Gladius by Guy de la Bédoyère

Author:Guy de la Bédoyère
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2020-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

TWELVE

PEACETIME DUTIES

JACKS-OF-ALL-TRADES

Owing to the situation of the free city of Byzantium . . . in conformity with established precedent, I have decided to send them a legionary centurion to protect their privileges.

Pliny the Younger, as governor of Bithynia and Pontus1

Roman soldiers, whether serving or retired, were some of the most productive and essential agents both of the state and of wider society in general. They became involved in all sorts of building projects, collecting the emperor’s taxes, sorting out property disputes, policing country roads and going on journeys of exploration. No wonder then that Roman soldiers and veterans turn up in Pompeii, in Egypt seeking the source of the Nile, circumnavigating northern Britain, smelting iron, supervising quarries and serving as lead-workers, among numerous other tasks. The fourth-century biography of the emperor Probus recounted how many ‘works’ still to be seen in the cities of Egypt which Probus had ordered soldiers to build, including bridges, temples, porticoes and basilicas. ‘The labour of the soldiers’ had also drained marshes so that they could be used as farmland.2 ‘You were a bonny labouring boy more than you were a fighter’, remembered one veteran of the Great War of 1914–18. He might as well have been talking about life in the Roman army.3

POLICEMEN AND TAX COLLECTORS

Soldiers were the closest thing Rome had to a police force, which meant they could often find themselves keeping the peace in city streets and at public events. In Rome praetorian guardsmen, the urban cohorts and the Vigiles all found themselves supervising public entertainments from time to time, and even unwillingly participating. In the provinces, and especially in unpredictable frontier areas, carrying out such tasks was a risky business. In AD 9, one of the reasons Quinctilius Varus lost three legions in one of the greatest catastrophes in Roman history was because, believing the province of Germania to be at peace, he had agreed to send out soldiers at the request of various communities to cover policing duties (see Chapter 7).4

Under Tiberius events in Rome’s theatres were becoming notoriously dangerous because of unruly audiences – Tacitus later called them ‘the squalid lower classes haunting the circus and theatres’. In the year 15 a praetorian tribune, a centurion and several soldiers were killed on one such occasion.5 A few years later, when the Theatre of Pompey caught fire, praetorians were ordered there by the praetorian prefect, Sejanus, to act as firefighters (successfully, as it happens). 6 In 38 Caligula carried out one of his few ‘good and praiseworthy acts’ when he helped soldiers, who must have been praetorians or Vigiles, put out a fire in Rome.7

Soldiers were being paid anyway, so it made sense to order them to carry out any duties the emperor wanted. In 28 soldiers were responsible for collecting a tax paid in ox hides from the Frisians, in this instance because it had been decided the hides would be useful to the army.8 Caligula made it his business to impose a regimen of new taxes, but he bitterly resented having to do so through the professional tax farmers known as publicani.

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