Author:
Simulacrum
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Date:
1/31/2015 5:32:27 PM
Subject:
RE: DAMN
Well, I guess I'm wrong. I thought the Roman army was extremely regimented and formation-driven before the reign of Augustus. All those precisely measured Roman camps -- the ones that were exactly the same for generations -- just happened to strike the soldiers' fancies time after time. All the documentation for their issued armor, their pila, shields, gladii, etc. -- all that stuff about legions, cohorts, and so on -- that must have been made up by those nineteenth-century dilettants.
The Roman army ran on regimentation, repetition, formation, and uniformity. They liked it that way. A commander could take over a legion and know what it would run exactly the same as another legion. There was no rugged individualism. You're imagining some ad hoc Davey Crockett outfit held together by comitatus. That's not how the Roman army worked.
