FIRST SERVINGMAN Let me have a war, say I; it exceeds peace as far as day does night; it’s sprightly walking, audible, and full of vent. Peace is a very apoplexy, lethargy; mulled, deaf, sleepy, insensible; a getter of more bastard children than war is a destroyer of men.

Shakespeare, Coriolanus 4.5.208–11

It is 1 January 107 BC. Caius Marius has just entered his first consulship and inherited the command of the conflict still raging in Numidia, a war that has thus far swallowed the reputations of three senatorial generals. He has his earlier experiences of Numidian campaigning serving as one of the legati of the distinguished general Quintus Caecilius Metellus, although obviously without the responsibilities of supreme command. Even so, here is a man, a novus homo (‘new man’), who has a natural propension to arms, a man of the camp not of the forum. Intrinsically, he realizes that the anti-insurgent struggle against Jugurtha, king of the Numidians, requires more boots on the ground.

The incessant warfare in Numidia is one of ambushes and surprises, of desultory fighting through scrubland and semi-desert and, what now would be considered war crimes or atrocities, storming and spoiling settlements and mercilessly butchering or enslaving their inhabitants. While the death toll in Numidia continues to rise, it is a sordid saga of this village taken, that truce broken, a new atrocity by the occupying forces. And so, it continues.

Portrait bust traditionally identified as Caius Marius (Vaticani, Museo Chiaramonti, inv. 1488), 1st century bc. (Vatican Museums, CC BY 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

This is a conflict fought with little clarity about its aim, nor proper planning for the aftermath. Terror is the prevailing principle. Tactically, the army under Metellus had done much in Numidia to degrade Jugurtha’s capacity. But Rome’s confrontation with the king is marked by a gaping hole where a strategy should be. More serious still, the army has been considerably reduced in numbers, partly by death, disease and desertion, partly too by the detachment of men left to garrison such settlements as the Romans had chosen to occupy as they tramp back and forth season after season through Numidia. All the same, as Marius was to learn, it was to take more than capture of a town or two to bring the Jugurthine War to a successful finish.

With a talent if not the genius for war, before getting his campaign under way the new consul was to spend some time in Italia busily enrolling new recruits. In this Marius took a bold step and opened the ranks to all who wished to volunteer, including the capite censi or head count, the poorest element in Roman society listed in the census simply as numbers. This was because these citizens lacked significant property and so were legally barred from military service. But that is another story. What concerns us here are those ‘bravest soldiers from Latium – men who had either served under him [viz. Marius] or been recommended to him – and by personal appeals induced time-expired veterans to join his expeditionary force’ (Sall. B Iug. 84.2).

Service in the Roman army necessitated a citizen being away from his home – invariably a small farmstead – during the brief summer campaigning season. But Rome’s overseas adventures meant the call came more frequently after the Second Punic War (218–201 BC). Between the city and the countryside ran the sharp iron edge, and not just the plough – in Rome Mars was the god of agriculture as well as of war. Yet the need to fight overseas and to leave soldiers to form permanent garrisons in newly acquired provinces meant that men were away from home for longer periods. This interruption from civilian life could easily spell ruin to the peasant proprietors who had traditionally made up the bulk of able-bodied citizens eligible for the compulsory call-up. Hopkins (1978: 35) estimates that in 225 BC legionaries comprised 17 per cent of all the adult male citizens, and in 213 BC, at the height of the war with Hannibal Barca, 29 per cent. Inevitably, what had been seen as a duty and voluntary obligation took on a somewhat different character as longer campaigns led to the snapping of more of the ties that connected the mores of field and village with those of battlefield and camp. Of course, if combat armies became larger, in the eyes of those who conjured them up they were usually still too small. In this belief Marius was not immune when it came to raising his expeditionary force for Numidia.

There existed from at least 200 BC onwards a core of proto-professionals, very experienced and well-trained legionaries who freely took to the excitement and danger of military endeavour, or who had few if any home ties and harboured a desire for travel and adventure, or to whom the humdrum, penurious, hen-pecked reality of everyday was a wearisome existence, and who were willing to volunteer for service in the army over several years. To illustrate the compass of Roman campaigning and the wide-ranging experience of 2nd-century BC legionaries, we can do no better than turn to Livy and employ the frequently quoted example of the citizen soldier of Sabine stock, Spurius Ligustinus, in whose mouth the eminent Augustan-era historian puts the following speech:

I joined the army in the consulship of Publius Sulpicius (Galba) and Caius Aurelius [200 BC]; and served for two years in the ranks in the army, which was taken across to Macedonia, in the campaign against king Philip (V) [i.e. Second Macedonian War, 200–197 BC]. In the third year (Titus) Quinctius Flamininus [cos. I 198 BC] promoted me, for my bravery, centurion of the tenth maniple of hastati. After the defeat of Philip and the Macedonians [at Kynoskephalai, 197 BC], when we had been brought back to Italy and demobilised, I immediately left for Hispania as a volunteer with the consul Marcus Porcius (Cato) [195 BC]. Of all the living generals none has been a keener observer and judge of bravery than he, as is well known to those who through long military service have had experience of him and other commanders. This general judged me worthy to be appointed centurion of the first century of hastati (primum hastatum prioris centuriae). I enlisted for the third time, again as a volunteer, in the army sent against the Aetolians and king Antiochus (III Megas) [i.e. Syrian War, 192–189 BC]; Marcus Acilius (Glabrio) [cos. 191 BC] appointed me centurion of the first century of the principes (primus princeps prioris centuriae). When Antiochus had been driven out and the Aetolians had been crushed [at Thermopylai, 191 BC], we were brought back to Italia; and twice after that I took part in campaigns in which the legions served for a year. Thereafter I saw two campaigns in Hispania [i.e. First Celtiberian War, 181–179 BC], one with Quintus Fulvius Flaccus as praetore [182–181 BC], the other with Tiberius Sempronius Gracchus in command [180 BC]. Flaccus brought me back home with the others whom he brought back with him from the province for his triumph, on account of their bravery; and I returned to Hispania because I was asked to do so by Tiberius Gracchus. Four times in the course of a few years I held the rank of centurion of the first century of the triarii (primum pilum); thirty-four times I was rewarded for bravery by the generals; I have been given six civic crowns (sex civicas coronas). I have completed twenty-two years of service (viginti duo stipendia), and I am now over fifty years old. (Liv. 42.34.5-11)

But here, standing before an assembly of fellow citizens, Ligustinus’ brief albeit distinguished appearance in history comes to an end.

Numidian silver dídrakhmon (Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, département Monnaies, inv. Luynes 3960). Obverse bust of Jugurtha.(Bibliothèque nationale de France, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

Born between 223 BC and 221 BC and having volunteered in his early twenties, the solid, shrewd veteran Ligustinus was in fact making a personal plea to the consuls of 171 BC to ensure that he received an appointment appropriate to his experience and status. Albeit embellished for rhetorical reasons, and it is entirely feasible the elder Cato was the original literary source (Biglino 2020: 209, 215), Ligustinus’ recital of his service record does provide a good indication of the very nature of distant and chaotic engagements fought by the mid-Republican army of the 2nd century BC.

After his initial six years of service in Macedonia, Ligustinus had left hearth and home to reenlist as a volunteer, serving in Iberia, Greece, Asia Minor and perhaps elsewhere for a further 16 years. We should assume that he had not only collided against the pikes wielded by Macedonian phalangites, true professionals to a man, stood firm against the stampeding war elephants of a Seleukid monarch, but had also fought in those dirty little asymmetrical wars against tribal insurgents on the Iberian side of the Pyrenees. And herein lay the Roman genius, namely the canny knack of finding a way to take a humble smallholding farmer like Ligustinus, at home with the soil and the cycle of the seasons, and turn him into a soldier with formidable fighting qualities. Militarily speaking, this is what made Rome special.

For his battle scars, Ligustinus had been showered with military decorations by a succession of admiring commanders, including the curmudgeonly elder Cato, a general Ligustinus evidently held in high esteem. Prominent amongst his honours were the six coronae civica, each a simple oak-leaf crown awarded for saving the life of a fellow Roman citizen during the cut and thrust of battle. The venerable Ligustinus would have proudly worn these, as well as his other military decorations, at every public festival in his hometown and would have commanded great respect. Such visible symbols of his valour would not be confined to the public domain, however, as it was also the Roman custom to hang up these badges of bravery in the most conspicuous place in the house regardless of its lowliness.

Two points merit attention. First, military service tends to mature a man quickly, and Ligustinus, in his early twenties, was no exception. All in all, he had served all but two years as a centurion, holding increasing senior posts, culminating in that of the chief centurion, primus pilus, of the legion. Centurions were soldiers who had gained experience in the ranks, and who were promoted as a reward for bravery in battle, or because they showed signs of being able to lead and discipline men (Polyb. 6.24). Secondly, according to the constitution 16 years was the maximum a man could be expected to serve (Polyb. 6.19.2), but the quintagenarian Ligustinus, now with 22 years’ service under his belt, went beyond the pale to reenlist as a centurio primi pili, on this occasion in legio I (Liv. 42.35.2). Consequently, he was to serve under one of the consuls in the Third Macedonian War (172–168 BC). Ligustinus fought at Pydna, the last battle of the Macedonian wars in Greece and Asia Minor.

 

Roman military decorations (Berlin, Deutsches Historisches Museum) commonly awarded to centurions. (Krank-Hover, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)

Battles produce corpses, multitudes of them. In a mass killing such as the decisive battle of Pydna, ranks of living humans were transformed into corpses, shapeless body parts scattered over the battlefield. Hacked off legs and arms, a chunk of flesh cleaved from the loins, the split open skull of a soldier or disembodied guts over which dance a flock of greedy carrion birds with their dagger beaks. Killing occurred by hand in ancient times, slaughtering one by one – it took a huge amount of energy, effort and nerve. Ugly, brutal and exhausting, what motivated Ligustinus to expose himself to the horror and carnage of battle again and again? Still, as his six coronae civica testify, there is no doubt that he was to be found in the thick of it. The other question of course, was it bravery or was it bravado on Ligustinus’ part?

His pattern of military service would not have been much out of place in the fully professional army established by Augustus. Ligustinus is presented as the ideal soldier farmer, since Livy takes care to point out that he still worked the plot of land he had been left by his father, where his wife Ligustina (his dowerless cousin) had borne him six sons, of whom four were grown up, and two daughters, both of whom were married. Ligustinus was able to have a home life because he never spent excessively long periods bearing arms – from a minimum of one year to a maximum of four years, his 22 years of service were spread over 30 years – and so was able to trade off years of civilian life with those serving as a soldier.

The irony is that even though his soldiering had been voluntary, Ligustinus’ smallholding was not of sufficient size to have rendered him liable to military service at all, not to mention the obligation to the finance the cost of basic war gear he was by law required to possess in the event of mobilisation. The peasant household of three to four mouths needed a minimum of 7 iugera of land to subsist by dint of strenuous manual labour, and assuming that no animals were kept. This 7-iugera holding (1.75 ha/4.38 acres) is very much the traditional figure for many of the viritim (‘man-by-man’) grants handed out by the state during the first half of the 2nd century BC. This figure represents bare subsistence, and allows for no surplus beyond the food required to support the family.

Ligustinus declares that his father had left him ‘one iugerum of land and a little hut’ (Liv. 42.34.2), which obviously fails to sustain his family, and this requires him to take up soldiering to supplement what little he gains from spending his days ploughing his single iugerum. A fragment of a speech of the elder Cato entitled de tribunus militum, which has commonly been dated to the year 171 BC, contemplates the recruitment of ‘the poor and proletarii’ (Cato ORF fr. 152). As his father’s legacy was less than the standard minimum of 2 iugera (0.50ha/1.25 acres) for landed property (e.g. Liv. 8.21.6), and well below the 4 iugera considered the hypothetical minimum amount of land to ensure eligibility for military service, it is little wonder that the hard-pressed Ligustinus, with many mouths to feed, had made a profession out of the military – or more artfully, the profession of arms – plainly to earn money.

Spanish re-enactors equipped as mid Republican legionaries. (Digitalcorona, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

Ligustinus may have been the model of the good returning veteran, but he was fully aware of the potentially profitability of long-term military service. A soldier was receiving a daily wage of 3 asses, 1,800 per annum, by the early 2nd century BC. The pay of a centurion was better. Whilst not much it was a regular payment. Crucially, however, were the benefits at the end of a campaign in the form of post-service rewards and booty. Ligustinus, based on Livy’s texts, had received 41,420 asses (Biglino 2020: 222). With a land plot scant enough to sufficiently provide for his family, pay and profit were the primary considerations with Ligustinus. Through making a living by killing others – which, somehow, he seemed to be fine with – the pursuit of war was all the real wealth the hard, middle-aged centurion possessed.

Brief, authentic, readable, and illuminated with human interest, Livy’s vivid account forms the only biography of a 2nd-century BC soldier who fell well outside of the aristocratic class that we possess. Prior to Marius’ military reforms of 104 BC when he unwittingly made service in the legions virtually professional, poor peasant proprietors like Ligustinus represented the social drift for viewing the army as a stand-by career. It appears then that such proto-professional legionaries were to be found amongst the rank and file of the Roman armies who fought, sacked, slashed and burnt back and forth across the thirsty badlands of Numidia for a half dozen or so brutal years.

Nic's new book The Jugurthine War 112–106 BC: Rome's Long War in North Africa is available now.