Invisible Romans (34 page)

Forced billeting (as noted, for example, in Pliny’s letter to Trajan,
Letters
10.77–8) was a common abuse, as were blackmail, extortion, and other methods to extract money from the civilian population for personal use. When soldiers ask John the Baptizer what they should do to be good, he tells them, ‘Don’t extort money and don’t accuse people
falsely – be content with your pay’ (Luke 3:14). In Egypt a man entered significant bribes in his account books as a ‘business expense’!

A most graphic and extensive example of a soldier abusing his authority comes from the novel of Apuleius,
The Golden Ass
(9.39–42). Here a gardener is riding along a road in Thessaly on Lucius, the man-turned-into-an-ass protagonist of the novel. A centurion traveling alone meets them coming from the other direction. In the initial encounter, the legionary soldier is recognized both by his uniform (
habitus)
and by his demeanor (
habitudo).
He behaves haughtily and arrogantly (
superbo atque adrogant sermone),
addressing the gardener in the army’s official language, Latin, although they are in a Greek-speaking area, and blocking his path. He invokes his right to requisition transport and commandeers the ass to carry his unit’s baggage and equipment. The centurion takes umbrage both at the gardener trying to force his way past him, and at the failure to respond to his Latin query; he displays his inbred arrogance (
familiarem insolentiam),
and resorts immediately to violence, striking the gardener with his centurion’s staff, knocking him to the ground. The gardener clearly recognizes the unequal power relationship and tries to placate the soldier by being obeisant (
subplicue)
and offering the excuse that he didn’t understand the Latin. The soldier repeats that he is commandeering the ass for state use and begins to lead him off to his fortlet. The gardener again tries begging – he addresses the soldier in an obsequious tone and beseeches him to be more kindly. All to no avail. In fact, the gardener’s pleas only increase the violence of the soldier, who prepares to kill him with further blows from his staff. But the gardener tackles the soldier and beats him to near death, then heads for the nearest town. The soldier recovers and enlists the help of fellow soldiers who in turn summon the civil magistrates of the town to find and execute the gardener for attacking the soldier; these officials are motivated by fear of the soldier’s commander if they don’t act. The gardener is arrested by the magistrates and held in jail pending, presumably, execution without trial, at the behest of the soldier. The soldier gets away scot-free, despite his excessive violence against the gardener. He loads up Lucius with his military gear prominently displayed to terrorize anyone he might meet on the road (
propter terrendos miseros viatores),
and progresses to the next town, where he thrusts himself on a local magistrate for billeting, rather than staying at an inn. So in this encounter are seen the negatives
civilians experienced from the soldiery: arrogance from which there was no recourse, unauthorized requisitioning, billeting on the civilian population, violence from which there was no effective protection, and manipulation of the civil judicial system in favor of the soldiers.

An episode in Petronius illustrates similar haughty behavior. Encolpius, deserted by his lover Giton, buckles on his sword and goes looking for revenge.

As I rushed about, a soldier noticed me, some sort of con man or thug, and he said to me, ‘Hey, fellow soldier, what’s your legion? Who’s your centurion?’ When I bravely lied about my century and legion, that fellow said, ‘Come on now, do soldiers in
your
army go around in fancy footwear?’ My lie betrayed me at that point by the look on my face and my trembling. ‘Hand over your sword, or it’ll be the worse for you!’ Despoiled, I had neither sword nor revenge. (
Satyricon
82)

From the soldier’s perspective, therefore, being in the army encouraged a sense of superiority over the civilian population, an experience of power that could at once allow and exculpate almost any excess. There was no check on this other than self-policing (surely extremely ineffective) and the fruitless bleatings of Roman officials, for example:

The Governor of a province must see that persons of limited resources are not treated unjustly by having their only lamp or small supply of furniture taken from them for the use of others, under the pretext of the arrival of officers or soldiers.

The governor of a province shall see to it that no action be authorized favoring persons claiming unfair advantage for themselves by the assertion of their military status. (
Digest
1.18.6.5–6)

The arrogance that Apuleius describes was a normal part of being a soldier. A member of a group set apart, answerable only to its superior officers, who were likely to be complicit, the soldier relished his position of power in a world where relative power was the only way to get things done – or to prevent them from being done to you. For the soldier, this was definitely a positive aspect of the job.

The one major soldierly act not mentioned in the tales of Apuleius and Petronius is bribery. Presumably the poor gardener was in no position to offer a bribe to the soldier; many others in civil society were in such a position, however. In the Easter story, soldiers are bribed:

While the women were on their way [from the empty tomb], some of the guards went into the city and reported to the chief priests everything that had happened. When the chief priests had met with the elders and devised a plan, they gave the soldiers a large sum of money, telling them, ‘You are to say, “His disciples came during the night and stole him away while we were asleep.” If this report gets to the governor, we will satisfy him and keep you out of trouble.’ So the soldiers took the money and did as they were instructed. And this story has been widely circulated among the Jews to this very day. (Matthew 28:11–17)

A soldier assumed that bribe-taking was part of his privileges and supplemented his pay accordingly, generally ignoring advice such as that quoted above from John the Baptizer to not take any more than his due, and be satisfied with his pay.

Soldiers, women, and marriage

The most controversial aspect of military life both for common soldiers in antiquity and for scholars in modern discussions was the so-called ‘marriage ban.’ Augustus had passed two laws of seemingly conflicting content. On the one hand, the
Lex Papia Poppea
encouraged the formation of families and the bearing of children. On the other, a law or decree of unknown name prohibited soldiers from marrying, thus preventing them from forming a legitimate family. This juxtaposition of measures reveals two conflicting goals of the Augustan arrangements for the Roman community.

During the early and middle republic, the army was recruited from families and only for temporary service. The ideal of the peasant-soldier was ingrained in practice and in myth: the farmer who leaves his home, family, and fields to serve his community, sometimes in far-flung places for extended periods of time, and then returns to take up the plow
again. As this became more myth than practice during the second century
BC
, soldiers became less and less peasant recruits serving and returning home, and more and more tied to their generals as the source of rewards both in battle and after extensive campaigns. Culminating in the civil wars of Pompey, Caesar, Octavian, and Antonius, soldiers came to represent the rending of the community rather than its bedrock foundation.

24. A soldier and his wife adorn their gravestone; their son is before them. As he grasps a sword in his left hand just as his father does, he was probably a soldier, too.

25. A soldier’s extended family. This gravestone was set up after the ban on marriage was lifted in the early third century
AD
. It reads: To the Underworld Powers. Aurelia Ingenua, the daughter, set this up at her own expense to most dear parents, Aurelius Maximus, veteran of the Second Auxiliary Legion, her father and to Aelia Prima, her mother; as well as to Aelia Resilla, her grandmother. Aurelius Valens, a soldier of the Second Legion, also dedicated this to the kindliest of in-laws.

In this situation, Octavian-become-Augustus saw that he needed
to control the army in every way possible to keep it from continuing to be the juggernaut for disruption that had, indeed, brought him to power. He managed this at the managerial level by controlling personally or through trusted lieutenants the recruitment, deployment, and command of virtually all the legions in the provinces; this essentially eliminated the ability of others to raise and lead an army against him.

Besides cutting off the possibility of new military warlords rising against him through military commands, Augustus also had to deal with the soldiers’ expectations of rewards from their generals, which had risen hugely following the promises of bonuses as an enticement to service during the civil wars of the first fifteen years of his ascendancy. After deactivating large numbers of those soldiers and paying them off with cash and land, he realized that his newly envisioned community could not afford politically or financially to continue with the soldiery essentially blackmailing him with expectations of extensive, expensive, and unpredictable rewards for service. His solution was to break cleanly with the myth of the peasant-soldier family and to establish the military family separate from the civic family as the basis for the future army’s recruitment, organization, and loyalty. Artemidorus catches exactly what was happening in his interpretation of the dream ‘Taking up a career as a soldier’:

To be enrolled as a soldier or to serve in the army indicates death for those suffering from any sort of illness. For an enlisted man changes his very life. He ceases to be an individual making his own decisions and takes up another way of life, leaving behind the other. (
Dreams
2.31)

In a real sense, the solution of the
Lex Papia Poppea
and of Augustus’ military reform was the same: recreate or create a basic unit of life and responsibility in both the civilian and military spheres.

This new army (never openly conceived as such, of course) had everything Augustus saw was lacking in the army of his youth. Creating the units ceased to be a process of disrupting the civic family with large conscriptions carried on with regularity; the twenty to twenty-five years of service for a soldier meant that only around 7500 new soldiers had to be recruited from all Roman citizens each year. Loyalty of the
recruited soldiers was to him, or to him through his lieutenants, alone. An explicit reward system of expectable lines of advancement, regular pay, and discharge bonus was in place, eliminating the propensity for and expectation of ad hoc rewards. Overall commitment to military duty was assured by walling off the soldiers from civilian expectations and focusing on fellow soldiers, not on civil families, for social support and interactions. They were often removed far from their natal homes and families, and remained away for many years – not infrequently for the rest of their lives. The clearest evidence for the success of this process is the large number of funerary dedications by soldiers to other soldiers. Here are two examples:

Gaius Julius Reburrus, soldier of the Seventh Legion, Twinned and Lucky, born in Segisama Brasaca, lies here having lived 52 years and served for 24 of those. Licinius Rufus, soldier of the same legion dedicated the gravestone. (
CIL
2.4157, Tarragona, Spain)

This is a memorial to Aurelius Vitalis, a soldier of the Third Flavian Legion, who served 7 years of his 25-year life. Flavius Proculus, a participant in the German incursion, a soldier of the legion just noted, and Vitalis’ heir in the second degree, set this up to his fine fellow soldier. (
CIL
13.6104 =
ILS
2310, Speyer, Germany)