The Roman Army During the Republican Period

It has traditionally been held that the velites, the light infantry of the Republic, were eventually replaced by auxiliaries over the course of the first century BCE. This has often been related with the ‘Marian reform’ in which Marius supposedly disbanded citizen cavalry and velites. However, the theory of the Marian reform has recently been heavily criticized and is no longer tenable (Cadiou 2018). Indeed, it has for instance been demonstrated that Roman citizen cavalry continued to exist in the first century BCE (Cadiou 2016).

The Roman soldier has often been a victim of elite disinterest on the part of commentators both ancient and modern. One of the most striking areas where he has been ignored is what happened to him after far-flung battles and wars. The Romans associated the idea of loyalty to the military with land, allowing only those in ownership of land to serve in the legions. The idealized soldier’s experience was constructed as a system that was both exemplary and cyclical.

The experience of Roman soldiers fighting in Spain in the Middle Republic was markedly different from those serving in other theaters during the same period. Beginning with the Second Punic Wars, troops commissioned to the Iberian Peninsula were stationed in the region for prolonged periods of time, often in excess of six years. Throughout the extent of their service, Roman soldiers did not just keep to themselves. They were meeting, communicating, and creating relationships with various local inhabitants throughout the Iberian Peninsula.

This paper examines how the Roman army in the early Republic adopted a Celtic panoply, in the process abandoning Greek-style hoplite equipment. This paper considers Roman panoply as a cultural problem, and examines the links between the distinct visual appearance of Roman legionaries and how this was deployed to articulate both Rome's national identity as well as its waxing Mediterranean hegemony.

The traditional model has long held that, in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE, ancient Roman warriors covered themselves in heavy bronze armor, turning themselves into slow-moving, invincible behemoths, who – like their Greek cousins – likely banded together into tight phalanxes. And while the argument around the early Roman use of the phalanx formation has heated up in recent years (see Rich 2007, Rosenstein 2010, and Armstrong 2016), there are few scholars who argue against the simple existence of heavy infantry in early Rome.