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.