The Auxilia of the Roman Imperial Army

by George Leonard Cheesman

All these suppositions, however, both as regards Germany and Britain, are based upon the assumption that a raid would be the sole subject of the attacking force, and that it would not be too numerous to be dealt with by the garrisons of three or four castella. To a more serious invasion the resistance offered was much less effective. The legions, it is true, still remained in reserve, but they formed the only concentrated force at the disposal of the defending general, for the majority of the auxilia, scattered as they were along the entire length of the frontier, could not be quickly concentrated, and a provincial garrison can rarely have taken the field at anything like its full strength. The system also created serious difficulties when it became necessary to send troops from one province to the aid of another. Three regiments, for example, could not easily be sent from Germany to Pannonia, because each of them constituted an essential link in the chain of frontier defence. It became the practice, therefore, to form out of detachments drawn from several regiments a composite vexillatio in which efficiency must have been greatly diminished by lack of esprit de corps. A cavalry vexillatio of this type commanded by a certain Lollianus, probably during the Parthian war of Trajan, was drawn from no less than five alae and fourteen cohortes equitatae.[346]

In defence of the system it would probably have been urged that on every frontier the hostile forces were equally dispersed and far less easily concentrated, and that a combination of the Celtic or Teutonic tribes would be heard of long before it was ready for action. The existence of the league which attacked and for a time broke through the Danube frontier in the reign of Marcus was certainly known to the imperial government, and the local governors succeeded in delaying the crisis until the return of the vexillationes which had been sent to the eastern frontier, with whose aid they hoped to be able to cope with the situation.[347] Their calculations were upset by the havoc wrought in the army by the plague which these troops brought with them. Even so the danger was eventually surmounted, and the frontiers were on the whole successfully maintained for nearly a century more.

But the full consequences of this system cannot be perceived without some consideration of the changes which it brought about in the conditions of military life and their effect upon the general morale and condition of the troops. A very important point to notice is their immobility. Already in the first century there was, except for the officers, no regular system of transfers, and only an important change in the military situation caused troops to be sent from one province to another. In fact such changes were frequent, and considerable transfers took place, particularly during the Flavian period and the wars of Trajan. From the accession of Hadrian onwards, however, such movements cease almost entirely. During the following hundred and twenty years hardly a legion changed its position and the auxiliary regiments remained almost equally stationary.[348] We can trace regiments which remained literally for centuries in the same province and for the greater part of the time were in the same castellum. Of the twenty-one cohorts and alae which are mentioned by the Notitia Dignitatum as forming part of the garrison of Britain, fifteen are shown by the evidence of diplomata to have been in the province long before the end of the reign of Hadrian; and two more, which occur in a diploma of 146, are probably only not mentioned earlier because they were creations of that emperor and had consequently no veterans ready for discharge until after his death.[349] Similarly the Cohors V Lucensium et Callaecorum was in Pannonia at least from 60 to 198, the Cohors I Hemesenorum from 138/46 to 240, and the Ala III Augusta Thracum from 148 to 268/71.[350] The best instance, however, is that of the Cohors II Ituraeorum Felix. This regiment is placed by the Notitia in Egypt, and other evidence shows it to have been in the province in 147, 136, 98, 83, and probably 39.[351] As this section of the Notitia seems to date, at the earliest, from the beginning of the fifth century the regiment was probably quartered in the same province for at least three hundred and twenty years.[352]

Evidence of continued stay in one castellum is naturally more difficult to find, but the way in which the names Ulpius, Aelius, and Aurelius follow one another on a series of inscriptions of the Ala I Ulpia Contariorum from Arrabona in Pannonia Superior suggests that the regiment remained there throughout the second century, and the title Antoniniana shows that it had not moved before the reign of Severus Antoninus.[353] At the fort of Veczel in Dacia the Cohors II Flavia Commagenorum has left inscriptions dating from the reigns of Hadrian, Marcus, Septimius Severus, Severus Alexander, and Philip, which cover practically the whole period during which the province was in existence.[354] In Britain a remarkable series of dedications from Amboglanna (Birdoswald), which has already been referred to, shows that the Cohors I Aelia Dacorum was stationed there from about 211 to 271.[355]

Had the practice of employing a secondary title derived from the name of the reigning emperor commenced before the third century it would probably be easy to prove stays of much longer duration. The figures given above must certainly be taken as a minimum. A second-century auxiliary could thus make himself at home in his quarters in the practical certainty that, with the exception of a few temporary absences as member of a vexillatio, he would spend the whole of his twenty-five years of service patrolling the frontier on each side of his castellum.

In considering the life which the frontier guards would lead under these conditions we must remember that the character of the auxiliary soldier in the second century had changed considerably since the force was first organized by Augustus. In the early first century enrolment in the Roman service had little effect on the levies of wild tribesmen who composed the greater part of the auxilia at this period. They might be organized in Roman fashion, but the military qualities which they displayed and their whole manner of fighting were inherited from their ancestors. Promptam ad pericula nec minus cantuum et armorum tumultu trucem is Tacitus’s description of a cohort of Sugambri employed in Thrace in the reign of Tiberius, and in like fashion the German cohorts of Caecina’s army shouted their war-songs and rattled their shields beneath the walls of Cremona.[356] In the second century all this was changed: the progress of Romanization had raised the majority of the provincials, even in the frontier districts, to a level of culture which placed them far above their ancestors of three generations back, although they might still seem barbarous to a cultured Greek or Italian.[357] In the conditions of the service there was nothing to prevent the auxilia from participating in this general advance, and the soldiers who spent the best years of their lives in these little frontier stations gathered around them all the amenities of provincial life which would have been found in any country town in the neighbourhood. On the sheltered side of the fort a civil settlement, technically known as the canabae, quickly sprang up, and soon contained as many inhabitants as the fort itself, if not more. It was here that the soldiers placed their wives and children, that retired veterans settled near their old comrades, and traders erected their shops. A bath-house or two and a few small shrines, particularly those dedicated to the popular military cults of Mithras, ‘the Unconquered Comrade,’ and Juppiter Dolichenus satisfied the highest material and spiritual needs.[358]

At the fort of the Saalburg, where such a settlement has been carefully explored, an area of something like seventy-five acres was covered with buildings and gardens. Shrines dedicated to the Mater Deum and to Silvanus and Diana have been found, as well as those of Mithras and Juppiter Dolichenus, and two others remain as yet unidentified. On the outskirts, here as elsewhere, lay the cemetery with its inscribed sepulchral monuments, the chief source of our information on so many points of military life.[359] On the British wall no canabae have been so carefully explored as those on the German limes, which is the more to be regretted since the buildings are usually in a better state of preservation; but it is still possible to see near the fort at Borcovicium (Housesteads) the terraces on which a scanty crop was raised, while the remains of buildings extend down the hill from the fort at the top to a small Mithraeum in the valley.[360] At Cilurnum an elaborate bath-house was erected for the use of the soldiers of the Ala II Asturum on the banks of the Tyne, and further excavation would doubtless show that it did not stand alone. Where excavations have not taken place the existence of these and other buildings is testified to by inscriptions. At a fort on the Lower Rhine we even find the praefectus repairing at his own cost the regimental clock.[361]

The married quarters mentioned above require a few words of explanation. Numerous critics of the Roman army have assumed not only that celibacy is a valuable military ideal, but that it was actually attained until Severus issued his famous edict permitting soldiers to marry while still on active service.[362] Previous to this it is assumed that they had no relations with women but those of the least binding description. Seeck, indeed, has carefully explained that the ‘children of the camp’ could not have been reckoned upon as a valuable source for recruits, because the rate of mortality is notoriously higher among illegitimate than legitimate children.[363] This theory is sufficiently refuted by the fact that, as we have seen, nearly fifty per cent. of the recruits for the Legio III Augusta in Africa were giving castris as their birthplace long before the reign of Severus.[364] A recently discovered edict of Domitian has shown further that such unions were sufficiently permanent to be officially recognized by the government during a soldier’s period of service, although only legalized at his discharge.[365] The effect of Severus’s edict was merely to anticipate this act and give legal sanction to existing and perfectly well understood social conditions. Practically the change was probably of small importance, since it seems fairly clear that married quarters were not allowed inside the fort walls after this edict any more than before it, nor were married men allowed to remain permanently outside. Cagnat has shown that the arrangement of the internal buildings of the legionary fortress at Lambaesis, which are proved by epigraphical evidence to have been still existing in the third century, is entirely opposed to such a supposition, and to the general theory, which has often been advanced, that from the time of Severus onwards such a fortress became merely a club-house and exercise ground for the greater part of the troops.[366] These arguments are concerned only with the legionaries, but they are worth introducing because the erroneous views here discussed have often been made to apply to the army as a whole. In the case of the auxilia, indeed, there was never any justification for their acceptance. The evidence of the diplomata was always sufficient to show that even in the first century the auxiliary soldiers, like the legionaries, formed family ties during their period of service which were officially recognized on their discharge.[367] The same picture is given by early sepulchral inscriptions, of which the following, from the Pannonian fort of Teutoburgium, may serve as an example:

‘Ti(berio) Cl(audio) Britti f(ilio) Valerio, dec(urioni) alae II Aravacorum, domo Hispano, annor(um) L, stip(endiorum) XXX, et Cl(audiae) Ianuariae coniugi eius et Cl(audiae) Hispanillae filiae vivis ex testamento Flaccus dec(urio) frater et Hispanilla filia heredes faciundum curaverunt.’[368]

This tendency towards matrimony was naturally intensified by the more settled life of the second-century auxiliary. The systematic investigation of the cemetery attached to one of these permanent garrisons reveals as orderly a family life as could be found in any country town of the peaceful inland provinces. The following inscriptions, which are drawn from different parts of the Empire, are but few among many which might be advanced to support this contention.