The rural milieu was an important source of recruitment for the Roman army from the second quarter of the 1st century AD until the reorganisation of the province under the Diocletian. This paper ...provides a synthesis on the mobility of soldiers recruited from this environment, following three research axes: direction of soldier’s mobility, the cases of the veterans who return home and those of veterans who remained in the province where they performed their service. Another objective of the study is mapping the mobility directions in order to trace the routes taken by the Roman army and to highlight the links between the origin province and the service regions.
During the 3rd and 4th centuries we witness a marked militarization of the socio-administrative framework of the Roman Empire. From the irruption at the institutional level of the military elites to ...the very morphology of the official buildings, which tried to imitate the distribution of the castra, this situation became a manifest reality. Naturally, in this new military context, the organization of the armed forces was far from the one that had been in force centuries ago. Among the most striking novelties, in view of the study at hand, one in particular stands out: the revaluation of the arms service in the imperial palace. This is where we must place the activity of the scholae palatinae, elite cavalry regiments of 500 men in charge of protecting the emperor and his family.The trajectory of the scholae is a reflection of the sociopolitical evolution of the Lower Roman Empire, especially in its Eastern half. The development of these contingents reveals a series of problems that suggest a projection that goes far beyond the sphere of war. In this sense, this paper delves into the role played by these horsemen and addresses the reasons that explain their conversion from elite warriors to forces whose scope of action was practically exclusively restricted to ceremonial ornamentation from the 5th century.
Durante los siglos III y IV asistimos a una acusada militarización del armazón socio-administrativo del Imperio Romano. Desde la irrupción en el plano institucional de las élites castrenses hasta la misma morfología de los edificios oficiales, que trataban de imitar la distribución de los castra, esta situación se convirtió en una realidad manifiesta. Como es natural, en este nuevo contexto marcial la organización de las fuerzas armadas distaba mucho de aquella que había estado vigente siglos atrás. Entre las novedades más llamativas, de cara al estudio que nos ocupa sobresale una en especial: la revalorización del servicio de armas en el palacio imperial. Es aquí donde debemos situar la actividad de las scholae palatinae, regimientos de caballería de élite de 500 hombres encargados de la protección del emperador y su familia. Su trayectoria constituye un reflejo de la evolución sociopolítica del Bajo Imperio Romano, especialmente en oriente. Y es que el desarrollo de estos contingentes revela una serie de problemáticas que sugieren una proyección que va mucho más allá de la esfera bélica. En este sentido, el presente trabajo profundiza sobre el papel de estos jinetes y aborda los motivos que explican su conversión desde guerreros de élite especialmente preparados para entrar en combate a fuerzas cuyo ámbito de acción quedó restringido prácticamente de forma exclusiva a la ornamentación ceremonial desde el siglo V.
The Roman Army in Dalmatia Radman-Livaja, Ivan
Mélanges de l'Ecole française de Rome. Antiquité,
08/2022
Journal Article
Peer reviewed
Open access
The study of the Roman army in Dalmatia is not a neglected field of research. Besides many publications dealing with military camps or military units, there are also several synthetic texts covering ...this topic in more detail but the seminal work about the Roman army garrisoned in Dalmatia is still the chapter written by J. J. Wilkes in his book Dalmatia. Roman army studies in Dalmatia have advanced significantly in the last 50 years – quite a few excavations took place since 1969, epigraphic discoveries occurred as well and dozens of relevant papers and books have been published – but most of Wilkes’s conclusions are still pertinent. This overview is thus primarily intended as an update of chapter 7 of Wilkes’s Dalmatia, with a focus on information concerning the Roman imperial army in Dalmatia acquired through research in the last five decades.
In Mark, Herod Antipas orders John the Baptist’s execution by a σπεκουλάτωρ. Thus, Mark becomes the first witness to the use of the word σπεκουλάτωρ in Greek. The Latin word speculator was used in ...the first century mainly in respect of the praetorian speculatores soldiers who acted as the emperor’s personal guard in Rome and who were involved in the events of the civil war in the years 68–70 CE. Mark’s use of the word σπεκουλάτωρ (along with other factors) points to the city of Rome as the gospel’s origin, since the vast majority of attestations of the word speculator occur in the city of Rome, where these soldiers mainly carried out their duties.
Within this paper, the authors set out to update the latest interpretations on the location of Roman forts along the middle course of the Olt River. With the exception of the Hoghiz fort, all the ...other forts are located on the right bank of the Olt River. At the same time, information has been added on the presence of the previous Dacian fortifications in this area.
Though we do not usually associate the art of single combat with the Eastern Roman Empire, we know from the sources that Eastern Roman soldiers were well trained for single fight – indeed, a needed ...skill in any professional army – and that they often engaged in duels, both with enemy’s “champions” or in the heat of battle. This article has the aim to analyze the extant evidence concerning training, feats of arms and the evidence of single combat itself in the Eastern Roman Empire (from Late Antiquity to the Middle Ages).
The legionary base at Legio (Legion II Trajana and Legion VI Ferrata) is the first full-scale legionary base of the Principate excavated in the Eastern Empire. The 2015–2019 excavation seasons of the ...Jezreel Valley Regional Project focused on the headquarters compound, the principia. While many components of the compound are typical of those of permanent legionary bases throughout the Empire, several unique features of the principia at Legio offer new research avenues concerning the function of these buildings within the Roman army administrative system and community life. This paper summarizes the results of the 2015–2019 seasons of excavation and remote sensing within the principia.
