Innholdsfortegnelse for AW XV.2 i Ancient Warfare Magazine

EDITORIAL

Long time coming It sort of feels like this issue has been fifteen years in the making. Not only do we have the same style of helmet on the cover as issue I.1, Ancient Warfare magazine had its first offices in Nijmegen — the heart of the Batavian homeland. Moreover, I was a member of the organising board of the Nijmegen Roman festivals that took place on the Kops Plateau, a unique site on the eastern side of the city that miraculously had never been built over. Archaeologists examined the site in depth in the final decades of the last century and were able to establish that it successively held the headquarters for Drusus’ Germanic expeditions and the fort of the Ala Batavorum. In other words — and quite apart…

1 min

Ancient Warfare Magazine|AW XV.2

BURIED IN A BROTHER’S ARMS

The Sacred Band was probably established around the time of the Theban overthrow of Spartan dominance in 378 BC which had been in place since 382. As we have seen (see AW XIV.2), the Sacred Band built on a long tradition of picked units of 300 Theban hoplites stretching back to the beginning of fifth century at least. Several sources exist for the establishment of the Sacred Band. Plutarch (Pelopidas 18-19, 23) tells us one of several origin stories, claiming: “The sacred band, we are told, was first formed by Gorgidas, of three hundred chosen (epilekton) men, to whom the city furnished exercise and maintenance, and who encamped in the Cadmeia; … But some say that this band was composed of lovers (erastes) and beloved (eromenos).” This origin story is…

4 min

Ancient Warfare Magazine|AW XV.2

TACITUS’ STEREOTYPES

Published in ca. AD 98, Tacitus’ Germania introduces themes that are also relevant for his account of the Batavian Revolt, which we will discuss below. In it, he describes the land and customs of the people beyond the Danube and Rhine. It is a highly political treatise, because the emperor Domitian (r. AD 81-96) had just claimed to have defeated the Germanic tribes. Every Roman knew the coins with a mourning Germanic lady and the legend Germania Capta, but here was Tacitus, describing the customs of Germanic tribes that were fully independent. And completely uncorrupted. Noble savages Tacitus is not the ethnographer he pretends to be. He is a conservative moralist. His Germanic people are essentially anti-Romans. On the one hand, they are civilized citizens of an agricultural society, on…

4 min

Ancient Warfare Magazine|AW XV.2

AFTER THE REVOLT

After the Batavian Revolt, written sources transit from meta-history, written from afar by the elites for the elites, to the ego history reflected by epigraphic sources (some of them narrating episodes truly spectacular, such as the soldier Soranus crossing the Danube in full gear in front of emperor Hadrian). Obviously, epigraphs, however revealing, are not enough, although the material culture holds the key to our understanding of the Batavians’ integration, acculturation, and becoming during the late second and third centuries. Dispersal After Julius Civilis’s revolt, the Batavian troops were reformed, the nine pre-revolt cohorts being reorganized and dispatched as follows. Cohorts I and II returned to Britannia immediately after the revolt and are documented for the first time outside of the island in Pannonia, through a diploma from AD 98…

14 min

Ancient Warfare Magazine|AW XV.2

THE ARMORUM CUSTOS

In 1901, French archaeologists were busy investigating the area of the principia in the middle of the legionary fortress at Lambaesis (Tazoult-Lambèse in Algeria). Much of the south-western quadrant of the fortress had been built over, right up to the principia. Along the principia’s eastern side, however, they found a long series of rooms that flanked the large central courtyard in a pattern that is now familiar from many other military sites. In one of the rooms, the archaeologists were amazed to find a large inscription (ILS 9097), over 2m wide and almost 1m high, dedicated to the Severan imperial family by the armorum custodes of the Third Augusta Legion. Sixty-two names had been appended, which seemed to match the number of centuriae in a legion, leaving three men as…

9 min

Ancient Warfare Magazine|AW XV.2

PRELIMINARIES

Limes sites added to UNESCO’s World Heritage list Two new sections of the Roman military frontier have been inscribed on the World Heritage List of the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). The addition of the sections in northern Europe marks another success for a group of dedicated archaeologists who have been working over twenty years “to encircle the Roman Empire with a new protective ring,” said David J. Breeze, one of the three members of the team who conceived the dream. They called the project “Frontiers of the Roman Empire” (FRE). “FRE – The Lower German Limes” follows the left bank of the Rhine River and adds approximately 400 km from the Rhenish Massif in Germany to the North Sea in the Netherlands. It comprises 102 components…

9 min

Ancient Warfare Magazine|AW XV.2

THE BATAVIAN REVOLT

The Batavians are first mentioned by Caesar (Gallic War 4.10), who placed their territory on an island 100 miles long (Pliny NH 4.101) between the Rhine and the Meuse, hence the name insula Batavorum (“Island of the Batavians”). Tacitus provides the detail that the Batavi, once a tribe of the Chatti, had relocated there following a dispute (Germania 29) tentatively dated to between 50 and 15 BC. Their situation in this extreme northern frontier zone of the Roman world, where Germanic incursions could threaten the provinces of Germania Inferior and Gallia Belgica, made the Batavi important allies. As such, they were granted tax exemptions, but from the time of Octavian and through the Germanic campaigns of Drusus from 12 BC onwards, they were valued as auxiliary cohorts. They provided eight…

13 min

Ancient Warfare Magazine|AW XV.2

NO BARRIER TO BATTLE

The Batavians, like other warriors from the lands east of the Rhine, had no problem crossing water (Tacitus Histories 2.17.2). When a unit of gladiators advanced in small boats to occupy an island in the middle of the river, the Germans swam towards them, car rying their weapons, and reached the island first. The Germans attacked the gladiators, who were not able to defend themselves properly due to their unstable boats. Seeing the chaos among their enemies, the Germans jumped into the water, took hold of the boats, and began to board them and to push them underwater (Tacitus Histories 2.35.1–2). While this story may be exaggerated, it is a perfect example of the special ability of the Germans – and particularly the Batavians – to swim through deep water…

14 min

Ancient Warfare Magazine|AW XV.2

LESS DANGER, MORE PROFIT

Along tradition of modern scholarship has presented Greek warfare as practically synonymous with pitched battle on open ground. We are told that the Greeks were bad at sieges, combined-arms warfare, and irregular operations, but set-piece battles were their specialty and the way they preferred to fight. The single most important piece of evidence is a part of the speech that the historian Herodotus gives to the Persian Mardonius at a council meeting with Xerxes, where he seems to paint a straightforward picture of the Greek way of war: When they have declared war against each other, they find the finest, flattest piece of land and go down there and fight, so that the victors come off with terrible loss; I will not even begin to speak of the defeated, for…

11 min

Ancient Warfare Magazine|AW XV.2

TALES OF THE AXE

Does Virgil’s imaginary battle between mythical heroes reflect anything of the reality of axe combat in Iron Age Italy or in the Roman Empire? The general Latin term for an axe was securis, but Camilla’s weapon was no ordinary axe. It was double-bladed or bipennis (Aeneid 11.662, 694-698). Readers of Ancient Warfare will be familiar with the funerary stele of Auvele Feluskes, a warlord who led a gens (clan) in Vetulonia in Etruria at the close of the seventh century BC. Feluskes is depicted in the newly fashionable Greek war gear of hoplite shield and Corinthian helmet but, like Camilla, he is armed with a bipennis. Silius Italicus tells us that the Romans adopted the fasces from Vetulonia (Punica 8.483–485). These symbolized a magistrate’s power to administer corporal and capital…

8 min

Ancient Warfare Magazine|AW XV.2

SHAMEFUL BEHAVIOUR

There are many possible reasons for this general lack of interest in the subject. Two of the main rationales behind scholars’ indifference are based on problematical assumptions made about the practice. Firstly, historians frequently refuse to elaborate on the topic based on its apparent ‘commonality’. But can the frequency of a practice really be accepted as a justifiable reason to disengage from a topic? Furthermore, many scholars view martial rape to be a predictable and uncomplicated practice. They believe that sexual assaults against war victims took a universal pattern, regardless of factors such as period, nationality, gender, and ethnicity. This presumed pattern takes the following format: army conquers city, soldiers plunder city, the surviving men are killed and the surviving women are raped before being subjected to a lifetime of…

11 min

Ancient Warfare Magazine|AW XV.2

MOPPING UP

At the end of AD 69, things were going well for Civilis. He remained undefeated and the revolt had spread; the Treveri and Lingones had joined his rebellion. In Italy, however, Vespasian had defeated Vitellius and his principal supporter, Gaius Licinius Mucianus, was making arrangements for the defeat of the revolt. He appointed Appius Annius Gallus and Quintus Petillius Cerialis as commanders, and a large army of five legions was assembled to deal with the crisis. These included XIII Gemina, VIII Augusta, XI Claudia, and II Adiutrix. With XXI Rapax, they started on three paths towards the crisis over the Cottian, Pennine, and Graian Alps. Reading between Tacitus’ lines, it seems that Gallus took XIII Gemina, VIII Augusta, and XI Claudia via the east-most Cottian Alps into Germania Superior, whist…

13 min

Ancient Warfare Magazine|AW XV.2

THE PRIVILEGES OF RANK

The letter was written in February AD 108 and was sent from Bostra in Arabia, where Apollinarius was stationed with the Legio III Cyrenaica, to his mother Tasoucharion in Alexandria (Egypt). He had enlisted around AD 103/104, while III Cyrenaica was stationed in Egypt. When he joined the legion, Apollinarius followed in the footsteps of his father, Gaius Julius Sabinus, who also served, no doubt giving his son a vital insight into military life. For a decade or more, father and son both served, albeit not in the same legion – by AD 105, Sabinus had been transferred to Legio XXII Deiotariana, which remained in Egypt throughout the rest of his service. The letter, along with several others written by and to both Sabinus and Apollinarius, were found as a…

5 min

Ancient Warfare Magazine|AW XV.2

Army of the Roman Emperors

By Thomas Fischer; translated by Mike C. Bishop ISBN: 978-1612008103 Casemate Publishers (2019) – £45.00 www.casematepublishers.com The reader of English has many choices when it comes to the Roman army. There are highly academic tomes dealing with specific aspects, which are usually dense with technical text and enlivened with the occasional illustration and some black-and-white figures or plates; and there are general books packed with colour pictures, which are usually light on copy but seem designed more for the coffee table than the study. Army of the Roman Emperors by Thomas Fischer sits squarely in the space between the two. This is a big book in every respect. Large in format, it weighs 1.9 kg, and runs to nearly 600 pages, printed in two columns. Heavyweight its scholarship is too.…

7 min

Ancient Warfare Magazine|AW XV.2

ANCIENT WARFARE readings

TACITUS By Ronald Syme Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1958 ISBN: 978-0198143277 Syme’s two-volume Tacitus is still the go-to account for any investigation into the historian and his works. The Batavian Revolt is no exception. Syme’s every page contains insights and analysis that is very modern despite its age. More often than not, his judgements are supported by scholarship undertaken decades after he wrote. EDGE OF EMPIRE. ROME’S FRONTIER ON THE LOWER RHINE By Jona Lendering and Arjen Bosman Karwansaray Publishers, 2012 ISBN: 978-9490258054 Historian Lendering and archaeologist Bosman team up to explore the history of Rome’s Lower Rhine Frontier. This is a go-to introduction for the culture and background of the entire region, placing the revolt into a wider context. The revolt itself is solidly analyzed on pages 92–108. ARMED BATAVIANS:…

4 min