Rise Of The Auxilaries

[Onasander]

I read in Brian Campbell's book the Roman Army that the first exclusively auxilary fort known within the Roman Empire is in Valkenburg, Holland, 40 A.D. Now, me's so dumb it never occured to me that the Roman's would ever of allowed, or for that matter, ever thought of this.

 

How were independent Auxilary forces maintained, provided for, trained, and what of thier leadership?

[Favonius Cornelius]

You see a great many instances where auxillary forces are stationed alone with responsibility to a given area. Of course, the emperors were not fools: they commonly stationed them in far off locations so as to isolate them, give them no connection to the people they garrisoned and focus them on their task. Two examples I can think of off the top of my head would be Sarmatians in Britannia and Batavians in Aegyptus. They recieved less pay than the legions except perhaps for some specific cases, and were trained as well or nearly as well as the legions.

 

Not sure about the leadership of these units, but my guess is that the leaders were more trusted men early on in the empire, then later more men from the region the unit was from were put in (better trust, fewer Romans).

[Germanicus]

Onosander, I found the Vindolanda Tablets gave me a better understanding of the way things worked in those kind of forts. They were written by the soldiers and officers and wives and slaves of the ninth cohort of Batavians and the first cohort of Tungrians, both Auxiliary units located at the fort, immediatly below Hadrians wall in the 1st and 2nd centuries.

 

You could do some reading at "Vindolanda Tablets online" link below.

 

 

 

 

 

http://vindolanda.csad.ox.ac.uk/