Caesar's Legion: The Epic Saga of Julius Caesar's Elite Tenth Legion and the Armies of Rome (40 page)

Its members would share a tent and sleep together, cook together, eat together, relieve themselves together, train together, march together, fight together, and, if need be, die together.

In 1963 Lieutenant General Sir Brian Horrocks, a British corps commander during World War II, remarked that in an average group of ten fighting men two will be leaders, seven will be followers, and one just doesn’t want to be there. It’s not unlikely that a similar generalization applied to the men of a Roman legion
contubernium.

Having created their squads there on the sand at Córdoba, the centurions would have lined up ten squads, one after the other. This was a century. Then another ten squads. The two centuries formed a maniple, 160

men strong, the equivalent of the modern company. Then they created another maniple, and another, leaving places in each century for a centurion and his two deputies, an
optio,
or sergeant major, and a
tesserarius,
an orderly sergeant. Together, the three maniples created a cohort, or battalion, of 480 men.

The centurions would have made up as many cohorts as required, as many as seven or eight. The local recruiting officers would have received orders from the Palatium to enroll a specific number of recruits to fill the gaps in the legion’s ranks left by illness and battle casualties and by the men who would soon retire from the legion after serving out their twenty-year enlistments. Some veterans of the 10th would have already volun-

c20.qxd 12/5/01 5:40 PM Page 213

teered for a second enlistment, probably about 1,500 of them, and those men would go into the legion’s senior cohorts after the retirees departed.

So about 4,000 new legionaries would have been enrolled here at Córdoba to fill the vacancies and meet the legion’s requirement of a total of 5,345

enlisted men and NCOs. With its 72 officers, the full-strength legion would number 5,417 men.

Once the cohorts had been formed, a senior centurion of the 10th would have stepped up onto the rostra in front of his new Spanish
tiros,
as recruits were called. The centurion may not himself have been Spanish; by this time centurions transferred from one legion to another as they went up the promotional ladder, changing legions as much as a dozen times in their careers. Probably in his forties, he would have been garbed in dress uniform—blood red legionary tunic; shinguards; shining segmented metal armor that covered his chest, shoulders, and back; a helmet complete with a transverse crest of eagle feathers that signified his rank; and with his bravery decorations on display across his chest. On his right hip he would have worn a dagger, on his left a sword, both in scabbards richly decorated with gold and jet inlay. Apart from the segmented armor, which had replaced the cuirass of iron mail ringlets worn by his first-century b.c.

predecessors, he would have looked little different from Centurion Gaius Crastinus of the first enlistment of the 10th Legion.

The centurion would have addressed the silent, apprehensive recruits.

He would have told them that they were joining Rome’s most famous legion, Julius Caesar’s “old faithfuls,” and that they had a lot to live up to, reeling off the 10th Legion’s long list of battle honors since the day in 61 b.c. when it had been personally founded by Caesar. The centurion would have told them about the legions’ “buddy system,” whose existence we know of from Tacitus. The Roman army encouraged every legionary to team up with a comrade from his squad, a comrade who would literally stand at his back when the fighting got tough, who would witness his will, and who would bury him if necessary when the time came. It’s easy to imagine that the day would come when these rookies would need their legion buddy like a baby needs its mother.

Before long, the centurions of the 10th were leading their new recruits out of Córdoba. Unless taking part in an amphibious assault of the type for which Caesar had been famed, the legions invariably traveled by foot wherever they had to go. Over the next several weeks, the 10th Legion’s
tiros
tramped all the way across Spain, through France, northern Italy, the Balkans, Greece, and Turkey to reach the unit’s station in Syria, using the c20.qxd 12/5/01 5:40 PM Page 214

214

C A E S A R ’ S

l e g i o n

straight, paved Roman highways built primarily to permit the rapid transit of the legions, and commandeering supplies
en route
in the name of the emperor.

Early in a.d. 64, the 10th Legion underwent its latest discharge and reenlistment at Cyrrhus. The youngsters who’d marched all the way from Spain paraded at Cyrrhus with the men of the last enlistment who were staying on. Now the recruits were in red woolen tunics and shining armored cuirasses. Not a single toga was to be seen—it was a formal, ceremonial garment akin to our tuxedo today and rarely worn. The tunic was the everyday garb of Romans of all walks of life, and was made of two pieces of cloth sewed together, with openings for the head and arms, and short sleeves. It fell to just above the knees at the front and a little lower at the back, with the military tunic being a fraction shorter than that worn by civilians. In cold weather it was not unusual for several tunics to be worn on top of each other. Augustus habitually wore up to four tunics at a time in winter months.

Just as a Scotsman is asked if he wears anything beneath his kilt, so the question is still asked by scholars about what the legionary wore beneath his tunic. There is no documentary evidence, but most Romans are believed to have worn a loincloth, although it is suggested that cli-mate and ethnic background could have meant that at least some legionaries, such as those based in the East, went without undergarments in the heat of summer.

No matter what the weather, and irrespective of the fact that auxiliaries serving in the Roman army, both cavalry and infantry, wore trousers of some sort, legionaries didn’t begin wearing full-length trousers until the fourth century. Trousers were considered foreign and vulgar by educated Romans. Comfort did begin to win out over fashion toward the end of the first century, when legionaries commenced the habit of wearing short breeches under their tunics.

Over the tunic the soldier of a.d. 63 wore an armored cuirass of segmented metal plates that covered chest, shoulders, and back and wasn’t unlike today’s bulletproof vest. Heavy but effective, the
lorica segmentata,
introduced in about a.d. 30, relegated the mail-covered leather jacket of Caesar’s day to use by auxiliary units only over time.

Each man wore a helmet, kept in place by a leather strap that tied under the chin. With a protruding neckguard, it looked a little like a modern fireman’s helmet, except that it had the added protection of flexible cheek flaps. The helmet was adorned with a removable parade plume of yellow horsehair—2nd-century Roman governor, general, and author c20.qxd 12/5/01 5:40 PM Page 215

Arrian describes the plumes worn by his troops as yellow, and archaeolog-ical evidence suggests yellow plumes were universal. Not worn in battle since early in the first century, the plume would be kept with the rest of the soldier’s kit when the legion was on active duty.

At the throats of the new recruits would have been tied the legionary neck scarf, so fashionable that auxiliaries wore them as well, even though they didn’t have to protect their necks from the chafing effects of heavy armor. And on their feet, hobnailed army sandals, the
caligulae
from which the emperor Caligula’s nickname derived when he was a child living with his parents, Germanicus and Agrippina, among the troops on the Rhine.

His actual name was Gaius.

On his right hip each man wore a double-edged, sharp-pointed twenty-inch mild steel sword, the
gladius.
In 150 b.c. Polybius called the Roman legionary’s sword the “Spanish sword.” Spanish swordmakers were reputedly the best in the Roman world. Even if by the time of the a.d. 63 recruitment legionary swords were sometimes produced in other parts of the empire to the same design, there is no doubt that a legion recruited in Spain would have sourced its sidearms there. The swords of most of the Roman soldier’s adversaries had rounded ends, making them effective in just the slashing mode. The legionary’s sword, the Spanish sword with its sharp point, could be used to both jab and slash, putting the legionary at a distinct advantage in the confines of close-quarters combat.

On the new legionary’s left hip hung a dagger—the arrangement of a legionary’s sword and dagger were opposite to that of his centurions. To complete his outfit, every man also carried heavy arms—a javelin in his right hand and a rectangular shield in his left bearing the proud bull emblem of the 10th Legion, made to an effective design that hadn’t changed in hundreds of years.

Almost certainly, Field Marshal Corbulo would have come up from Antioch for the swearing in of the 10th’s new enlistment. He would have welcomed the new recruits with an earthy speech, and, as tradition required, presented the standard-bearers of the maniples and cohorts with their new standards. Men leaving the legion took their old standards with them, and would march behind them in their Evocati units. Only the legion’s eagle standard remained; it never left the legion. The field marshal would then have led the new men in swearing the oath of allegiance to emperor, legion, and officers.

The retiring veterans of the legion were probably already on their way to their new homes. As it happened, the 10th Legion was the only one of Rome’s now twenty-five legions that underwent its discharge this particular c20.qxd 12/5/01 5:40 PM Page 216

216

C A E S A R ’ S

l e g i o n

year, and the Palatium apparently decided it wanted to settle more veterans along the Rhine in a.d. 64, almost certainly in the wake of the recent activities of hostile German tribes east of the Rhine. So the men of the 10th who retired that year were given land on the west bank of the Rhine, and had to travel all the way to Germany to take up their grants.

We know this because, five years later, as a new civil war engulfed the empire in the wake of the demise of the emperor Nero, the reliable Tacitus describes retired veterans of the 10th Legion marching from the Rhine in their Evocati militia cohorts as part of an army of the aspiring emperor Vitellius, led by General Aulus Caecina. They were combined with other Evocati militiamen of the 4th Macedonica and 16th Legions who were also living along the Rhine in their retirement, and veterans of three of the four legions based in Britain. Those 10th Legion veterans defeated the army of the emperor Otho in the Battle of Bedriacum at the town also known as Betriacum near Cremona in northern Italy in a.d. 69, and five months later were defeated themselves at the Battle of Cremona by troops loyal to General Vespasian.

The surviving 10th Legion vets from Vitellius’s defeated army would have been pardoned and permitted to go home to their farms along the Rhine after the war, in a.d. 70. But before these events took place, their comrades still serving with the 10th Legion had a problem of their own to contend with in the Middle East, one of the bloodiest campaigns in the legion’s history to date: the Jewish Revolt.

c21.qxd 12/5/01 5:43 PM Page 217

XXI

:

ORDERS FROM

THE EMPEROR

n a lazy day in January a.d. 67, guards on duty in the towers at the decuman gate of the 10th Legion’s base at Cyrrhus would
O
have peered down the road to Antioch to the south as a legion courier came galloping toward them.

The base at Cyrrhus was a permanent installation. Back in 30 b.c., Augustus had required permanent winter camps to be established for all the legions of his new standing army, throughout the empire. Augustus stipulated that there was to be a maximum of two legions at each base, although from the Greek geographer Strabo we know that the main legion base in Egypt, at Babylon Fossatum, just up the Nile from Alexandria and today the site of Cairo, was occupied by three legions when he visited there in 25 b.c. Probably one of these legions was just passing through at the time, heading west or northeast to a new station.

The buildings at the Cyrrhus base in a.d. 67 may have been wooden, standing behind a wall of earth and timber and punctuated by wooden guard towers, giving it the appearance of a fort of the nineteenth-century American Wild West. Or it may have originally been built from stone, like other permanent structures of the region. Before the century was out, all the legion bases throughout the empire would be upgraded to be constructed of solid stone buildings behind formidable stone walls and featuring cleverly engineered granaries and luxuries such as vast bathhouses.

The layout of the legion marching camp was preserved in these permanent bases, with neatly set-out barrack rooms lining the camp streets instead of rows of tents, as well as workshops, stables, and a
praetorium,
the legion headquarters complex.

Occupying the praetorium at Cyrrhus in January a.d. 67 was a colonel, the 10th Legion’s deputy commander, a senior tribune in his late twenties.

217

c21.qxd 12/5/01 5:43 PM Page 218

218

C A E S A R ’ S

l e g i o n

Like so many legions, the 10th would have seen its commanding general depart late the previous year, moving on to a fresh assignment elsewhere in the empire or perhaps back at Rome, and the unit was now awaiting the arrival of a new commander for the next campaigning season beginning in the coming spring.

The colonel of the 10th received important news via several sources.

The most regular was the
Acta Diurna,
or
Daily News,
the world’s first daily newspaper. Founded by Julius Caesar in 59 b.c. when he was consul, by imperial times it was produced by industrious secretaries working in one of the departments of the Palatium in Rome. The handwritten copies of the
Acta
were distributed to Roman officials in every corner of the empire in the satchels of the couriers of the
Cursus Publicus,
the remarkably efficient state courier service also run by the Palatium. The
Acta
contained details of official decrees and appointments; birth, death, and marriage notices; sports results—the outcomes of the latest gladiatorial contests and chariot races at the capital; and even news of traffic jams and house fires in Rome.