The Roman Army at War 100 BC-AD 200 (1996) by Adrian Goldsworthy

Adrian Keith Goldsworthy has quickly emerged as one of the most distinguished and prolific young classical scholars. This monograph, an adaptation of his doctoral dissertation from Oxford, is detailed and academic, but surprisingly fluid and accessible.

Goldsworthy asserts that the best way to study an army is first to review its performance at its intended objective, which is to fight and beat the enemy; and then explore the typical combat experience from the ground level perspective. In doing this, he takes the same approach made famous by John Keegan’s 1976 classic, “The Face of Battle.”

Goldsworthy plainly states that most people (including professionally trained scholars who should know better) have gotten the Roman army wrong. He notes that military history – and the Roman army in particular – are popular subjects, but generally shunned by the Academy, at least in exploring exactly how the army fought, a fact he ascribes to a knee-jerk liberal reaction against the study of violence for fear that such study condones it. The end result has been that military history has been dominated by those outside the academic mainstream and have tended to focus on two themes in warfare: 1) the so-called “principles of war”: and 2) the importance of the results of individual battles, both of which Goldsworthy claims are western concepts and not well suited to understanding the Roman army.

The Roman army is usually depicted as a highly uniform juggernaut that moved with methodical precision, a well-oiled and well-disciplined machine under the command of a citizen general who was more spectator than battlefield commander. According to this view, “A Roman campaign was almost like a siege on a larger scale.” Not true, Goldsworthy claims here.

The true hallmarks of the Roman army, he argues, were flexibility and the embrace of a reflexively aggressive approach to war, a policy designed more to capture the initiative and maintain high morale in the ranks (while eroding the morale of the enemy) rather than any innate desire to cross swords. In fact, Goldsworthy asserts that much of how the Roman army behaved was designed to beat the enemy before engaging him, an early version of “shock and awe” one might argue. The neatly laid out field camps were a tangible sign of the Roman army’s inexorable advance and vaunted discipline. The long, thin lines of the Roman legionnaire advance, often conducted in silence so that commands could be heard, were meant as much to intimidate as to coordinate movement. And the first volley of the pila and final rush to engage in individual combat (unlike the rugby-like scrum of the Greek phalanx Goldsworthy writes that Roman legionnaires essentially engaged in groups of “one-on-one” fights) was meant to break the will of the enemy, causing him to turn and flee, the point in battle when by far most casualties occurred.

It has often been claimed that the Roman army was susceptible to guerilla warfare. Nonsense, Goldworthy says. Once the Roman legion moved from a 30 maniple configuration to the 10 cohort organization in the late Republic it was almost uniquely capable of meeting most contingencies, including insurgent-like threats to its authority, especially in Judea where the Roman army faced a succession of relatively well-led Jewish revolts during the first and second centuries. The cohort system (a unit of less than 500 men or roughly equivalent to a modern infantry company) allowed small units to be peeled up from their parent legion for special work (so-called “vexelations”), such as garrisoning a rebellious city or protecting trade routes. That said, it certainly helped the Roman cause that many of the most dangerous and numerous adversaries, such as the Germans and Gauls, preferred for cultural reasons to fight in large infantry battles, a set up that nearly ensured that superior Roman arms, discipline and logistics would carry the day.

For all the focus on the organization and training of the Roman army, Goldsworthy maintains that nothing mattered so much to the legionnaires than personal bravery, both in their commanders and frontline troops. The author stresses that the Roman commander (usually a provincial governor invested with both civil and military authority, at least during the period under examination) may have had no formal command training, but his life experience as a Roman noble prepared him well for his task of leading men in combat. The usual place for the Roman commander was dismounted and just beyond the front line, where he could exhort his men on, personally witnessing (and later rewarding) acts of bravery (or punishing cowardice) and sending in reserves at the right moment. This cultural imperative to demonstrate courage revealed itself in the form of individual combat and conspicuous (and usually unnecessary) displays of heroics. Goldsworthy cites the exploits of Titus Pullo and Lucius Vorenus in Gaul (these names will be familiar to those who have seen the HBO series “Rome”) as emblematic of this type of behavior, which as with so much of Roman actions (if you believe Goldsworthy) was aimed primarily at overawing the troops, friendly and enemy alike.

There are no shortage of books on the Roman army of the late Republic and early Empire. I’ve read quite a few of them and no volume better captures the feel of the legions on the march and in battle than “The Roman Army at War.”