Soldier and Society in Roman Egypt

A Social History

Richard Alston

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2002
• Print ISBN: 9780415186063
• eBook ISBN: 9781134664757
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Archaeology
• Index: Social Sciences

The province of Egypt provides unique archaeological and documentary evidence for the study of the Roman army. In this fascinating social history Richard Alston examines the economic, cultural, social and legal aspects of a military career, illuminating the life and role of the individual soldier in the army.
Soldier and Society in Roman Eygpt provides a complete reassessment of the impact of the Roman army on local societies, and convincingly challenges the orthodox picture. The soldiers are seen not as an isolated elite living in fear of the local populations, but as relatively well-integrated into local communities. The unsuspected scale of the army's involvement in these communities offers a new insight into both Roman rule in Egypt and Roman imperialism more generally.

1

INTRODUCTION

There is an image of the Roman imperial army embedded in the popular consciousness and in the minds of many Roman military historians. It is an image with which all who read this book will be familiar. The Roman army is frequently portrayed and described as the first modern, professional army. The achievements of the soldiery in maintaining the frontiers of a vast empire almost unchanged for four centuries are lauded and the credit is given to the quality of the troops and Roman military organisation. Yet this vast empire, stretching from the south of Scotland to Arabia and from the deserts of Africa to the lands beyond the Danube, was mostly not acquired by this professionalised force. The Roman army of the early Republic was, like the armies of many other ancient city states, a citizen militia, gathered every summer to fight the enemies of the state in wars which sometimes appear more like extended bandit raids. Gradually, for reasons that are still hotly disputed, this army conquered Italy, defeated the superpower in the Western Mediterranean basin, Carthage, and then extended her power to the East, conquering first one and then the rest of the Hellenistic kingdoms created by the successors of Alexander the Great. In the meantime, the armies went West and North, establishing control of Southern Gaul, Spain and the North Balkans. In surges of conquest, Rome came to rule the lands around the Western Mediterranean and exercise hegemony over those encircling the Eastern Mediterranean. In the last great explosion of conquering energy at the end of the Republic, the armies of Pompey completed the conquest of the Hellenistic kingdoms, only Egypt maintaining a fragile independence under the last Ptolemies, and Caesar conquered Gaul and threatened the remote, semi-mythical island of Britain.

These massive conquests were made by an army which remained institutionally a citizen militia. Armies were recruited for single campaigns and served with the generals appointed for those campaigns. To a large extent, the armies that fought the campaigns of Pompey and Caesar were the armies of Pompey and Caesar and not the armies of the Roman state. The army had changed from the time of the early Republic. The ideal soldier had been the soldier-peasant who left his plough to fight in the spring and returned to harvest in the autumn, but no longer could peasants farm and fight. There was no pretence that the soldiers could return home at the end of a years campaigning. Originally, the very poorest of Roman society had been excluded from the army and only those with property had fought; by the late Republic, service was open to all Roman citizens and, with Roman citizenship extended throughout most of the peninsula of Italy, many Roman legionaries may have had only the most tenuous connections with the city itself. Inevitably, the demands of maintaining a vast empire meant that the army of the late Republic came to differ more and more from the citizen militia, and the soldiers, who had received some pay since the early Republic, became not peasants fighting only for the summer but ‘career soldiers’ enlisting and re-enlisting in the campaigns of the great generals.

The gradual professionalisation of the Roman army created great political problems for the Roman senate and state. After Sulla had shown that a charismatic general could march his troops on Rome itself and hence win political battles, powerful politicians commanding the large armies necessary for the great wars of conquest would always be a threat to political stability. When tensions within the ruling elite became open conflict, the conflict could escalate into violence and, further, into civil war. After the wars of Sulla and the Marians, the violence of political struggle in the late Republic, a further outbreak of civil wars between Caesar and Pompey, the Caesarian faction and the assassins of Caesar, Octavian and Antony, it seemed that political stability could only be assured by the prominence of an individual who would retain control over the army. Octavian’s final victory at Actium in 31 BC gave him temporary dominance and vast political, military and financial resources. Octavian’s political settlement laid the foundation of the imperial system of government and provides a convenient divide in the history of Rome between the Republican and imperial periods.

One of the most important tasks of Octavian, or Augustus as he was known after 27 BC, was to establish his control over the army. This, over time, he achieved by a number of reforms. He improved the finances of the army. He made provision for retirement allowances. He set terms and conditions of service. Although there were adjustments in the reigns of his successors, the Roman imperial army can reasonably be said to have come into being with Augustus. Service in the legions was no longer for a single campaign and no longer with an individual general. Legionaries served for twenty years, later extended to twenty-five, and, in a society where life expectancy was probably under 30, many who joined the army would have died in service even without the threat of enemy action. Military service became a career. The army was no longer institutionally amateur but, apart from the senior officers, was a professional body and Augustus did all he could to ensure that this new model army from the lowliest infantryman to the highest of generals was personally loyal to the emperor. The legions were no longer founded for individual campaigns and disbanded when not needed, but continued to recruit soldiers over generations. The imperial army maintained the frontiers and repelled the barbarians. This army conquered Britain, drove deep into Germany and across the Euphrates into Parthia, besieged Masada and destroyed the Temple at Jerusalem. The military system created under Augustus was still recognisable three centuries later and elements of the Augustan military system can be perceived in the armies of the Christian emperors of the fourth century.

Understandably political leaders and historians have, since the Renaissance, been impressed by the achievements of the Roman army and the tenacity with which it maintained the territorial integrity of the Roman empire. Some of the former group have even tried to emulate the army in order to obtain similar political influence and power. Many scholars have been fascinated by the army and have devoted their lives to an attempt at understanding it. It may seem a little perverse then to burden the already groaning shelves with another book on the Roman army but I offer no apology. Roman imperial military history has evolved over the last generation into almost a separate sub-discipline of ancient history. In a recent survey of the work of the previous forty years, M.P.Speidel, one of the leading practitioners of imperial military history, called on his colleagues to isolate themselves further from mainstream ancient history by setting up separate journals, possibly separate academic posts and a separate literature on the Roman imperial army. Speidel asks of the work of his generation of Roman military historians,

where is the unifying thread? I believe that we do have such a thread and a clear overall vision in what we are doing, and that is the past itself, which, of course, is just another way of saying that our sources are rich and clear, that our methods are mostly sound, that our accounts of the Roman army are informed by our various lives’ experience rather than by ideology or outside forces.¹

Rarely in the last twenty years can any historian have written with such confidence or produced so explicit a statement of Rankean positivism and amongst ancient historians especially, such confidence is shocking.

The root of Speidel’s confidence is the general agreement amongst military historians about the methodologies to be used and the context of their study. Roman military history has been dominated by the two disciplines of epigraphy and archaeology and, in the Anglo-Saxon world, by the scholars who have come to be known as the ‘Durham school’, many of whom were trained by Prof. E.Birley in whose honour Speidel wrote the paper from which I have just quoted. Birley has produced the most explicit and informative statements of the ideology of this school. He served in British military intelligence during the second world war, devoting his energies to understanding the German army and its officer corps, and, after the war, transferred the skills developed in military intelligence to the study of the Roman army. Birley and his followers set out to interpret the evidence concerning the Roman army using methodologies and assumptions developed to understand modern armies.² The perceived success of this approach has encouraged military historians to understand the Roman army as if it were a force analogous to modern armies, though allowing for the obvious differences in technology.

This modernising view has given the Roman army the patina of modern Western European military forces and it is this model which has dominated Roman military studies. It is no coincidence that Speidel laid out a plan of research on the Roman army for the next generation under the title ‘Work to be done on the Organization of the Roman army’. We should concentrate on those aspects of research that have most concerned modern military intelligence: ranks and career structures, the officer corps, logistics, equipment and tactics. The modernising tendency was taken to its logical conclusion by Luttwak who brought his skills as a Pentagon strategist to the analysis of the Roman army in his book The Grand Strategy of the Roman Empire. For Luttwak, the German threat in Roman Europe was analogous to the Russian threat and the essay was as much about the strategy of NATO as it was about the Roman empire.³ Luttwak’s view may be radical but it does not run contrary to the prevailing intellectual assumptions of Roman military historians. It did, however, cause some disquiet amongst other historians of the Roman empire. Writers such as Millar, Mann and, at most length, Isaac have questioned Luttwak’s fundamental assumptions. These writers doubt whether there was any strategy in the modern sense. Millar especially casts great doubt on the policy-making capabilities of the Roman emperor and the quality of information available to him in order that sensible strategic decisions could be taken.⁴

Mainstream Roman history has itself adopted a position of broad consensus in the last twenty years, a consensus that is fundamentally opposed to that in Roman military history. Historians have come to lay great stress on the ancient aspects of the ancient world. This is no tautology. Historians have concentrated not on political history, to which previous generations devoted most of their attention, but on social history, in an attempt to create a kind of sociology of ancient society, emphasising such elements as the economy, status divisions, the relationship between state and individual and the institutions of everyday life. Historians have found that the technology available to the ancients was, in many ways, primitive and that social organisation differed greatly from modern, Western expectations. Life in the ancient world was very different from modern life and the institutions which shaped that life also differed greatly. There is, then, an incongruity between mainstream ancient history and military history which necessitates a re-examination of the assumptions brought to both aspects of what should be a single discipline of ancient history.

We have already noted Speidel’s confidence in the quality of the sources available and the comparative ease with which these can be interpreted. This may lead us to believe that there is a strong empirical case for believing in the modernist view of the Roman army. The interpretation of the sources is often, however, dependent upon the basic assumption of a modernist view. Three groups of sources can be singled out: the military treatises, archaeological remains and inscriptions.

The military treatises are far from simple texts. Frequently based on Hellenistic precursors, they usually deal with specific aspects of Roman military life such as the construction of camps and the organisation of units. Though sometimes based upon the reality of Roman military life, the treatises at best present a text-book version of reality. They single out specific aspects of the Roman military for comment and these tend to be the more technical aspects like trench design or order of march. At worst, the treatises are arguments for reform to be discussed in the political salons of Roman society and their connection with any military reality is, to say the least, tenuous.⁵

Archaeology may offer a certain concrete reality but even here there are problems of interpretation. As we shall see when we look at the forts of Roman Egypt, dating criteria can be decidedly loose and even the century of construction can be a matter of debate. Also, the presence of a fort tells us very little about the military disposition of the troops at the site. We may know that there were troops present and, judging from the size of the fort, we may be able to establish that there were quite a large number of troops there, but we can establish neither what the troops did while they were there nor for how long many of the troops were present. A large fort might have been built for six or seven thousand men but who can tell from the archaeological evidence whether that number of troops remained in garrison for the lifetime of the fort or what their duties and roles were while they were in garrison? Even a seemingly simple structure of linear defence such as Hadrian’s Wall has been the subject of much scholarly debate as to its purpose.⁶ Did the Roman army spend its time training for major conflicts or policing or terrorising the local inhabitants? We may assume that where there were forts there were soldiers but we cannot assume that where there were soldiers there were forts. Quite large numbers of soldiers could have been billeted on civilians or have requisitioned houses and not left any archaeological trace.

The archaeological data can be supplemented with inscriptions but a brief foray through any collection of military inscriptions will demonstrate the weaknesses of these sources. Inscription on stone was an expensive, very formal and permanent record. Like our inscriptions, the inscriptions of the Romans tended to be highly standardised. The inscriptions emphasise career structures, length of service and names. They serve to identify but no one would expect to be able to reconstruct modern society merely by noting the inscriptions in stone and even allowing for the fact that ancient inscriptions are much fuller and varied than modern inscriptions, the problems with the evidence are clear. Let us take a hypothetical example: the tombstone of a Roman legionary at some town in Middle Egypt. What does this tell us? It tells us precisely what the tombstone says: that the soldier of the legion was buried at this spot. We do not know whether the entire legion was situated nearby, why the soldier was in the area, nor why the soldier died. If there was a fort nearby we might assume that the soldier was stationed at the fort at the time of his death but if the fort was small, we might assume that he was visiting the garrison of a smaller unit. If there was no nearby extant military installation, do we assume that he was on campaign, police duties or home on leave? As soon as we try to interpret the death of the soldier, we have to make certain suppositions and assumptions which, to a greater or lesser extent, are constructions separate from the actual text on the stone. I would not argue that such constructions are necessarily wrong, only that the evidence is problematic and our sources are far from the perfection attributed to them. If we were to change the context in which we interpret the inscription, the meaning of that inscription would change as well. The view that the sources are unproblematic springs from the basic assumption that the Roman army behaved in a manner similar to a modern army.

This assumption is, of course, not necessarily incorrect since the institutional arrangements of a modern army are not totally dependent upon industrial technology, allowing for the absence of telecommunications, nor would I wish this book to be seen in a negative light, as an attack on the traditional forms of military history, though I believe that the traditional forms are deeply flawed. By discussing the work of these scholars, I seek merely to clear the field of analysis and to sweep aside previous convictions that discourage the raising of big issues such as what the army was for, what the soldiers did, who the soldiers were and how the army related to the civilian population. If the context is assumed, the answers are also obvious: the Roman army acted in the way modern armies act and performed the same functions. We cannot simply assume that the Roman army existed as a modern-type army.

The modern army is ideally seen as having a very limited function in Western society. The prime function of the army is to defend their societies against threats from external powers or, in more aggressive states, to pose threats to external powers. The army is, therefore, trained for war and whenever the army becomes involved in activities which do not involve fighting a war, these are regarded as extraordinary or aberrations. Thus, the recent involvement of armies in the distribution of humanitarian aid is seen as an extreme measure, only to be undertaken when the civilian agencies are unable to act because of violence. Again, the involvement of the army in anti-terrorist activities frequently causes unease and is excused as part of the extraordinary measures needed to combat terrorism. The ideology of non-involvement is highly developed in certain Western democracies but in many other modern societies the military is far more pervasive and, given the general development of ancient political institutions, such as the judiciary and bureaucracy, one might expect that the army would have been far more integrated into the political and social structures of ancient Rome than in modern Western democracies.

During the Republic, the army had been the people in arms and one would assume a priori that there was no real difference between the social structures of the army and civilian life. Political and military power were inextricably intertwined. Rome’s political leaders commanded her armies and this conjunction of powers, together with the pervasiveness of patronage in Roman social and political life, partially explain the involvement of the Roman army in the political struggles of the late Republic. During the imperial period, there was, until the third century, no division between political and military leaders. Governors administered provinces, heard legal cases and conducted military campaigns. Emperors themselves occasionally led troops into battle. The army, on various occasions, intervened in politics to appoint their general as emperor. At a more local level, although the soldiery fought wars, they were also involved in matters which we might class as civilian. There is at least a prima facie case for assuming that there was no great divide between civilian and soldier. The problematic relationship between soldier and civilian is one of the major themes of this study.

Discussion of the nature of the soldier-civilian relationship raises many questions concerning Roman imperialism. The Roman army was the largest single institution in the Roman empire. If the army was tucked away on the frontiers, in forts, preparing itself assiduously for the day when it would be called to defend the empire, then the army would be remote from civilians and, one suspects, the Roman empire itself might be far distant. However, an army intimately involved in the everyday life of a Roman province would not only be a very visible presence, but would also bring Roman imperial power to the cities and villages of the province. The army would provide a means for the imperial power becoming a real and intrusive element in the life of a provincial.

When considering the relationship between the Roman state, through its representatives, and civilians, we should not lose sight of the soldiers themselves. After all, they started as civilians and those who survived retired into civilian life. The soldiers were themselves an element of society whose lives were deeply affected by the institution of the army. A major element of this study will concern itself with how the army treated its soldiers, a problem which has obvious implications for the issue of military-civilian relations. Patterns of recruitment and settlement and the rewards, both financial and legal, given to the soldiers affected their standing in society. Chapters on the economic and legal status of soldiers and veterans and the impact of veterans on the communities in which they settled create a picture of the soldier and veteran in their economic, social and cultural context allowing us to consider such issues as the ‘Romanity’ of the Roman troops and the extent to which they formed a separate and privileged group in provincial society.

This book aims to explore the relationship between the army and the soldiers of the army and the people and society of an individual province. It thus differs radicall...

Table of contents

• COVER PAGE
• TITLE PAGE
• COPYRIGHT PAGE
• LIST OF MAPS, TABLES AND FIGURES
• PREFACE
• ABBREVIATIONS
• 1. INTRODUCTION
• 2. THE ARMY AND THE PROVINCE
• 3. RECRUITMENT AND VETERAN SETTLEMENT
• 4. THE LEGAL STATUS OF SOLDIERS AND VETERANS
• 5. THE ARMY IN ACTION
• 6. THE ARMY AND THE ECONOMY
• 7. KARANIS: A VILLAGE IN EGYPT
• 8. DIOCLETIAN AND AFTER
• 9. CONCLUSION
• APPENDIX 1: MILITARY UNITS
• APPENDIX 2: THE ARCHAEOLOGY OF THE ARMY
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY