New Directions in Roman Republican Warfare

Described by Polybius (6.23) and Livy (22.46) as a short, double-edged, thrusting sword, and made famous by Hollywood films, the gladius Hispaniensis has become synonymous with the Roman army.

This paper synthesizes literary reports of Republican-era Roman soldiers being issued togas with visual representations of what these garments might have looked like. It follows the recent suggestion of Ursula Rothe that the toga of the Early and Middle Republic was an outdoor wrap that was worn in many contexts, including military ones, as well as by unmarried women and children (Rothe 2021).

Livy’s narratives of the siege and sack of the two cities in close succession at the turn of the fourth century BCE, Veii by the Romans (5.1-5.23) and Rome by the Gauls (5.32-50), provide insight into how Romans may have conceptualised space, ‘the city’, and trauma in a military context. The sack of Veii is depicted as a traumatic defeat for the Veientines, after an epic 10 year siege, from which the city never fully recovered. Conversely, the sack of Rome by the Gauls is far more indefinite.

Despite the efforts of a few scholars in the early 2000s (Dee 2003; Isaac 2005; McCoskey 2012), applications of critical approaches to race to the study of Greco-Roman antiquity have been few and far between. Recent work has drawn attention to the significance of this absence. Medievalist have shown that race does, in fact, offer a valuable heuristic of historical analysis for premodern periods (Heng 2018).

It is now commonly observed that Rome owed much of its military success in the third and second centuries BCE to its ability to effectively mobilize the non-Roman population of Italy (Brunt 1971; Eckstein 2008; Taylor 2020). This observation, however, raises the question as to why Rome was able to mobilize its subject Italian communities, the socii or ‘allies,’ so much more effectively than Rome’s rivals were able to mobilize their own subject populations. In this paper, I analyze the Roman system for recruiting the

A JStor search for “officer + masculinity + gaze” yields 1,781 hits. The majority occur in “History” (529) and “Literature” (502), nine within “Classical Studies” journals. The ratios are equivalent with comparable terms, and most hits are recent: conversations are ongoing in adjacent disciplines that are not noticeably widespread in ours.