caldrail

Legionaries caught sleeping on guard (and they engaged in this practice often as the common technique was to prop yourself up on a spear) weren't necessarily beaten. They would normally be given animal food to eat and told to sleep outside the camp. 'Hazing' in this instance appears to be another word for what the British call 'Beasting', which is communal bullying in order to force conformity and attitude. It's difficult to say to what extent the Romans carried this out since we don't have much in the way of writings left by common soldiers (please note the supposed level of literacy in the legions). What we can say with some confidence is that money was an important factor. A letter from one soldier in Egypt tells his family that "nothing happens around here without money".and we already know that a certain of corruption persisted within the legions, with centurions often taking bribes from their men to avoid onerous duty. During the post-Marian period the Romans instituted a system of 'Close Friends', in which they were quartered in eight man groups. Whilst this does not appear to have had any combat significance (because the group was too small for survival on the battlefield and because the Romans did not allocate contubernae to specific duties) it represented a manifestation of the 'extended family' concept that runs through Roman society like letters in a stick of rock. It provided a 'buddy' system among the men and some measure of low level control whilst the centurion was elsewhere in that their comnrades were likely to keep a close eye on what their less well behaved brethren were up to. However, clearly the level of behaviour in the Roman legions wasn't brilliant and easily dropped to appalling levels. Theft from civilians wasn't unusual and note that the legions protected their men from what they considered interference from aggrieved citizens bearing complaints about their loss. The case was held by a senior legionary ("a judge in boots") and unless the legionary was unlucky, the case would be dismissed on some trivial grounds. Whatever the result, the plaintiff was at risk of retribution from the accused soldier and his mates. There is clearly a 'bully boy' attitude among legionaries. This can lead us to all sorts of speculation about hazing/beasting. There's little evidence for it apart from a suggestion that recruits being escorted to their camp were quickly deprived of their expenses money by asll sorts of ruses from the veteran soldiers, and that sort of behaviour is conformal with our perceived pattern of the legions thus far. It isn't hard to imagine that bullies within the ranks 'stole the soldiers lunch money', but I don't see much evidence for that - none, if I were honest - although money was clearly changing hands to smooth things over on a daily basis..There was a certain level of fraternity within the legion derived from their 'buddy system' and the legions esprit-de-corps, and we know that legionaries were required to swear an oath not to steal from each other before a campaign (does that suggest they suffered a low level of theft in the camp ordinarily? That's not unusual for men billetted together - "If it isn't nailed down, it's mine" ) We do know that Roman soldiers lived in extremely cramped conditions. Not only were eight men billetted together in a small room, but their slaves (yes - soldiers sometimes owned slaves) must have lived with them. A feature of a men-only enviroment in restricted space is that the level of violence increases, especially when the prevailing culture is macho, and the legions qualify on both grounds. Although that would raise our expectation, we don't see mentions of this sort of thing in the sources. Either it was too low level for writers to notice or bother writing about, or that level of violence did not occur. The truth is probably between those viewpoints. The reality as far as I can determine (you may disagree) is that the centurions regarded hazing/beasting as their preserve, as a means of enforcing the behaviour they wanted foom the men, and ensuring they were willing to perform assigned duties or compensate by cash if they couldn't. What might happen to those soldiers who did not perform a daily duty and didn't compensate their centurion is another matter.

Why has Nero not been given a world/planet/ comet/ outer spacey thingy all of his own.? He is the manifestation of Apollo, you know...

Farmers or not, the Romans had a long history of raiding right back into the bronze age, and possibly earlier than that. Military virtue was part of the culture so I guess that had something to do with it. They didn't always have an easy time of it mind you. Like most warrior peoples, they tended to laud their victories and merely mention their defeats (unless some dramatic tragedy was part of it). For instance, Quintilius Varus gets star billing for his complete inability to spot the ruse and his subsequent loss of three legions (and honourable suicide), whereas another major defeat a few years ago is barely mentioned. Marcus Lollius, anyone? Were the Romans so different? Not really, although they were probably more militaristic than some, more disciplined than others, and rapacious traders the moment they spotted an opportunity.

Phew... I nearly stopped taking the pills for just a moment there

There are times when I stumble across an old gem in my local library. it happened today, as I spotted an old style bound book hidden among the ranks of colourful spines in the 'ancient history' section. Always worth checking out in my experience. Not because older books are any better informed (mostly they aren't, especially the victorian ones) but because they can provide some extraordinary local detail and period atmosphere. This book was called The Scouring of the White Horse and it turns out to have been written by Thomas Hughes, none other than the author of Tom Brown's School Days, both books written in 1857. There's a handwritten note dated 1861 on the first page. You don't get any more atmospheric than that! In my hands was a book about an area of land not far from where I live, that I've visited a few times on my cross country hikes, and what struck me was how similar the land is today. He describes walking along dirt paths that I've trod myself. There's more fences up there now and more intensive farming, though curiously he notes at one point about the keenness of farmers for ploughing. Given the area is rugged chalk upland over looking rural lowlands, the ability of victorian farmers to work the land up there is impressive, but then, the Romano-British did too. Hughes recounts a holiday he spent away from London and his humdrum life as a clerk. I love the bit where his boss pays him off and asks when he wants a well deserved holiday. There's a personal touch about victorian business that we've lost. He discards the Channel Islands, France, the Lakes, and instead heads for the country. I note the various assumptions we have to make when dealing with a holiday journal nearly 150 years old. He refers to a 'Bradshaw' when travelling (a travel guide written in the era for the convenience of railway journeys in an era of a plethora of railway companies and timetables. Back then, an essential aid - just ask Michael Portillo - He did a television series on it). We read how his friend lit a 'lucifer', which turns out to be a pipe. I just love these little details I had no idea of. The White Horse at Uffington is being cleaned. A crowd of willing workers and well-to-do gentlemen cheerily interact. Best of all, the organisers have turned it into a community event and are staging 'games' in the area, with horse races, wrestling, and fights with 'backswords', or sticks, in which head injuries prove the most common defeat. Hughes describes the locals, rough, hardened men, with gypsies and traders, all camped out in the old hill fort (at a small rent, of course - Lord Craven wasn't entirely a landowner for nothing!) There's an exuberance to the manner Hughes writes, and clearly, a vivacious nature to victorian England despite the presence of a brutish underclass. You can't help but love it. And funnily enough, while Hughes tells us that a fifteen year old schoolboy "with sufficient industry" could read two hundred pages of latin text and learn from it, their knowledge of the dark ages and the origins of neolithic monuments is horribly mangled. How things have changed. "But not one man in a thousand who will be on the hill tomorrow will know what the meaning of it all is; and that makes it a melancholy sight to me." 'The Old Gentleman' (Thomas Hughes)

Having just watched Prime Ministers Question Time, I was also amused to hear a minister ask, in the light of changes and crackdowns on benefit fraud, whether Richard III had been declared unfit to work.

A few did continue, mostly those connected with ports or roman forts. There is however a marked change from Roman to Saxon settlement overall as many older towns are abandoned through lack of commerce or increased disease, perhaps violence in some cases. The Saxons for their part weren't particularly interested in using Roman buildings to live and often employed the stone as a resource for creating their own. In at least one case, bemused Saxns saw the ruins of a Roman rtown and assumed it had been built by giants. I should point out however that the decline of Roman towns began before the legions left Britain, and although some received official patronage and investment with such things as substantial stone walls (increasingly common with Saxon raids a threat), many did not, and the older Roman pattern of settlement visibly evaporates - but even so, please note how often medieval towns, although sometimes much smaller, existed adjacent to Roman sites.

Oh great. They can identify a king killed in battle in the middle ages but can't be bothered to find the villain who vandalised my car in an age of databases, criminal records, more CCTV cameras than anywhere else in the world, and a government keen on restoring law and order with rights for victims? Tell David Mitchell to go away and tell a few jokes about justice. You never know, it might do some good, besides earning him a few quid. Not that I feel like having a rant you understand. Or that I place values on material possessions. This is the Age of Aquarius after all. Let's be a new age communal society and share our transport with the local community. Why not? It's going to happen anyway. (deep breath) Okay, I feel better now. How fascinating that Kind Richard III has been identified. At least he'll get a decent burial.

Given we're dealing with a different culture it isn't implausible to suggest that the building listed hospital use among its primary purposes, and that it was used for a variety of reasons such as when medicine wasn't a priority. Would the Romans really leave a building almost disused? Or were they beset with malingerers with fallen arches and bad colds?

When people begin to learn about the roman legions (I prefer not to call it "the army", they didn't have a national army but instead maintained lots of small ones, calling them legions), they start with the organisational breakdown and reputation. Immediately the human tendency to categorise, not to mention a great deal of military romanticism, leads us to place modern aspects on the legions. The typical glowing description on the internet for instance often looks suspiciously like a wish list for any aspiring general. It is true that the Romans had medics among them. These were invariably greeks, because the Romans themselves did not have these skills. A lot has been said in recent years about medical ability in ROman times. They had become quite adept in healing injuries caused by violence, but remember that even so part of the treatment was ensuring the injured man said his prayers. There were also a lot of treatments for ailments, major or minor, that clearly did more harm than good. The trouble was that many people in Roman times claimed to have medical skills and didn't. Whether these con-merchants survived in legion employment I can't say - I don't recollect any mention of a medic pretending to know what he was doing and getting caught - but then the Romans don't really mention medics do they? Nor do they ever mention a medical corps, because there wasn't one. Yes, they had a primitive hospital in their home fort, and greek medics among them. However, the reality of ancient warfare was that an injured man who couldn't get back to the hospital would very lucky to survive for long.

I see two problems. Firstly our lack of archaeological evidence for multiple prisons, and secondly, the lack of explicit mentions of them in the sources. I'm also wondering if our modern context is inappropriate, since the population of prisons today is higher than previous eras, especially in the US which is very fond of locking people up, but of course I have to accept this may be a phenomenon linked to cultural development which the Romans shared to a lesser degree. We know that bodies were indeed thrown into sewers where possible - an unknown number of mugging victims were gotten rid of this way (and that still happens today, witness the behaviour of a russian serial killer in recent times) and Nero is noted in Suetonius as hiding the evidence of his youthful adventures in this way. Whether escaping along the cloaca maximus was possible is another matter. It was large enough - the Romans proudly tell us how large the sewer was - but incarceration wasn't necessarily easy to escape in this way. Were prisoners chained to prevent escape? Was the sewer gated? Were the roman prisoners given to superstition toward dark tunnels of human excrement, not least since unwanted babies were routinely discarded in such places and therefore regarded as a burial place? (though in fairness, since prostitutes used tombs as places to ply their trade, respect for the death was somewhat circumstantial). You raise interesting points but unfortunately there's a great deal to consider.

Caesar however does not highlight these 'styles' of leadership as abnormal, other than to boost his own personal standing by showing that he did indeed behave with martial valour. The fact that a general in ancient times fought alongside his men means nothing - that was normal practice in an age when the ability to fight was as important to impress your own troops as much as impress the enemy. That he relied on subordinate commanders is also not unusual - typically an ancient army has already decided how it wanted to fight the confrontation before it began. Deciding during the battle is too late - real time communications were not reliable or even instituted, not even by the Romans, who did no more than rely on passing information by the same means as their enemies.

I'm amazed there are 15,000 crocodiles in one area. Escaped from a farm? Who pays for that lot to feed? Or can't he afford it anymore?

The question of whether 'people struggled to stay alive' is circumstantial, not an assumed fact, and many primitive peoples get along quite happily today without undue worry (and most of their concerns are caused by modern society poking its commercial and military nose in) The thing often forgetten is that archaeology isn't just about digging up bits and pieces from the ground, it's about context - why those pieces are there, what they mean. In general a broken sherd of pottery does little m ore than indicate culture and period, nothing more, but its placement can change that significance, as archaeologists are only too keenly aware of the rubbish people in the past left behind. The thing is, it's possible to tell, with enough evidence, how much struggle people went through in their daily lives. "Making your daily bread" was a tough chore for neolithic peoples as the arrival of superior agriculture meant they had to resort to physical labour to exploit it. Skeletal remains display the results of constant hunching over a millstone for instance. Firstly, they had enough grain as far as we can tell. Second, someone in the family went to a lot of trouble to feed the family. What we see in the early bronze age is a period of plenty. I'm not sure why, presumably the farming methods were getting better and the slow introduction of metal tools was a boon. In the middle Bronze Age, there's a rapid increase in the population of Britain (after the megalithic religious sites like Stonehenge and Avebury had closed). At the same time, a huge surplus of bronze axe heads that were never used as tools appears - why? The two are part of the same phenomenon, and can be construed, even by a non-expert like me - as a parallel increase in personal entrepeurism, materialism, and changes in family emphasis. There are of course writers who want to sell books and thus sensationalise the past. Television is by far the worst offender mind you, although some documentaries are very responsible and quite revealing.

it's even less formal than that. The sources mention officers ranging behind the line attempting to rally or spur men on (Roman discipline was not invulnerable) rather than actually commanding troops (which was actually the job of the centurions). In fewer cases, such as Caesar himself, we see mentions of senior officers fighting in the line alongside their men, which again was primarily to inspire the men around them. What this means is that we have real identification of the lack of overall control by one man. Certainly senior officers had authority, but junior officers had considerable freedom (and responsibility) to show initiative and lead from the front.

Aha! Found it. I believe this page comes from a book written by Francis Hitchens in 1978. The symbology of 'the maze' appears quite inherent to human psychology and may well be a manifestation of instinctive behaviour that dates back to our primeval past. See what you think... BasicMaze.pdf

I've seen that before in an article. Apparently the pictured labyrinth is not a physical one, representing any constructed site, but more of a metaphysical concept dealing with personal enlightenment and transformation (apparently). The article infrerred that constructed labyrinths were bult to encapsulate this idea in physical form, to somehow attempt to make it real. I'll try to find the article but it was written in the 70's and I'm not sure where it is.

Can you believe this? I was banned from the accessing this site by my local library. Back online now, of course. Guess Caldrail knew too much

Guards would be supplied on the orders of the civil administration from whichever existing corps they deemed appropriate or convenient. The facilities would be secure but not necessarily fortified - it's unlikely such defenses were viewed as standard or were commonplace. Since the legions of the time were not reliably paid they often took civilian jobs to provide income and were not always primarily concerned with military activity despite the huge increase in numbers officially enlisted.

The issue of Roman command is subject to incorrect modern interpretation, as many assume the situation was exactly the same as today. In republican times the twin legion consular army used a system of power sharing, in which each general took command on alternating days and the other acted on his orders. This was done primarily to prevent ambitious leaders getting ideas, but the scale of warfare increased to the point where this system could no longer function adequately. It then migrated to a system of legionary legates in imperial times who were pretty much their own masters, subject to imperial or senatorial decree, with the proviso that in the provinces they were seconded to the governor. Thus day to day activities were under legate authorisation (although centurions did all the petty organisation) and military expeditions were either headed by the governor himself as the regional overlord (thus brigading the legions assigned to him and with him on campaign in one temporary army) or acting on orders to complete their objectives as individual formations. The idea of micromanagement is one largely dependent on the character of the commander himself. Some men prefer to delegate, others to take a personal interest. Quite how leaders like Antony and Octavian could micromanage their forces, up to around thirty legions apiece at their peak in the civil war, spread over large areas for practical reasons, is another matter. In imperial times please note that Augutus introduced a small number of tribunes to the legion, who acted as executive officers for ad hoc or assigned tasks.

Well he would wouldn't he? It's all deeply instinctual (and a little immature, but if you're that powerful, who's going to criticise?) and the basis for achieving political success, which is after no different to trying to dominate a herd/pack in the wild - you get mating rights and everyomne else slinking out of your path. However these lads don't have the experience of it. You can sort of tell can't you? The problem with playing king of the hill is that sooner or later a younger stronger man will want your place. That too is the natural norm. A great many dictators end their careers in igmony.

Firstly re-enactors aren't trying to kill each other thus their behaviour is slightly different, aside from anachronistic modern mindsetm (I'm not decrying their research and efforts, but be honest, the people who did this for real grew up in a world where it happened around them, unlike today). A shield wall is a temporary barrier of overlapping shields designed for maximum protection. The late roman empire developed the idea into two rows of shields, one above the other (jeez - those guys must have strong arms!). It is not possible to charge with a shield wall. It is, despite opinion given above, more difficult to maintain a shield wall during advance. The formation is primarily defensive for those reasons. When we consider the use of a shield wall remember that fighting throughout the event is not constant. Warriors get tired as sword & shield melee is physically intensive, thus there would be periods where both lines stand apart, regaining their breath, taunting the enemy, or simply readying themselves for the next surge. Descriptions of the battle wouldn't generally mention that (one roman source does but does so in order to stress the relentless and determined nature of legion vs legion), and although the actual fighting is sporadic or intermittent, both sides are confronting each all the time. It's also worth mentioning that pushing is as useful a tactic as swinging a sword around. Does that sound odd? Watch a modern riot with armed police. Human psychology is no different to other creatures in many respects and so getting pushed back is liable to induce a sense of failure or defeat. This is an inherent part of a shield wall in that it presents a harder barrier to force backward.

I wouldn't rule it out but Roman policy on helmets was to avoid obstructing the senses as much as possible, thus ears, nose, mouth, and eyes are not covered and incidentially whilst I understand the researchers inferences, there's nothing I've seen to suuggest that infantry used masks. It might simply be religious in nature if they did, not necessarily for combat.

I should add, in case of confusion, that there are only two reasons why old men were asked to stay on. Firstly to keep valuable experience in the legion, but also to keep numbers up. Recruitment into the legions was not guaranteed and legates did stoop to some dodgy means to maintain the strength of their command (indeed, long service was one of the gripes mentioned by Tacitus in the Pannonian Mutiny, so clearly these men were often persuaded against their better judgement to remain legionaries)

This should answer your question... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Evocatus