Caesar's Legion: The Epic Saga of Julius Caesar's Elite Tenth Legion and the Armies of Rome (51 page)

A study of the reenlistment dates of the legions also tells us that the change-over from sixteen-year enlistments to twenty-year enlistments was phased in by Augustus between 6 b.c. and a.d. 11, as each individual legion’s latest reenlistment fell due.

By knowing that a particular legion reenlisted in a particular year, we open a whole new door to our understanding of the legions. When the 12th Legion performed so badly against the Jewish partisans in Judea in a.d. 66, losing its eagle and taking heavy casualties, it had much to do with the fact that the legion was due for reenlistment in the new year and its youngest legionaries were thirty-nine years of age while its senior cohorts were manned by men no younger than fifty-nine, all thinking about their looming retirement and neither mentally nor physically equipped for the serious fighting they would encounter—the last men an astute commander would choose as the main element of his combat force.

By using the reenlistment factor, we can determine that the recruits snared by Piso at Celenderis in a.d. 19 after the assassination of Germanicus Caesar were bapp02.qxd 12/6/01 8:46 AM Page 275

Greek or Spanish youths bound for the 4th Macedonica or 6th Victrix Legions in Syria, which were both due for reenlistment in the new year.

The reenlistment factor even allows us to calculate the ages of many legionaries in any given year, because all new recruits were a minimum of twenty years of age on entry into the imperial legions. If a legion underwent its latest reenlistment three years ago, say, then this year many of its legionaries would be twenty-three, some would be forty-three, and one or two would even be sixty-three. The ages of centurions are less easy to calculate, because they moved around among the legions as they were promoted, and the legion they started with might well have a different reenlistment date to that of their current legion.

The reenlistment factor allows us to determine that the four 12th Legion legionaries who carried out the crucifixion of Jesus Christ were quite possibly forty-one-year-olds who’d recently commenced a second enlistment with their legion—the senior 2nd or 3rd Cohorts would have been posted to troublesome Jerusalem; besides, second-enlistment men would have earned the perks that went with carrying out executions—and that the men of the 3rd Augusta Legion who escorted St. Paul to Rome in a.d. 60–61 were probably raw recruits who’d just joined the legion.

Thanks to Roman efficiency and consistency, we are able to use the reenlistment factor in furthering our knowledge and understanding of the Roman Empire and its legions.

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T h e U n iq u e n e s s of t h e L e g io n Com m a n d s i n E g y p t a n d J u de a During his reign, and following the example set by Julius Caesar, Augustus appointed officials of Equestrian Order rank to govern Egypt and decreed that no Roman of senatorial rank could even enter the province of Egypt, at any time, for any reason, without the emperor’s specific permission. This was because Egypt was at the time considered the breadbasket of the empire. Between them, Egypt and the province of Africa produced almost all Rome’s grain. He who controlled the grain supply could control Rome, and to ensure that no senator ever even thought about challenging the emperor by taking the revolutionary road via Egypt, it was off-limits.

Germanicus Caesar, heir to Tiberius’s throne, caused uproar when he went to Egypt as a tourist in a.d. 19. If a senator trod the sands of Egypt, as Vespasian did in a.d. 69, it was seen as a deliberate contravention of the law, the first step on the quest to empire. For this reason, at least until the third century—Cassius Dio refers to Egypt still being governed by a prefect in a.d. 218—and probably much later, the governor of Egypt was always a prefect, an officer of Equestrian rank, never of consular rank, as in other important provinces. He was also paid as much as a top proconsul, to maintain his loyalty and his incorruptibility.

Yet there were always legions in Egypt—three during the early part of the reign of Augustus, two throughout the first century, one by the third century.

Imperial legions were ordinarily commanded by legates, officers of senatorial rank.

If legates had commanded legions in Egypt, their presence would have contravened the law of Augustus.

We know that the Prefect of Egypt issued orders to the legions in the province, just as Tiberius Alexander called the legions in Egypt together on July 1, a.d. 69, and required them to swear allegiance to Vespasian as their new emperor.

Vespasian sent his son Titus, then only a prefect, a colonel, to Egypt to bring the 15th Legion to Caesarea so it could take part in the a.d. 67 Judean offensive, and in doing so didn’t contravene the law.

Tacitus confirms that from the time of Augustus, Rome’s armed forces in Egypt were always commanded by knights of the Equestrian Order—colonels. So
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a unique but simple solution was arrived at to solve the Egyptian dilemma. As the emperor Claudius was to tell the Senate on one occasion, all things are precedents at one time. A precedent was set regarding the command of the legions in Egypt. In deference to the Augustan law, legions stationed in Egypt were commanded by their second-in-command, a senior tribune, an officer of Equestrian rank, and these officers were subordinate to the Prefect of Egypt, who outranked them in terms of Equestrian Order seniority.

Once a legion left Egypt, a legate took command again. When a legion passed through Egypt, marching to an adjoining province, the legate commanding it would have traveled by sea to join it, never setting foot in Egypt.

A similar situation existed regarding the garrison in Judea. One or two writers have in the past put forward the theory that no legion could have been stationed in Judea prior to a.d. 70, and the province could only have been garrisoned by auxiliaries, because the governor of the province was merely a procurator, and the general, or legate, commanding a legion in his province would have outranked him, an unacceptable situation.

As it happens, the administrator of Judea until the reign of Claudius was not a procurator at all, but a prefect. Pontius Pilatus, celebrated famously in countless books, films, and television programs as Pilate, the Procurator of Judea, similarly held the appointment as
Prefect
of Judea, not Procurator, a fact confirmed by an inscription relating to Pilate found at Caesarea in 1961. And in the same way that the Prefect of Egypt could command legions stationed in his province because they were led by their senior tribunes, so the Prefect of Judea, and later the Procurator, once the status of the administrator changed after a.d. 44, could command legionary forces in his province.

There is ample evidence that legions were stationed in Judea during this period. Varus, Governor of Syria, stationed a legion, the 10th, in Jerusalem in 4 b.c. The Jewish historian Josephus several times writes of the “legionaries” of the Judea garrison in the years leading up to the First Jewish Revolt of a.d. 66–70, and provides plenty of clues about the identity of the legion stationed in the province between a.d. 48 and 66—“the Augustans,” “the Syrians,” “the men from Beirut”—for us to know that it was the 3rd Augusta, a Syrian legion with a major recruitment station at Beirut, a military colony founded by veterans of the 10th Legion. The fact that elements of the 3rd Augusta Legion were stationed at Jerusalem and Caesarea is confirmed by the Christian Bible, which talks of men of the “Augustan” legion saving and escorting St. Paul the Apostle in a.d. 58–61—there were three “Augustan” legions, and the 2nd Augusta and the 8th Augusta were never stationed in the East, but the 3rd Augusta was. Indications are that the legion stationed in Judea between a.d. 6 and 48 was the 12th.

There is never a mention of a general commanding the legion stationed in Judea prior to a.d. 70. Interestingly, Josephus tells us that after serious trouble in the province in a.d. 51–52, Claudius sent for the Procurator of Judea, Cumanus, and a subordinate, “the tribune Celer.” Civil tribunes—Tribunes of the Plebs—did not serve outside Rome. Military tribunes only officered legions. Had there bapp03.qxd 12/6/01 9:21 AM Page 279

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only been auxiliary units stationed in Judea, the most senior Roman military officers in the province would have been prefects, not tribunes. And Josephus had more than enough exposure to the Roman military to know the difference. If he said Celer was a tribune, not a prefect, then a tribune he was.

Josephus went on to say that Tribune Celer was subsequently tried at Rome for his rapacious conduct in the province, then returned to Judea, where he was executed by his own troops, and Cumanus was replaced as procurator. Cumanus and Celer were obviously the two most senior Roman officials in Judea at the time. Junior tribunes were merely officer cadets, without responsibility or power.

Even so, they, too, only served with legions.

There was only one senior tribune with each legion, its second-in-command.

Celer was obviously a senior tribune, second-in-command of the 3rd Augusta Legion, the legion stationed in Judea at the time, and as such was the only senior tribune stationed in Judea and the province’s military commander in the same way that senior tribunes commanded legions in Egypt.

There are several other examples of imperial legions outside Egypt being commanded by their senior tribunes, for years at a time—the 6th Victrix and 12th Legions in Syria during the Jewish Revolt of a.d. 66–70, for instance, when brigadier generals were scarce on the ground—so it appears to have been an accepted practice.

The conclusion that can be drawn is that until a.d. 70 Judea was treated in the same way as Egypt—the officer commanding the legion based in the province was its senior tribune, normally the legion’s second-in-command, who would have been outranked by the prefect/procurator and could therefore take orders from him. As with the legions in Egypt, when the Judea legion left the province, a legate could be appointed to command it.

As further evidence of this, when Corbulo brought six cohorts—three thousand men—of the 3rd Augusta Legion up from Judea to take part in his a.d. 58 campaign in Armenia, they were apparently commanded by their camp prefect, Capito, the legion’s third-in-command. This would have permitted their senior tribune to remain in Judea with the other four cohorts, as the province’s military commander.

The situation in Egypt continued because of the Augustan law, but the situation in Judea could be changed at the discretion of the emperor. Vespasian did just that in late 70. When he permanently stationed the 10th Legion in Judea that year, he left it under the command of a legate, a general, even though there was also a procurator stationed in the province. The procurators who had commanded the Judea garrison in the past had, almost without exception, done a poor job with the troops at their disposal, so now the Judea legion would be autonomous. To ensure that there was no conflict between the procurator and the general of the legion, Vespasian duplicated his orders to them—both received the same directives, and both were expected to carry them out, one via his civil officers, the other through his soldiers. And both would have reported to the Syrian governor, the regional commander in chief.

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T h e N a m i n g a n d N um b e r i n g S y s t e m of t h e R om a n L e g io n s Until 31 b.c., legions had numbers or names, but apparently not both. In 84 b.c., Pompey the Great began the habit of always numbering his new legions, a habit subsequently adopted by Julius Caesar. In his major reform of the Roman army, begun in 31 b.c., Augustus reduced the legions to twenty-eight in all, giving each a number between 1 and 28. It was an admirably practical system. For less practical, more nostalgic reasons, he also allowed several existing legions to combine their old names with their new numbers. For the next hundred years, it was sufficient to know a legion’s number to be able to identify it. But in the civil war that followed the demise of Nero, in a.d. 68–69, things changed dramatically.

Considerable confusion has been caused over the years by the fact that from about a.d. 67 the numbers of the legions of Rome began to be duplicated so that by the end of the war of succession—late a.d. 69—there were four 1st Legions, three 3rd Legions, and two of each of the 2nd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 10th, and 15th Legions.

New legions continued to be added and others abolished as the years passed.

By a.d. 233 there had been seven different 1st Legions, and there were still four 2nd Legions. To identify a Roman legion after a.d. 68, it’s necessary to also look at its title—was it the 6th Victrix or the 6th Ferrata, for example, the 10th or the 10th Gemina?—two quite different legions.

It had all begun very methodically. The four original legions annually levied in Rome in republican times were numbered 1 through 4. Other legions supplied to Rome by the Italian allies carried the names of their tribes rather than numbers—the Martia Legion, famous in its day, would have been supplied by the Marsi tribe southeast of Rome, for example, the tribe and the legion being named for the war god Mars.

The numbering system that developed in the first century b.c. carried through the subsequent history of imperial Rome. It was begun by Pompey the Great when he personally raised and financed several legions in the Picenum region of eastern
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Italy in 84 b.c., naming two of them the 1st and 2nd Legions. Pompey subsequently raised the 3rd, 4th, 5th, 6th, 7th, 8th, and 9th Legions. When Julius Caesar arrived in Farther Spain in 61 b.c. to take up his appointment as governor of the province, he raised a new legion locally and, following Pompey’s system, he called it the 10th. Over the next few years, Caesar raised six more legions for his campaigns in Gaul and Britain—the 11th through the 16th. Shortly after, the triumvir Crassus raised a number of legions to take to war against the Parthians, managing to have himself killed and most of his legions wiped out at the Battle of Carrhae. It appears that these legions may have had names rather than numbers.