The relevance of the research topic is due to the insufficient study of the role of the governors of the Senate provinces in the military command system of the early Roman Empire. Completion of this ...knowledge is necessary both for studying the military organization of Rome, and for revealing the essence of the Roman state-political system. The purpose of the study is to find the legal and ideological grounds for the military status of the governors of the senatorial provinces, which, in the author’s opinion, should be resolved primarily in the context of considering the issue of imperium militiae of such governors. In the absence of direct indications in this regard in the sources, the method of reconstruction was the analysis of specific material (including prosopographic), reflecting the military functions of the governors appointed by the Senate. The author made an attempt to find out the commander’s status of the governors by finding a full-fledged imperium militiae in them. The author’s conclusion: throughout the entire period of the early Empire, the governors of the senatorial provinces retained their imperium militiae, continuing to carry out the functions of a military leader, although to a much lesser extent than at the beginning of the period. Such governors remained an important element in the system of military command, especially in critical situations that regularly arose even in the «pacified» provinces.
This contribution is dedicated to a small hoard of Constantinian nummi found in Aquileia in the early ‘60s, but only recently “rediscovered” in the coin cabinet of the National Museum. 20 of the 21 ...coins belong to the same issue type VIRT EXERCIT, struck in AD 319 in Thessalonica, specifically conceived for the distribution to the troops and rarely attested among treasure and single finds of the entire Mediterranean area. Within the assemblage, three die-linked specimens have been detected as well as an obverse brockage coin, peculiar features proper to a uniform stock of coins concealed soon after its production. During the struggle for power against Licinius, Constantine the Great visited many times Aquileia between 318 and 319 AD as attested by ancient sources. Given the peculiar traits of the hoard, the owner should be sought among the members of the Constantinian army, following the emperor or involved in supply duties, frequently moving between Northern Italy and the Balkans during the war against the Licinian dynasty.
In a book on Justinian’s wars of conquest, Peter Heather has argued that Rome’s ability to wage war in the sixth century CE was helped, to a large degree, by the military revolution that took place ...in Late Antiquity, which consisted of two principal parts: an increased deployment of Roman soldiers to the eastern frontier, and a shift towards Hunnic tactics. In this essay, however, I argue that these claims are misguided, and using five criteria set out by Lee Brice in an article on military revolution during the reigns of Philip II and Alexander the Great of Macedon, I show that the changes which Heather argues in favour of had begun long before Late Antiquity. Instead, what we see is the continued gradual evolution of Rome’s military, with the Roman state shifting troops to the east from the beginning of the imperial era, and the first documented implementation of steppe-inspired changes dating to the second century.
Preliminary analysis of coin finds from the area of the Roman
legionary fortress at Tilurium (today the village of Gardun, near
Trilj) is presented in this paper. The scholarly analysis encompasses
...the finds yielded by systematic archaeological excavations,
as well as finds today stored in the Museum of the Cetina
Region, in Sinj. Most of the coin finds date to a period from the
first half of the 1st century AD, with a noticeable reduction in
coin supply starting in the second half of the 1st century and
continuing during the 2nd century. The period of the 3rd century,
and the period of late antiquity, in the 4th and 5th centuries, again
shows some increase, but the quantity of coin finds in these
centuries is smaller than the amount pertaining to the period of
the Principate. The dating of numismatic finds therefore largely
overlaps with the dating of Tilurium as a Roman legionary fortress
and then a fort used by auxiliary contingents.
This paper draws on recent advances in our knowledge (much of it owed to the proliferation of military diplomas) and a new analytical method to quantify the number of soldiers and their children who ...received Roman citizenship between 14 and 212 c.e. Although significant uncertainties remain, these can be quantified and turn out to be small relative to the overall scale of enfranchisement. The paper begins by reviewing what is known about grants of citizenship to soldiers, with particular attention to the remaining uncertainties, before presenting a quantitative model of the phenomenon. The total number of beneficiaries was somewhere in the region 0.9–1.6 million — significantly lower than previous estimates have suggested. It also emerges that the rate of enfranchisement varied substantially over time, in line with significant changes in manpower, length of service (and hence the number of recruits and discharged veterans) and the rate of family formation among soldiers. The Supplementary Material available online (https://doi.org/10.1017/S0075435819000662) contains a database of military diplomas (Supplementary Appendix 1), a mathematical model of enfranchisement implemented in MS Excel (Supplementary Appendix 2), a description of the model (Supplementary Appendix 3A) and a derivation of the model of attrition across service cohorts in Fig. 6 (Supplementary Appendix 3B).
There is ample evidence that anti-Christian polemicists asserted that Jesus' true father was neither God nor Joseph, but a Roman soldier named Pantera. This was long dismissed as ahistorical, but for ...the past century, some interlocutors have argued that there may be credibility to the polemic, with some going so far as to identify Pantera with a certain Tiberius Julius Abdes Pantera, a Roman archer. The present article addresses various misconceptions of Tiberius Julius Abdes Pantera by those both asserting his parentage of Jesus and those arguing against it. The article concludes that the possibility that the soldier under question was Jesus' father is remote.
Los términos hospes/hospita presentan distintos significados en la epigrafía romana, relacionados en unos casos con la noción de extranjero, en otros con el hospedaje, e incluso con el concubinato. ...En este trabajo analizamos la presencia de estos vocablos en la epigrafía militar del Imperio romano, en la cual manifiestan una relación conyugal.
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