at least once. The great advantage the Roman army had in this was that it could accomplish the entire grain-processing system internally: soldiers carried sickles and threshing tools (threshing was done in the camp, for safety) as well as hand-cranked mills for grinding the grain (probably carried on mules, they're quite heavy, around 27kg). Soldiers were then responsible for baking their own bread; the Romans also had a hardtack like biscuit called bucellatum which kept better and might be stockpiled before longer operations. Consequently, a Roman army moving across hostile countryside could convert fields of ripe grain into supplies all on their own, while a Roman army moving in friendly territory could purchase (or requisition) raw grain and process it internally, rather than having to rely on civilian mills or bakeries. It's not clear if Hellenistic armies would have had all the same capabilities - they do seem to have had handmills, so they might have, but food allowances to soldiers may suggest that they didn't always do so.

Supplementing this were grain transfers between theaters, overseen by the Senate. Livy' gives us some insight into this and's habit of relating (annually) the assignment of Roman magistrates and senatorial legates gives us considerable viability into this from 218 to 167 (when our preserved text of Livy breaks off). Once Roman armies are operating outside of Italy, the transfer of bulk grain by sea to active areas of operations were frequent. We hear of grain sent from Etruria in northern Italy to Tarentum in Southern Italy in 212 (Livy 25.15.4-5, 27.3.9), to Roman armies in Greece from Africa in the Second Macedonian War (200-197, Livy 39.19.2-4; note also 32.27.2), from Africa for Roman operations against the Seleucids (Livy 36.3-4), setting up a supply depot for shipments on Chios (Livy 37.27.1). Sicilian grain, especially, seems to have been used to regularly supplement Roman supplies basically everywhere (Livy 36.2.12-13, 37.2.11-12, 37.50.10-11, 42.31.8-9). That logistical system was in turn enabled by Roman command of the sea, which Rome achieves in the First Punic War (264-241) and never lets go of, shutting down whatever navy any opposing state might have quickly so that Rome could move troops and supplies overseas.

The result was that Roman armies enjoyed at least logistical parity - often logistical advantages - even when operating far away from their home territories. By contrast, Rome's Hellenistic enemies were, apart from Pyrrhus, incapable of projecting force into Italy proper in part due to the logistical constraints. Meanwhile, for Pyrrhus (and later Hannibal), operating in Italy was made more difficult by the fact that the Romans would use logistics as a capable weapon. Roman logistics thus gave them an operational edge: the ability to choose in most conflicts where the war would be fought; unsurprisingly, they generally chose to fight it in the home territory of their enemies - where Roman victories would have maximum impact and setbacks minimum implications.

Materiel Matters

Now you may have already noticed, that logistics capability is in turn dependent on quite a lot of equipment: you need handmills, sickles, threshing tools and cooking gear and quite a bit of it, probably in each small unit. We don't know how many sickles (Latin falces) the Romans might bring for an army, but we do know the handmills seem to have been assigned to the contubernium, a 'tent group' of six or eight soldiers well-attested for the imperial period. We don't have attestation for that unit directly until Cicero (who uses contubernales to refer to his 'tent mates' both literally and metaphorically) but I strongly suspect it existed earlier. In any case, one recovered imperial-period handmill recovered from Saalburg was inscribed as "con[tubernium] Brittonis." Combined with the normal assumption (albeit an uncertain one) that each contubernium had its own mule to carry the tent, it would make a lot of sense.

But this fits into a larger pattern: Roman warfare was a materiel-intensive pattern of war (material or matériel meaning all of the military equipment - tools, weapons, armor, munitions, etc. - beyond food and manpower that an army needs). Put another way, Roman armies were stuff heavy. Often we can't quite quantify that (or can't easily compare what we can to what other, less well attested armies did), but we have our sources - particularly, I may note, Greek language sources - regularly marveling at, for instance, regular Roman field fortification (Polyb. 18.18.8, Plut. Pyrrh. 16.4, Livy 31.34.8, Josephus BJ 3.76-84) or the heavy loads of kit Romans carried (Josephus BJ 3.95, Veg. Mil. 1.19).

And here I must note now that I am, in fact, writing my book on this very facet of the Roman army, but this must be a brief summary of a few major points.

We can start with non-combat equipment: the Romans carried a lot of it. Josephus reports of a Roman army that the soldiers each carried, "a saw, a basket, a pick-axe [the multi-purpose dolabra, discussed in a moment], a leather strap, a sickle, a took and three days provisions" when in the march (Josephus BJ 3.95) in addition to their arms, armor, clothing and other gear. To which we can add their tents (carried by contubernium, perhaps on the mule) and entrenching stakes (pila muralia) used to fortify the camp (Polyb. 18.18.3-8). The queen of this assemblage is without a doubt the Roman's trusty dolabra, a multi-purpose pickaxe common in Italy which could double as a digging tool, an entrenching shovel, a demolition tool and so on. Frontinus notes that one Roman commander, Domitius Corbulo, was in the habit of saying that it was with the dolabra that one defeated the enemy (Front. Strat 4.7.2). Of course in addition to that, we know Roman soldiers also carried cooking gear, perhaps individually or perhaps by contubernium - mess-tins, water-cans, pots, waterskins, cups and so on are all well enough attested.

A lot of these tools relate back to the Roman habit of entrenching, a habit that Polybius returns to with some awe at multiple points - evidently Roman fastidiousness on this point was remarkable even for a relatively seasoned Greek military-man in the mid-second century (Polyb. 6.42 and 18.24). The Romans built a fortified marching camp every night on campaign; we've described its defenses already. Notably, they tended to build these out in the flat and open while on the move, rather than seeking locations which would require less work to protect; Polybius openly contrasts this to Greeks who "shun the hardship of entrenching" (Polyb. 6.42.2). Of course all of that required the legion to move with a lot of extra material, both the tools to assemble the camp, but also the raw materials to do so; the legions actually moved their palisade stakes with them.

Via Wikipedia, remains of one of the Roman forts used in the siege of Masada (72-3AD). We can track some changes in the structure of Roman marching and siege camps over the years related to organizational changes in the Roman army, but in general features, Roman siege camps even of the early imperial period match what we see from the republic at sites like Numantia. On this, see M. Dobson, The Army of the Roman Republic: The Second Century BC, Polybius and the Camps at Numantia, Spain (2008)

On top of all of that non-combat gear, Roman soldiers were also uncommonly heavily armed and armored. On the one hand, a Roman army has a much higher percentage of armored heavy infantry than functionally any opponent it might face. The legion's infantry component is, after all, about 71% heavy infantry, a shockingly high figure. By comparison, at Raphia, the Seleucid army's infantry is only about 50% heavy infantry, while the Ptolemaic army's infantry complement comes very close at about 68%, but of course doing that required the exceptional integration of large numbers of Egyptian troops into the phalanx.

On the other hand, Roman heavy infantry were heavier than just about any opponent they might face. On the weapons side, a pair of pila require a lot of iron for the long shanks and so are both heavy and expensive (more so, for instance, than a simple Mediterranean omni-spear). And on the defensive side, the Romans were the beneficiaries of an Italian armor tradition that it seems had been trending towards an emphasis on wide-spread metal body protection for some time. Heavier Greek armor forms and helmets persist in Italy longer, as far as we can tell, than they do in Greece, while the Etruscans do thinks like adopt the Greek tube-and-yoke cuirass and then cover it with metal scales.

Pulling together artwork from the so-called Altar of Domitius Ahenobarbus (left) and the Great Tomb at Lefkadia (right) to contrast the armor we see on Romans (left) and Macedonians (right) in this period. Neither is badly armored, by ancient standards, but the Roman's mail armor is both more expensive, allows for greater mobility (it is more flexible) and offers superior protection. There is a reason the Roman-style armor persists through the Middle Ages, whereas the Hellenistic armor is abandoned after this period.

The Roman helmet of this period, the redoubtable Montefortino-type helmet, remains distinctively heavier than Hellenistic helmets (in a wide variety of types). Hellenistic helmets in this period tend to range from around 700-1,250g or so, whereas early third century Roman Montefortino-type helmets tend to be around 2kg (once you account for cheek-pieces), dropping to around 1.5kg in the mid-third century and roughly holding that mass through most of the second century (doubtless a reprieve to many Roman necks). Meanwhile the Roman expectation seems to have been that all of the heavy infantry wore metal body armor, either the humble pectoral or the much heavier and more robust mail lorica hamata (Polyb 6.23.14). The latter armor steadily replaces the former through the second century; Polybius, writing in the mid-second century is our last attestation for the pectoral and related armor types.

Via the British Museum (inv. 1873,0820.226), a third century Roman Montefortino helmet. The Romans tended to make these helmets quite thick and substantial. When it was used, this would have been polished brightly (the metal here is bronze), the knob at the top used to support a crest (typically a pair of feathers) and a quilted textile liner would have been glued to the inside to offer both padding and comfort.

Deploying large amounts of mail armor across the bulk of the infantry was a striking thing to do by any measure. Mail armor is really expensive, because assembling a coat of c. 40,000 rings takes a lot of time and quite a bit of iron (5-10kg, generally, in a finished coat). The Romans pick up this armor from the Gauls - for whom it was the armor of chieftains and other wealthy elites - probably in the 220s. By the last decade of the third century, it seems to have been a normal part of the legion, worn by the first class of the pedites, who might have made up, conservatively, 25-30% of the army (40% if we believe Dionysius that wealthier Romans were called to serve more often). That is an astounding investment in personal protection by Romans (who bought their own equipment), but it fits with that general trend towards more robust armor in pre-Roman Italy.

Finally, for all of this damn heavy stuff, Roman armies do not seem to have been overburdened with baggage trains. Instead, our authors are repeatedly shocked by how much of this stuff Roman generals can get their soldiers to carry (Josephus BJ 3.95, Veg. Mil. 1.19 and Polyb. 18.18 are the standard loci classici to cite for this). The Romans have their standard tropes - as most armies do - about how good generals prohibit lots of non-combat porters and sutlers from camps and keep the baggage train light, but certainly the impression we get is that lumbering, over-burdened Roman armies were the exception, not the rule. Instead, the relatively tight discipline of Roman armies seems to have enabled most Roman generals to keep most of this kit on the backs of their soldiers, when on the march, enabling the army to march leaner and thus more quickly.

Via Wikipedia, Roman soldiers from the Column of Trajan (c. 113) marching with their packs (sarcinae) suspended from forked staves called furca. These fellows are not from our period - they're several centuries later - but so far as we can tell the Roman marching pack changed little between the Middle Republic and the Principate.

That greater materiel intensity spawns its own advantages: Roman armies are more logistically self-sufficient, amply supplied, good at both offensive (sieges) and defensive (fortified camps) construction and more expensive Roman equipment came with real battlefield advantages. In particular, the combination of self-sufficient Roman logistics with disciplined Roman marches and being able to put a fortified camp anywhere gave Roman armies a lot of operational flexibility, within the confines of the normal rules for agrarian armies.

But it also speaks to strategic advantages: after all, all of this stuff has to come from somewhere. And that gets us into the broader topic of what we may call strategic depth, which in the Roman case comes from a multitude of compounding sources.

Strategic Depth

Normally the term 'strategic depth' is used in a very literal sense, to mean the physical distance between potential enemies and the productive core of a state - how far does an enemy have to go before they hit something of strategic importance (like major industrial or population centers). But here, I want to use the term a bit more broadly, to refer generally to a state's ability to tolerate setbacks at the strategic level. After all terrain is just one form of strategic depth: one can create depth by forcing an enemy to wade through swamps to get to something important or force them to wade through forests of soldiers to do the same. Both accomplish the same objective of providing a depth that an opponent must push through.

Rome, by 280 when Pyrrhus arrives, does have strategic depth in the geographic sense (Italy is a big place), but much more important than that is Roman strategic depth expressed in leadership, economic resources, effective (recruitable) manpower and the political will to access them.

Now we've already discussed the Roman recruitment system in a lot of depth, so I will give just a brief summary here. The Roman army was a conscripted citizen militia: Roman citizens from age 17 could be called up to serve in a process known as the dilectus. Because the Romans were at war basically every year and thus called up an army every year, the average Roman citizen male could expect to serve around 7 years or so in the army - the Romans seem to have preferred to conscript men in their late teens and 20s, so this service would have been front-loaded. Note that this isn't 'you're recruited for a straight 7-year tour' but rather a Roman might, at age 17, get conscripted, spend two years in an army, then be sent home when that campaign was done, spend a year or two at home, then get conscripted again at 21, spend a few more years enrolled, and so on. Each legion was thus a composite of both experienced soldiers doing the last years of their service and young men being called up for the first time. Once called, a Roman soldier was expected to provide his own equipment (weapons, armor, tools) and fined for failure to do so, consequently military service was restricted to families with property, called the assidui - the truly poor (the capite censi) might serve in the fleet, but wouldn't be called up to serve in the army.

Surviving Roman census statistics suggest that by the third century the Romans might have had, in any given year, around 228,000 iuniores ('juniors' - men from 17 to 46) among the assidui (whose total number might have been around 325,000). By contrast, the maximum mobilizations we see from either Ptolemaic Egypt or the Seleucid Empire are around 80,000 men, give or take; if we're being generous, we might imagine some troops still in garrisons for perhaps a peak deployment of 100,000 for either (despite the fact that the Seleucids have, conservatively, at least five times the population as the Romans).

One again, my block-chart of social classes in the Roman Republic. Notice how the population in this society is actually concentrated in the middle, among the freeholding farmers - a 'christmas tree' rather than a social pyramid. That's also part of the success of the Roman system. It might be good for the elites to have lots of people at the bottom of the chart, but those people aren't liable for conscription. The Romans, in their habits during Italian expansion (particularly colony foundation) seem to have acted to maximize the fat middle of the social ladder.
When in doubt, you can understand almost every element of Roman policy-making in the early and middle republic through the lens of, "What will most maximize military power?"

But we're not done, because we need to get to the socii who - you will recall - make up a bit more than half of every Roman army. We've discussed them before too: the socii are really subject communities of the Romans, but they don't pay tribute. Rather, the Romans protect them and allow a fairly high degree of internal autonomy and in exchange the socii provide troops for Rome's wars and have no other foreign policy. We don't know how those communities decided who was liable for conscription - that issue was left up to them, as was the question of how to get them equipment - but we do know that in 225 the Romans had the socii count how many men they had available to serve and the number, according to Polybius was roughly 445,000 (of which perhaps 298,000 were iuniores by the Roman definition, though if this mattered to the socii, we cannot be certain).

So the Romans have something on the order of 750,000 adult males liable for conscription, of which some 526,000 are in the band the Romans generally think of as 'fighting age' (17-46). That is a staggering figure, though of course the Romans never put that many men under arms at one time: peak roman mobilizations in 212 and 211 are around 185,000 (which is still more than double peak attested Seleucid or Ptolemaic mobilizations).

But there's more than just manpower here, because remember, the Romans expect these men to fight primarily as heavy infantry and the Roman understanding of what that means includes a lot of expensive heavy equipment, much of it metal (metal objects are particularly expensive in antiquity compared to other materials because they're hard to make). So to get these numbers, the Romans need more than population, they need population that is both willing and able to self-equip and effectively self-mobilize. We covered the political buy-in element of this with the socii in our series on the Roman Republic and on the same for Roman citizens in our post on the dilectus.

But what about the economic aspect? Here, I think the structures of farming in Italy seem to matter a great deal. In particular, the sense one gets from our Roman census data and these mobilizations is that the Roman freeholding farmer class - the 'medium' (neither small, nor big) farmers with enough land to be a little affluent, without being leisured rich - was wider than it was in much of the rest of the Mediterranean world. Roman Italy had no large 'serf' class (unlike much of the Near East) and probably had fewer slaves as a percentage of the population than most Greek poleis. Moreover, Roman conquests had intensified this effect: as the Romans expanded in Italy they would sometimes drop colonies into restive regions, creating new towns (or augmenting old ones) with Roman or socii settlers who received measured out plots of land to support them, essentially creating new assidui (rather than, say, creating mega-sized estates for the ultra-wealthy); some of these communities were Roman citizens, others - the Latin colonies - were socii with Latin Rights. Roman Italy may thus have both had more 'middle' farmers before the Romans, but the Romans also actively 'terraformed' the Italian countryside to maximize the quantity of heavy infantry it could support. Ancient historians tend to be cautious in asserting intentional Roman policies when it comes to this kind of 'social engineering,' but I will note that if you want to understand Roman policy in the Early and Middle Republic, asking the question, "What would maximize long-run Roman military power in this situation?" almost always produces the result the Romans end up with.

That huge base of 'medium' freeholding farmers in turn provides the massive agricultural resource base to support the production necessary to arm and equip these armies. Roman and socii freeholders are buying their equipment (and probably willing to invest heavily in quality, given that it is their life on the line!) using their surplus agricultural production to support the artisans who produce the necessary weapons, armor and tools. And while we can't see the Roman arms industry clearly, it seems evident from the scale of Roman armies and how much stuff they have when we can see them archaeologically, that this demand, churning over decades and centuries, is what builds up Roman capacity to fit out these armies, year after year. Of course, once your tour in service was done, as a Roman, you didn't throw your sword away, but rather kept it for a brother or cousin or friend or son who would be called to serve after you. But the result of that is that the Roman rural countryside already has huge reserves of equipment and experienced, trained fighting men, just waiting for the call up in an emergency.

The result is that not only are Roman armies better armed and armored, with a meaningful 'tactical edge,' there are also more of them! Logistical limits keep the Romans from applying overwhelming numbers in most battles (and it often doesn't work when they try to oversize their armies), but the resource and manpower depth of the system means they can just keep coming back. It also means the Romans can capitalize on opportunities and victories with fresh troops. Of course, you need experienced leaders to coordinate all of this, and that brings us to:

Leadership

The Roman system also provided an edge in military leadership. It was not the case that the Romans were unusually gifted with military geniuses in this period nor was their success up to one or two exceptional military leaders. Rather, Rome's institutions reliably churned out solidly capable, workmanlike generals and did so, most importantly, in quantity.

The key system here is the Roman cursus honorum (lit, 'the path of honors,' but in practice the Roman political career), which once again, we've already discussed. The upshot of the system was that a Roman who wanted to ascend to the upper echelon of the Senate, to have an influence on public affairs and, most importantly for us, to get command of an army had to move through a series of offices more or less in order throughout their 20s and 30s to be eligible to run for the consulship at age 42 (for it was the consuls that led Rome's major armies).

As a result, just about any aspiring Roman commander is going first to have served in the army either as a ranker (that is, common soldier) or a military tribune (a junior staff officer) and probably both. Ten years minimum of service was required (Polyb. 6.19.3). After that, our elite Roman might run for the quaestorship, where he has a two-in-eight chance of being assigned to manage finances in Rome and an six-in-eight chance of being the logistics officer in support of a Roman army. After that, his quaestorship might be extended a year or two, or he might rotate through another stint as a military tribune, interspersed with perhaps running for purely civilian mid-level offices (the aedileship or the tribunate of the plebs). Then, around age 39, he could try to get elected as one of the praetorships (4 and then 6, in our period); two of these offices were primarily legal but the other praetors were given minor commands in places like Sicily and Spain. Only then, around age 42, does our elite Roman get a shot at the consulship.

And you can see both a training function to this and a 'weeding out' function. On the training side, nearly any Roman consul is going to have had extensive experience managing almost every aspect of his army. Moreover, the expectation was that the consuls or praetors leading armies under whom all of these military tribunes and quaestors served exercised a mentorship function; this is an apprenticeship training system and it works! Finally, the structure of Roman politics is as an elimination contest, with fewer offices on each major step of the system and voters deciding which elites advanced and which didn't. Consequently, truly incompetent leaders might well be weeded out before reaching the army command offices of the praetorship or the consulship.

Meanwhile, all of the elites moving through this system are collected in the Roman Senate, a body of current and former magistrates, which serves both as the body which manages overall strategic direction (operating with the combined wisdom of every living Roman who has commanded an army) as well as a large reserve of experienced commanders to draw on.

That reserve of potential army commanders - not merely officers, but generals - matters, because it allows the Romans to keep multiple armies in the field, in multiple theaters, at the same time. By contrast, in Hellenistic monarchies, the main field army is led by the king - who can only be in one place. Consequently, you see even very active Hellenistic rulers still able to only focus on theater at a time, with subordinate generals sent to deal with other problems only being able to command much smaller (and often less effective) forces. Antiochus III's reign provides a good example of this sort of frenetic back-and-forth rush: Antiochus inherits power in 223, facing security problems in both Syria (Ptolemies) and Persia (rebellion). In 222, he heads to Syria (it goes badly) and sends general to Persia (it goes worse); in 221, he shifts, heading East and manages to get control of that problem, before shifting back to campaign in Syria from 220 to 217, before being stopped short by the Battle of Raphia. In 216, he's up in Anatolia, dealing with problems there and stays until 213. He's then in Armenia in 212, has a brief break and then we see him campaigning in Parthia and Bactria - his far East - in 209 through perhaps 205. Then seeing opportunity, he is back in Syria from 205 to 198, then another short break, before heading to Thrace and Greece in 196 and into a war with Rome from 192 to 188. He's back in the East in 187 when he dies.

Back and forth, back and forth, because he only has the one primary general: himself.

By contrast, in 190 - the year of the Battle of Magnesia - the Romans had one army in Greece (to fight Antiochus), another newly raised in Italy, another in Cisalpine Gaul, another in Southern Italy, another in Aetolia (north-western Greece, on the north coast of the Gulf of Corinth), another in Sicily, a small force in Etruria, two armies in Spain (one Nearer, one Farther), another army for Corsica et Sardinia, and a fleet. Livy (37.2) counts the following commands (not counting fellows who were replaced at some point during the year):

Place	Commander	Rank
Greece (headed to Anatolia)	L. Cornelius Scipio	Consul
Italy	C. Laelius	Consul
Cisalpine Gaul	P. Cornelius	Proconsul
Apulia and Bruttium	M. Tuccius	Praetor
Aetolia	Aulus Cornelius	Pro-Praetor
Sicily	C. Atinus Labeo	Praetor
Etruria	P. Junius Brutus	Praetor
The Fleet	L. Aemilius	Praetor
Nearer Spain	C. Flaminius	Pro-Praetor
Farther Spain	L. Aemilius Paullus	Pro-Praetor
Corsica et Sardinia	L. Oppius Salinator	Pro-Praetor

Eleven independent commands. And that wasn't an abnormal year! And then all of these experienced commanders head back to the Senate, where they're available in subsequent years to command armies - and because commanding armies is the route to political advancement and prestige in this society, they're eager to be called upon again.

Putting the Roman Hydra Together

Plutarch relates an episode in the Pyrrhic Wars where Pyrrhus sends an ambassador, Cineas to Rome (to try to get the Romans to surrender) and Cineas reports back that "concerning the [Roman] people, he feared that they might turn out to be fighting a Lernaean hydra, for already there were gathered twice as many men for the consul as those they had faced before, and there were many times more Romans capable of bearing arms" (Plut. Pyrrh 19.5).

Now, of course that's Plutarch and if you've been around here, you know that we can have little faith anyone actually said that. But it expresses a reality: not only did the Romans have a winning tactical system and solid operational-logistical advantages, they had tremendous strategic depth. We'll talk more later in this series about the specific circumstances for Pyrrhus here (geography and city fortifications are playing a role as well), but the basic concept is sound.

Let's put the factors we've discussed together.

First, the Roman system of control in Italy, the socii-system, maximizes military power by extracting soldiers rather than tribute from the allies, broadening Rome's recruitment base massively. The contrast to ethnic restrictions in the core units of Hellenistic armies should suggest itself. Second, the economic system of Italy is also more strongly oriented towards the middling farmers that make good heavy infantry, a facet of the local economy intensified by Roman colonial foundations in the course of the Roman conquest of Italy (which might include socii as well as Romans, so we're not just spreading a static Roman citizenry thinner and thinner).

Third, those middling farmers are expected to equip themselves. Consequently, good equipment was a sign of social status, but also had a good chance to save your own life. So instead of taxing these folks (and generating resentment) the system creates incentives for these regular farmers to invest in military activity with high quality equipment. And fourth, because you are recruiting some of these guys every year and they need equipment every year, Rome develops a deep well of reserve equipment in the countryside, without needing to maintain big arsenals or centralized systems of equipment distribution. And this whole system works without expensive royal courts, expensive central bureaucrats, or large garrisons to enforce unpopular taxation.

Then fifth, because Rome raises armies every year, the average Roman serves those seven or so years in their late teens and early twenties. That means both that any newly raised army is a mix of veterans (from previous dilecti) and green troops (just coming of age), giving every legion a 'spine' of experienced veterans, but it also means that the rural population in their thirties and early forties are all veterans too, available as an enormous 'fallback' pool of experienced, trained manpower in an emergency. And because of points three and four, most of them already have the gear they need too.

And then finally sixth, elite competition for command in the Roman Republic naturally creates a lot of commanders and the Roman career path ensures that anyone who reaches the consulship has experience handling every aspect of a Roman army before they are given command of one, creating an effective 'apprenticeship' officer training system. Because those commanders are then cycled back into the Senate, the Senate serves as a deep well of solidly workmanlike generals, meaning that while Rome doesn't have many 'military geniuses,' it never lacks for competent commanders. The loss of a general - or several generals - is never crippling, there are always replacements available to take command or to be given command of new armies for new theaters.

So in addition to the logistical and operational advantages the Roman army has, and its 'tactical edge,' the Romans also have this enormous strategic advantage in the depth of their military capacity. That depth is not just manpower, which is part of what makes it so hard to imitate. Key elements of the Roman system - the economic-agricultural model, the colonies, the socii, the social values that keep this system running and which sustain the political will to keep digging deeper and deeper to win (which I haven't discussed much here but are a major topic in my book project SHAMELESS PLUG) - all emerge over the long Roman conquest of Italy. Recreating them would mean recreating Roman and Italian society from the ground up, a process of decades if not centuries.

The result is that a Hellenistic state needs not just one lucky break on the battlefield - as we'll see, getting a decisive victory against a Roman army is a tall order - but an increasingly implausible sequence of almost endless lucky breaks. Worse yet, that strategic depth means the Romans will have time to learn, potentially adopting or adapting to whatever tactics you employ. Elephants catch the Romans entirely off-guard in the early- and mid-third century. By the late third and second centuries, Roman armies casually dispose of war elephants, with what seems to have been a standard and effective set of 'anti-elephant' tactics.

Meanwhile the Romans are in the opposite position. Exceptional Roman logistics and distributed command means that the Romans can capitalize on any opportunity, so they just need to win once to 'move the ball down field' as it were. A pyrrhic victory for the Romans isn't a problem either, as new forces can be quickly sent, with new commanders if necessary, to 'convert' on an opponent's weakness. And the Romans can use their navy, their strategic depth and their long-distance logistical coordination to open multiple theaters where, in order to steadily grind forward, they only need to be winning in one of them. In practice, of course, because the Roman tactical system is good, they tend to be winning in most or all of them.

But it is one thing to lay out possible edges or advantages only in theory. We need to see how these systems actually function when pitted against each other. And that's where we're going to turn next, looking first at some of the relative successes of the Hellenistic military system (in particular, Pyrrhus, as well as the Hellenistic successes against Gallic and Parthian enemies) before turning to the staggering run of unanswered Roman victories that functionally destroys the house Alexander (and Philip II) built.