THE RATIONALITY OF DISCIPLINE

In the early Empire, disciplina militaris attempted to routinize the army as a source of imperial power, mitigating conflict between emperors, aristocracy, and soldiers and discouraging usurpations by promoting both protobureaucratic rationalization and values or behaviors that produced the habitus appropriate to soldiers and officers. Ironically, discipline's dissociation of service from “sordid” economic matters also resembles Weber's concept of charismatic authority. Unlike an industry or a civilian bureaucracy, a military institution cannot be fully rationalized. Military service must motivate its personnel to undergo extraordinary risks and effort; it requires their social cohesion; and it demands special leadership qualities of its officers. Value-rational policies (a code of honor, etc.) are often promoted. In the Roman army, instead of a formal code, exemplary narratives, anecdotes, and treatises promoted specific habitus.

In the Roman army, full rationalization was impeded by tradition and by the charismatic authority projected by the commanders. Imperium militiae and its descendant in the Empire gave commanders unfetted authority over soldiers. Commanders could punish with inventive severity, as when Galba starved a soldier to death to punish him for extortion, or conversely to mitigate punishment, as Marius did with Trebonius or Septimius Severus with the Praetorians.

Disciplina militaris's rationalization countered patrimonial elements of authority in the Roman army, which was a cross section of Roman society, from the emperor and senatorial legates at the top to common soldiers and soldiers' servants (the despised calones and lixae) at the bottom.

the discipline of the army (disciplina militaris) was an important element of Roman imperial culture. Modern authors usually focus on loyalty and mutiny and on the stereotypical avarice of the Praetorian Guard, raising emperors to the throne and toppling them. Other modern impressions stress the orderly tactical formations and steadfastness of the Roman army in battle and the absolute, self-sacrificing obedience of soldiers. Still other modern stereotypes emphasize the severity of Roman military punishment, giving the English language the term “decimate,” inaccurately equated with annihilation. Decimation was a punishment in which one in ten soldiers were executed. These impressions are exaggerated, sometimes anachronistic.

Disciplina militaris sought to control soldiers in more respects than obedience or formal discipline. Why, for instance, did the emperor Hadrian banish gardens, porticoes, and dining rooms from military camps, and why did he take care to be seen eating the soldiers' campaign fare and to walk twenty miles in armor? Other aspects of Hadrian's management of the army more resembled modern institutional discipline: the repression of corruption, for instance, and the promotion of efficient administration. The passage of the Historia Augusta's Vita Hadriani is also remarkable for its omissions. Though we learn that he refused to wear ornamented armor, Hadrian did not take a particular interest in mass drill or uniform, essential elements of military training and discipline in modern times.

INTRODUCTION

Social conflict, as distinguished from overt struggle or violence, is a prominent theme in Roman military discipline. An account of social conflict in the Roman military should explain why the soldiers' mutinies were relatively infrequent. The usual explanations are political and material: soldiers' loyalty was secured by their annual oaths of allegiance to the emperor; by reverence for the emperor, fostered by the imperial cult; and by pay, benefits, and imperial gifts of money and privileges. These methods suggest a patrimonial mode of authority, in which the emperor was a personal benefactor of his soldiers. Little attention has been paid to a countervailing ideology of disciplina militaris, which commanders (both aristocrats and emperors) imposed to legitimate their commands; disciplina repressed unrestricted patronage of the army. However, the commander who imposed disciplina also needed to persuade the soldiers. This chapter examines the applicability to the Roman army of Weberian sociology, Marxist theory, and Pierre Bourdieu's theories of habitus and social and cultural reproduction. The social status of Roman soldiers is debated by modern scholars. Soldiers occupied an intermediate, subelite position in the Roman social hierarchy, in which their status was highly relative; this occupational status was reinforced by separation from low-status groups and activities.

SOCIAL HIERARCHY AND POTENTIAL CONFLICT

The Marxist definition of “class” is insufficient to describe social differentiation in the Greek and Roman world.

INTRODUCTION

The modern or popular image of the Roman army stresses its brutal punishments, such as decimation, in which one out of ten soldiers, selected by lot, were beaten to death by their fellows. In another famous instance, Titus Manlius Torquatus, consul in 340 bc, executed his son, also named Titus Manlius Torquatus, for engaging in combat against his orders. These punishments and other such incidents became an important part of Roman elite cultural tradition, but they beg the question of how Roman military punishment functioned in social terms during the late Republic and Empire. Even punishment requires legitimation, as opposed to pure domination (the imposition of authority by force), which is inefficient.

Roman military punishment required legitimacy in the eyes of the aristocracy, who favored severity, and required legitimacy in the eyes of the soldiers, who had the ultimate recourse of mutiny. In contrast with a fully legal-rational social organization, a traditional system often grants the dominated some customary form of resistance. That the obedience of soldiers should be categorical and absolute was an elite ideal rather than reality.

In the sources discussed here, three divergent modes or strategies of punishment appear. One tradition emphasizes absolute obedience and extreme severity, invoking incidents from the remote past and religious and moral tradition. Though clementia (mercy) was an imperial virtue, the authors of exempla praise lack of clementia toward the army and depict severity as restoring the mos maiorum (ancestral ways).

INTRODUCTION

The inculcation of combat virtus through physical training produced a highly aggressive, competitive disposition in Roman soldiers. This disposition was acceptable in the followers of civil war leaders but required moderation in the professional soldiers of a stable empire. A practically Homeric virtus was inconsistent with social control, which required modestia (obedience, respect for authority) in soldiers.

Military modestia could not be imposed in an abstract, legal-rational or objective fashion, in the manner of Kant's categorical imperative; it had to be conditioned. Disciplina militaris sought to impose such control through the inculcation of appropriate habitus. As will be seen in later chapters, disciplina sought, through practices consistent with social control, to monopolize and even redefine the production of virtus.

This chapter focuses on hexis, the physical and emotional disposition of soldiers' bodies, manner of dress, deportment, and stance, and their social, religious, and ethnic identities. Modern Western armed forces inculcate military bearing through the wearing of military uniforms and the observance of etiquette, as well as through screening processes at induction and through some form of civic religion or patriotism. Military etiquette includes observance of correct salutes and the proper handling of the flag. Honors paid to those who die in combat may be classified under civic religion.

Not all of these modern features were present in the Roman army. The control of recruitment remained an ideal; in practice, the army sought to keep out slaves and criminals or infamous persons, but did not always succeed.

INTRODUCTION

The popular imagination envisions the Roman soldier sweating and toiling, whether on the march or at work. Roman authors emphasized soldiers' and officers' expenditure of labor (effort, work), which reconciled the aristocracy somewhat to imperial patronage of the army and the expenses of the army. Through the labor of physical training, described in Chapter Two, soldiers were made into fighters and maintained these skills. Besides training, soldiers' labor included guard activities; the production, maintenance, and repair of equipment and other necessities; the requisition and transport of supplies; and military and civil construction. Especially on campaign or in remote areas, where civilian labor was lacking, soldiers built bridges, roads, and canals. More routine forms of work were the crafting, upkeep, and repair of equipment, the gathering and transport of supplies, the building of camps, and guard duties. In regions with extensive civilian settlement, the building and upkeep of roads was a munus publicum, the responsibility of the local communities, which contracted labor or levied a corvée. So-called viae militares denoted strategically important routes, not roads built by soldiers. Soldiers seem usually to have built aqueducts. This section will not survey all evidence for Roman soldiers' work, which would require an archaeological survey of the empire; it focuses on examples of the control of work.

The Roman military bureaucracy administered these forms of labor, displaying a high degree of rationality for an ancient society, though the slowness of transportation and communication in the Roman Empire limited bureaucratic efficiency.

combat training was an important element of Roman disciplina militaris. Soldiers acquired and maintained physical fitness and combat skills by training to fight with swords, javelins, and other weapons; marching long distances; and carrying out mass exercises and simulated campaigns. The training of soldiers was not fully rationalized in the Weberian sense. The sources do not emphasize a discrete period of training such as modern basic training or boot camp; training was ideally ongoing and was the responsibility of individual commanders. Such responsibility was still emphasized in the imperial period, though inscriptions show that low-ranking officers specialized as trainers. Some emperors adopted a highly visible role in overseeing training.

Combat training emphasized individual physical fitness and endurance and combat skills: technique, speed, agility, accuracy, and aggression. Virtus, courage or prowess demonstrated in combat, was the objective of training. Group maneuvers in formation, marches, and mock battles were also taught. However, the need to maintain ranks (ordines servare) in battle competed with the prestige of prowess in hand-to-hand combat with the enemy.

Soldiers who were well trained demonstrated a high degree of animus (confidence, morale) and impetus (onslaught, energy) in combat. These qualities, deployed against Roman citizens in periods of civil war, were hard to distinguish from furor (madness) and ira (rage). The aristocracy regarded the aggressiveness of soldiers as a double-edged sword.

Mass drill rationalized and legitimated professional armies in seventeenth-, eighteenth-, and nineteenth-century Europe, serving as a method of social control and a spectacle of national power.

To the citizens of Ionia's coastal cities at the end of the fifth century bc, the sight of mercenaries in the streets was nothing new. For decades, the Persian satraps of western Asia Minor had been employing Greek professionals, Arcadians especially, in their personal guards and urban garrisons. The latest satrap, prince Cyrus, was no different. In Persian eyes, hiring from the other side of the Aegean was far preferable to recruiting locally. The Arcadians and their ilk were just Greek enough that the Ionians would not chafe excessively at their presence, but still outsiders enough to have few qualms about cracking Ionian skulls when ordered to. From the Ionian standpoint, mercenaries were probably tolerated if not entirely welcome. Unless he had to quarter some in his home, the average city dweller probably appreciated the way Cyrus' soldiers enforced order and suppressed crime. Men hoping to make connections with the imperial administration might even seek to marry their daughters to mercenary officers. And for those in the right line of work – tavern-keepers, prostitutes, and armorers come to mind – the presence of a garrison meant steady customers and tidy profits.

If mercenaries normally blended into the fabric of Ionian life, an attentive citizen strolling through town in early 401 bc would have felt something afoot. Garrison units tended to be under strength, but now barracks brimmed with fresh recruits, and smiths and shield makers were doing a brisk business fashioning new sets of arms and refurbishing old ones.

In concluding let us return to the triple threads of lived experience, logistics, and community. The blood and violence of combat are more exciting and immediate – probably one reason why the face of battle approach is so popular – but only by examining their campaign in its totality can we fully grasp the Cyreans' experience. Reconstructing what it might have been like to march in lochos column or set up a suskenia encampment enables us to imagine the physical and spatial dimensions of ordinary soldiers' worlds. In doing so we comprehend the range of challenges they endured and the kinds of decisions they had to make. We can see, for example, why men would stay loyal to lochos and captain, but also sympathize with the dilemma of the mule driver, forced to choose between carrying a dying stranger and safeguarding irreplaceable supplies and gear. We discover not only the agonizing dangers – stress fractures, gangrene, and hypothermia – but also the mundane tasks – shaving, bathing, going to the latrine – that comprised the army's life.

Combining the personal angle of vision with an emphasis on supply and feeding offers a visceral handle on Cyrean reality. We prosperous modern urban-dwellers, safe at home, can perform our logistical routines, from turning up the heat to reaching into the refrigerator, almost effortlessly. Understanding the skill and energy it took the mercenaries simply to build a fire highlights how much more difficult mere daily survival was for them.

The Cyreans carried some things because they had to, other things because they wanted to. They carried the tools of their trades – shields and spears, sling bullets, arrows, javelins. They carried the necessities of life – food, water, firewood, cooking pots, cloaks, tents. They carried plunder, anything that looked portable and valuable enough to haul over one hill after another. The things they carried were as heavy and unwieldy as hammered bronze breastplates, as light and tiny as flint and tinder. Only a few had animals or slaves to help with the carrying.

Examining what the mercenaries carried significantly enhances our appreciation of the arduousness of the march. The Cyreans shouldered not the light, waterproof synthetics we take for granted, but bronze, leather, wood, and wool. Their non-combat gear was not standardized military-grade, but a mélange of borrowed and adapted items neither designed nor built for years of continuous hard use. More importantly, understanding the characteristics and sources of Cyrean equipment is essential to assessing the troops' behavior. Reliance on suskenoi, reluctance to abandon equipment, vociferous protection of pack animals – all make more sense when placed against the practical context of the army's gear.

Recovering the details of Cyrean equipment means dealing with the difficulties of the textual, archaeological, and art-historical evidence. Xenophon, for example, mentions weapons and armor repeatedly but gives few specifics; on non-combat items such as cooking pots, he says almost nothing.

Open most any book on the Anabasis and you will find a map of the Cyreans' march. Invariably this is in stark black and white, the army's route traced decisively against a backdrop of cities, rivers, and mountains; the map in this chapter (Map 2.1) is little different. Maps enable modern readers to comprehend Xenophon's narrative visually. They show the magnitude of the trek, all 3,000 kilometers of it. They allow us to place the Cyreans geographically as no ancient reader ever could have. Little wonder that figuring out exactly what path the Cyreans took from Ionia to Cunaxa and back again has been an enduring concern of Anabasis studies. Indeed, scholars have been producing reconstructions of the army's route since at least the eighteenth century. Thanks to them, we can now trace the Cyreans' footsteps fairly precisely, although some of the most vexing topographical questions, especially for central Anatolia, can never be definitively resolved.

What maps are not so good at conveying, though, are the changing conditions the Cyreans encountered during successive stages of the campaign. To be sure, much attention has been paid to Xenophon's descriptions of weather and climate, often in attempts to fix an absolute chronology for the march. Yet, we can do more to set the Cyreans into their world. Call it an environmental rather than a topographical approach. Dividing the campaign into six stages or periods provides a clearer view of the physical realities that shaped the army's behavior.

Food and drink were not the Cyreans' only bodily concerns. From the outset of the expedition, they had to attend to the mundane chores of bodily maintenance, as well as to the task of disposing the tons of waste the army produced every day. Moreover, the soldiers faced a range of physiological and environmental challenges, from march-related foot injuries to heat stroke in the Mesopotamian desert. After Cunaxa, wounds and injuries became omnipresent threats, and there was further danger from Anatolia's rain, snow, and cold. The soldier's body was assailed from every direction; to cope, he had to rely on his suskenoi.

INITIAL HEALTH AND FITNESS

The Cyreans likely began the march in excellent health. Their environment was free of several serious diseases, including sexually transmitted gonorrhea and chlamydia. Their diet probably provided plenty of vitamins and minerals. They were also highly fit. Some contingents, such as that of Clearchus in Thrace and those of Socrates and Pasion besieging Miletus, were already on combat operations when Cyrus summoned them and therefore accustomed to the demands of active campaigning. Other contingents used marches to the army's assembly points at Sardis and Celaenae for conditioning; only Cheirisophus' men reached Cyrus directly by sea. Even Xenias' Ionian garrison troops apparently stayed in excellent shape. Along with the other contingents, they began the campaign by marching some 112 km (almost 70 miles) from Sardis to the Maeander River in only three days.

NUTRITION AND SLEEP

To sustain themselves the Cyreans needed food and water.