There was money to be made for the legionaries over and above their salaries if their warlords were successful The warlords could promote the centurions of an existing legion to be the officers in a new one, and the senior legionaries to be similarly promoted, this time as the centurion in the new unit. The creation of many new legions increased the opportunity for promotion Why were the legionaries so successful, and how did they maintain that success for several centuries? Listen Now 3. This they found in Octavian who established the Principate Empire as Augustus, his pax Romana reflecting the desire for stability.ĭan has his regular catch-up with Simon Elliott on all things Roman. These were military leaders who often operated without the consent of the Senate and other political institutions of Rome, sometimes against the opponents of the Republic, but often – and increasingly – against each other in a never-ending spiral of civil war that ultimately saw all in the Republic desperate for peace. This was the the late Republican warlord think Marius himself, Sulla, Cinna, Pompey, Crassus, Caesar, Mark Anthony and Octavian. Yet it was this newly instituted military organisation that ultimately gave rise to a new phenomenon at the top of Roman society. Soon the slave markets of Rome were full of Germans. The main advantages of the new Marian legions, their lack of a need for long lines of supply and a streamlined organisation, enabled the Romans to ultimately win the Cimbrian War. In that way they could manoeuvre at a strategic level more quickly than their opponents, bringing them to battle on the best terms.Ī painting depicting the Battle of Vercellae in 101 BC, where Marius defeated the Cimbri with his newly-reformed legions. He therefore resolved to turn each individual legion into a self-contained fighting force, with little or no supply train. He felt them too unwieldy for this new kind of warfare, fighting hoards of ‘barbarians’ marauding across the countryside in their many thousands. He surveyed the debris of Rome’s military response to the crisis and concluded that the main issue was the organisation of the legions themselves. This was Gaius Marius, elected consul for the first time that year, the first of seven times he held the office. Panic gripped Rome, with the phrase terror cimbricus being used to describe the mood of the people. The Republic suffered defeat after defeat, some catastrophic. Here, Rome found itself fighting the Germanic Cimbrians and their allies in southern and southeastern Gaul. This was in the context of the Cimbrian War which lasted from 113 to 101 BC. And yet in the last decade of the 2nd century BC it was being tested as never before, excepting perhaps against its one time nemesis Hannibal.Ī detail of the carved relief on the Altar of Domitius Ahenobarbus, depicting pre-Marian Roman soldiers: 122-115 BC. Rome often lost battles, but always came back, displaying that most Roman of characteristics, grit. It had seen off the might of Carthage and destroyed many of the Hellenistic kingdoms in the Balkans and Levant. The Roman Republic was a militaristic institution that had grown exponentially from its Italian roots to dominate both the western and eastern Mediterranean. It lasted from the overthrow of the Etrusco-Roman king Tarquin the Proud in 509 BC through to around 27 BC when Octavian was first styled Augustus by the Roman senate.Īnd yet a single, seminal event in 107 BC set in train a sequence of events that was to see it crash out of existence as the optimates reactionary party and the populares reformers fought a series of vicious civil wars in the 1st century BC. The Roman Republic was one of the longest-lasting, most powerful political institutions of the ancient world.
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