caldrail

I wouldn't dismiss them entirely. You're there, nervous, waiting to fight, and a dozen men handling big heavy angry dogs loose their hounds at you. Those dogs are running at you, full of bared teeth and snarls, and dogs that want to be violent don't mess around. A big heavy dog intent on savaging you doesn't suffer the same morale problems as we do - it just goes at you. I understand what you mean - shields, greaves, weaponry - and to some extent if a formation keeps its nerve then the dogs will be defeated, largely because they become too focused on the one guy they're ripping into. But.... Wouldn't you be a little more nervous if a dozen snarling rottweillers ran toward you full pelt?

No thats ok, the site is informative, and fair play for pointing it out. The use of modern terminology is second nature to us (obviously) but fundamentally wrong, because it distorts the way we understand the roman military. Notice I used to make the same mistake too. Thats why I criticised the site, but at the end of the day at least the information is more or less as it should be, and as Adrian Goldsworthy points out, we shouldn't foist anachronistic organisation on a culture who had different ideas about how to fight wars. For instance. A recent post named the Optio as an executive officer. This suggests an air of authority, of some refinement, a guy with an office. In reality, Optio means "Chosen Man", and given the somewhat brutal methods employed by legions to command their men, what the name refers to is an official henchman of a centurion, nothing more. A man who wields discipline in support of his boss, almost gangland in its authority rather than any professional image. Part of the problem is the image of the roman military as a fully organised monolithic military machine - which in way, it was to people living two thousand years ago and such images survive in the folk memory for a long time, and now we interpret that folk memory in modern terms. Even after the Augustan reforms, with the legions at their organisational peak, they were still corrupt, bullying, and pretty much laws unto themselves. The reality is Rome was an aggressive city state whose military went through great changes in organisation, yet never lost that traditional warband element.

For a while we've had some cracking weather, lovely and sunny. Today though its cloudy, damp from yesterdays rain, and to be honest, quite a bit cooler. In fact, as I strolled across town in the mid-day gloom I could see my breath. Then again, things ain't too bad. The rain yesterday didn't amount to a cyclone sweeping Swindon downstream in massive mudslides or tsunami's. nor did an earthquake reduce my local school to an impromptu graveyard. Nature can be fantastic. A fluke of the weather, a little spot untainted by mankinds need to redevelop, or an animal in the wild close-up, where you never expected. Something that for one reason or another entrances you with its beauty. Sometimes though, nature ain't like that at all... Nature's Nasty Side If you're squeamish at all - look away now... On my way to the library in West Swindon I passed through one of those urban playgrounds that no-one uses. The other side of a fence made from railway sleepers I noticed movement on my left. A crow, startled by my sudden appearance. But it was the other bird that shocked me. A pidgeon, clearly badly injured, feathers strewn everywhere and unable to escape, was being eaten alive by scavengers. At times like this you feel powerless, and it reminds you just how cruel nature can be right in your own back yard, away from the media news teams and their cameras. But on a lighter note Right, enough of death and misery, back to my jobsearch. And there's a new winner of Idiot Employee of the Month. I was given a phone number to enquire about a vacancy and duly rang, but the contact wasn't available, so I rang back later. This time however the woman on the phone realised it was a good idea to ask what the phone call was for, and discovering I was after a job, took some details and promised to send me an application form. Next day, the form arrived in the morning post. With absolutely no details of where to send the thing when I'd filled it in. Obviously this is some sort of initiative test isn't it? I think I've applied to be James Bond's apprentice without realising. Oops... sorry... didn't mean to blow your cover chaps...

You mean there's more? Ohh... Yeah... rescuing father....

An archaeologist and his money are easily parted.... If you can get there with your bad back and hangover...

Unfortunately, he refers to legionary posts in modern terms. He also makes the mistake of referring to specialised troops when such specialisation was considered undesirable by imperial legions, which is why cross-training took place. A legionary was not trained as an artilleryman and regarded as such, he was merely a legionary like any other, who happened to have been trained in artillery. Further, the legions did not contain specialist formations such as artillery. I've already gone into some depth on the nature of roman organisation, and the use of the phrase NCO is not correct. NCO stands for Non-Commissioned-Officer, which indicates a lower level of command in a pyramid structure and is a hangover from the class system of european armies dating from the 1600's. For instance, he mentions the tesserarius as an NCO responsible for watch words. This is a distortion, because the tesserarius was a job within the legion, not a rank as we understand it, although I accept it brought a certain level of status to the holder of that title - but only whilst he did that job. That said, its got all the pertinent information and perhaps there are people who could benefit from studying it.

Translator? Most of the guys filmed doing the work of studying the remains in america had british accents. Correct GO - the british are taking over dinosaur research in a fiendish plot to prove that dinosaurs did not speak english with an american accent

yes.. but... it looks like a barge, handles like a barge on springs... and since when did the americans build a car that goes round corners? A few years back I met a woman from Iowa, or Idaho, or Indiana, or somewhere flat and empty. The conversation got around to driving cars and I asked her what it was like for her to drive in Britain, thinking she'd talk about driving on the correct side of the road. "(gaaaaaasp!)" She said, "You people are sooooo-Per-Meyen!" Apparently she was very impressed by the sort of driving that now gets british citizens tarred and feathered. At a roundabout she sat there astonished whilst traffic buzzed round her oblivious to her presence, and quite unable to think and react quickly enough to slot into traffic. She must be deaf too, because I cannot imagine she wasn't beeped at....

I agree completely. Indiana Jones is a disaster as an archaeologist and quite why the university pays him to teach - when clearly he spends most of his time fighting nazi's in desert regions - because his irresponsible attitude to archaeology is to extract artifacts without the proper authority from the country involved. Therefore, not only is he a tomb-robber, but an antiquities smuggler as well. I also notice he never records any evidence or finds, and going on a dig with the otherwise respectable Professor Jones is a very risky venture. Looks like fun though.... Sneaking into strange ruins... running from big heavy traps & irate natives... flying aeroplanes infested with snakes and nazi's.... getting involved with tank battles... eating strange insects... and getting involved with pretty and inebriated women. Sign me up immediately.

The gladius hispianensis is recorded (by polybius?) as a weapon of superior quality, and since the sign of a good sword was to bend the blade over the head and touch the shoulders before allowing it to spring back to shape, it clearly shows the excellent spanish sword-making dates back way before the islamic invasions.

I'm thinking in terms of those glyphs of jackal headed people (mythological figures but your average traveller in older times wouldn't know that) which were interpreted literally, and if there's a further connection to lycanthropy I would be astonished, as surely this was down to the human fear of wild wolves picking off weak and helpless members of their society?

Often. Especially after a pair of these dogs ripped a young child apart. problem is, the same people who want agressive powerful dogs are the same people who don't give a fig for Dangerous Dog Acts. This is however an interesting point, because the romans were dealing with potentially or very dangerous animals almost on a daily basis. I imagine they accepted the risk to some extent, but I don't recall any mention in roman sources of people suffering animal attacks outside the arena.

Frankly I'm envious. No really... All that scraping away dust and dirt under a baking hot sun...

In the UK the Rotweiller (a large and heavy dog with an unsavoury reputation for attacking young children) is often touted as the descendant of roman war dogs. I've no idea if thats true or not.

I also wonder if the modern fad for computer animations is swallowing up the budget previously spent on expert talking heads. Personally, I think the program could have taken the opportunity to say more about the late cretaceous enviroment of north america (the creature died about two million years before the K/T Even). I admit they did touch on this - they mentioned the 'mississipee sea', the river in the fossil location (that isn't there any more), some speculation about herds of these things running away from T-Rex (who apparently wasn't fast enough to catch them according to the research on the remains locomotion).

Recently I watched a program about medieval psychology, which was interesting. One thing the ppresenter talked about were the Dog-Heads, men with heads of dogs, thought to have villages and farms of their own and always 'somewhere over the horizon'. Now as to whether the continued claims of medieval people to have spotted these creatures wandering around at night are true, who can say? Thing is... I've wondered if the myth of these creatures started because of egyptian heiroglyphs depicting similar creatures. Egyptian wares and oddities may well ahve travelled about with trade especially in roman times and perhaps during the medieval as well, and since your typical peasant is none too educated and remained very literal about his christian worldview, that he interpreted images in this way? And from a few interpretations, a rumour becomes accepted as established expectation. Its interesting that medieval explorers who went out to find these Dog-Heads asked the locals where they were, only to be told 'We thought they lived where you come from" Bizarre...

Condemno ad bestias - Thrown to the beasts Condemno ad gladius - Thrown to the gladiators Condemno ad ludum - Thrown to the lanista, and presumably he used you like any other slave he owned and put you to work doing would he thought you were good for. Spartacus was sentenced in this way for being a bandit, and so his potential death by violence was deemed a suitable fate. The fight of two men with one dagger and the winner passes his dagger to a fresh man was a way of dealing with the noxii, or undesirable criminals. It was in fact an 'entertaining' way to get them to execute each other. It must be pointed out that this form of fight has been viewed with some suspicion in recent times. There were no fixed rules for contracts between lanistae and volunteers as far as I'm aware. One story records a higher class individual who wished to save his friend from debt, and signed on as a gladiator to earn enough to get him out of debt. I've no idea if the man was succesful, and in any case, he would be stained with slavery and therefore ineligible for public office thereafter. The numbers of fights were recorded by the gladiators themselves, either scratched on their cell walls or a lasting record on their tombstones. We know they were very keen to record their track record, and I dare say the audience did too, for betting purposes. Thus you might have heard two men arguing about Triumphus - "No way, Lucius, he gets let off more than he wins. I'm betting on Decimus..." - or that sort of thing. Bad luck tokens were for sale at events with which to curse the gladiator they wished to lose (and one wonders if a few of these lead pebbles weren't thrown at the gladiator if he won...). Anyway, the number of fights we believe gladiators fought depends on statistics gathered from such sources and might be a distortion of what actually happened. Nonetheless, gladiators, particularly the succesful ones, were pampered athletes and trained very hard, which required time. They also needed time to recover from wounds, and they may at times have been sent away to tour the provinces giving demonstration bouts.

I was fascinated by a documentary aired a couple of nights ago. A teenager in 1997 discovered a fossil in North Dakota, which turned out to be an extremely important find, because the creature was mummified and soft tissue had survived. It was a hadrosaur, a common grazing animal living in wetlands (the area found was once a wide river near the inland sea that once split north america in two during the cretaceous period). The reamins were not complete, and a large portion had gone missing (eaten?), and a further suprise was the discovery of an unlucky crocodile lodged in the carcass. Unfortunately, the main body could not be succesfully scanned with x-rays because the rock was too dense, so work continues, but its noticeable that the amount of soft tissue meant that modern reconstructions of dinosaur skeletons are incorrect - the vertebrae need to be spaced out more and the length of these animals needs to be increased by around 5%. Colour does appear to important to dinosaurs - the relative sizes of scales on their bodies suggest different patches of colour as modern reptiles do. What annoyed me though was the typical modern documentary style. After every commercial break, the voice-over re-introduced the program saying exactly the same things - and we saw the same computer generated imagery repeatedly. Please - tell me something.... Anything.... I know the teenager found it, you said five times already.... Please... Aww no, not the 'falling over dead' sequence again.... I won't mind if you prove they smoked cigarettes and became extinct because of lung cancer.... Just for something original.... This program suffered from one major flaw - they didn't have enough to say to fill an hour.

Camel units are recorded as in use in Egypt in the 2nd century AD. The terrain had little impact on the expansion of cavalry, since cavalry became ever more important and the dominant arm in the late empire. Legionaries weren't always taught horsemanship. This is something written by Vegetius and therefore represents an ideal situation. It wasn't possible for instance to train post-marian legionaries to ride because the legions of that time had no cavalry contingent. Julius Caesar did so because he needed cavalry there and then, not because he instituted a training program for his men. Elephants, despite their size and strength, are not well suited to battle and panic easily, with a tendency to run between gaps in men no matter what the mahout has to say about it.

I haven't seen any evidence for the length of training, and even if true, this refers to contract professionals. The cannon-fodder POW's or criminals weren't trained at all. Training must have taken some time and not all gladiators got past it. Estimates reckon that up to a third of intakes were rejected for inability or injury over the months of training. Typically, yes, this was true. Each fight was a risk, and the professional gladiator was something analogous to a race-horse, a trained athlete, an expensive profit-making commodity you didn't want killed. There was a limit to the number of festivals these men wouild fight in, and for private shows, where a customer may well want a death to please his audience, a lesser man would be the obvious choice. It paid to be a good fighter. The arena combat was an event, a spectacle, something special. There is a tale of a playwright being decidedly miffed when his audience heard a gladiator fight was taking place elsewhere and everyone vanished. These fights weren't happening every day, someone had to foot the bill, and the arena was an expensive way to impress the citizens. It all depends on circumstance. I wasn't aware of a time restriction before a gladiator could be freed, and in imperial times freedom was at the whim of the emperor/editor, who was more concerned with crowd-pleasing than strict regulations. I think perhaps there's some distortion of fact here. A bought slave trained as a gladiator is an investment, so obviously the lanista isn't keen to free him. A gladiator however may keep a portion of his winnings, and can buy his freedom, which inevitably means he must remain a succesful gladiator some time. There are instances of men volunteering to pay off their debts, who obviously had no intention of stayiing in the arena longer than necessary. Volunteers signed contracts lasting between three and seven years and the last year or two (if they survive) may well be spent working as a doctores, a trainer. As a guide, survivng inscriptions left by gladiators infer many of them were survivng fifteen to twenty-five fights. Also, the average expected life-span of a gladiator is reckoned at four years, so as the men condemned ad gladius by the courts were enslaved for five years as their punishment, their survival chances were not good. If the games editor gave them the rudis practice sword they were free men, whether the lanista wanted that or not. Also, since many gladiators were contracted fighters, the lanista had no choice to let the man go if he reached the end of his contract. Its also true that some freed fighters eventually returned to the arena as volunteers, either because they failed in life afterward, or because they wanted to return to the live they knew and understood. As a gladiator, he was cheered on by the crowds. As an ordinary citizen, his popularity faded and many must have felt has-beens.

"One moment senator, the president is in conference with the First lady right now and doesn't..." (THUMP!) "....Want to disturbed..." (SMASH! tinkle...) "Perhaps you could call back in fifteen minutes Sir?"

The romans were actually very intelligent in their use of cavalry. The days of mad headlong charges at the enemy had to arrive, and its as well to remeber that roman horses weren't as readily available as in later eras, expensive, and thus valuable commodities that you wouldn't want to risk unduly. That said, we shouldn't underestimate how potentially effective they could be. Hannibals returning cavalry sealed up the roman army which in theory outnumbered the horsemen by a considerable degree. That also shows the value of tight coherent defense (which you correctly point out) and how effective cavalry is at fighting at the edge of a formation, using height, weight, mobility, and picking off stragglers seperated from their fellows. Interesting point about the light infantry. Given such men were better able to keep some sort of pace with horses it allowed support. This does indicate that cavalry alone in these times weren't so capable of the decisive victories we see later (again, another point you raised). The cavalry are therefore a distraction to the enemy, to conceal the approach of this support, or a defensive measure for the light infantry in keeping enemy cavalry off their backs (a primary task for roman cavalry). However, whilst this all sounds very flexible and strategically sound, the ability of ancient generals was not always so inspiring, and unlike the flexible tactics we're discussing here, it was more probable that without the command structures available in later era's the ancient armies relied on battle plans arranged before the start, and any advantage was to be gained by luring the enemy army into a worse situation. Cavalry and infantry interaction for support was in the ancient world dependent on situation, the observational skills of those involved, and whether the commanders involved had anything between their ears.

His understanding of roman organisation is also way short of the mark, because he consistently refers to it in modern terms. I actually think he's bluffing. His system of ranks is nothing like that quoted by recognised experts, and please note he refuses to answer if you challenge him on his sources. If he genuinely is a wargamer, then its likely he's used to blustering to sound clever, I've seen characters like that before in wargaming circles. In fact, RW could receive an apology in public from me without hesitation if only he'd actually be a little more honest about his research. Notice that he never ever admits to being wrong no matter what he posts.

You hit the nail on the head - it is for show. Its the visual appearance as an exotic weapon that mattered more in the late empire. Such exotic weaponry wasn't entirely new - from the mid empire at least they were using a peculiar sword, with four steel 'knitting needles' as sharp pointy bits arranged in a 2x2 box layout (I believe it was called the quadrent, and had some religious significance?). By the late empire the old style professional bout had gone out of fashion. A straightforward no-nonsense sword-fight was no longer considered enough to please an audience, so the use of these strange and sometimes awkward weapons was both the visual interest and also the inability of the combatants to land a fatal blow. This served two purposes. Firstly, it meant that lanistii didn't lose a well trained and profitable commodity, but also because it dragged the fight out. This last point means in turn that fewer gladiators were required. In the late empire fighters were becoming viewed as heathen murderers by the increasing christian influence in society, and there less of them available, so for a full fun-packed day at the arena it was necessary to stretch the combats out as much as possible. Notice that after Trajan the huge celebratory games were scaled down considerably. In the late empire, there's very little emphasis on them in roman commentary too compared to what we read of during the Julio-claudian era. There wasn't the same money involved anymore, fights were much more expensive to stage, so instead of staging huge combats and mass spectacles, the professional bouts arranged for games had been reduced to a bloody pantomime involving these peculiar fantasy weapons.