Month: February 2018

The Roman Army A to Z: acies

/ Mike Bishop

acies (f. pl. acies)

Literally ‘a blade’s edge’. A battle line (Veg., DRM 3.14; Cic., Fam. 10.30.2); simplex a.: a single battle line (one row of ten cohorts) (Bell. Afr. 13; 59; Caes., BG 3.22.1); duplex a. a double battle line (e.g. ten cohorts arrayed in two lines of five) (Caes., BC 3.67.4); triplex a. a triple battle line (four cohorts in the front line, three in the second, and three in the third) (Caes., BC 1.83.2). [Cowan 2007]

The Roman Army A to Z

/ Mike Bishop

The Roman army partly defined themselves by their language – Latin was used, even in areas where Greek was dominant – and mastering it was a requirement for any new recruit. This means that any reader confronting the Roman army for the first time – whether in fact, fiction, or on a visit to Hadrian’s Wall – inevitably encounters a wealth of what appears to be technical terminology. What did it all mean? Even those with some knowledge may find themselves wondering what the source is for a particular term or phrase. These blog entries may well prove to be of some assistance when large (and  expensive) tomes maintain an inscrutable silence; compiling them for the book from which this is derived has certainly proved instructive to me.

Roman re-enactors chatting at Hadrian's Wall Live 2015

Roman re-enactors chatting at Hadrian’s Wall Live 2015

Most of the terms in what follows were indeed used by the Romans, but some have been coined by scholars (in Latin) just to fill in the gaps and confuse things a little (‘lorica segmentata’ probably being the most famous, but there will be others). It is always important to be aware of the fact that Latin in particular could have many meanings for one word and that the Romans were often annoyingly imprecise in their technical usage of language (much to the evident frustration of those same Latin-wielding scholars). Loan (it is much politer than saying stolen or appropriated) words were common and Greece was generous in its vocabulary donations to the Roman army, in much the same way as it was with its art in the 2nd century BC. Arrian (himself writing in Greek) commented (Arr., Tech. Takt. 33–44) on how the Roman auxiliary cavalry terminology for the hippika gymnasia was almost entirely taken from the Celtic language, so the Greeks were far from being the only donors.

Re-enactors at Hadrian's Wall Live 2015 simulate combat

Re-enactors at Hadrian’s Wall Live 2015 simulate combat

What follows is inevitably heavily influenced by two previous publications. First is Frank Graham’s Dictionary of Roman Military Terms and second Sander van Dorst’s web page containing his Glossary of Greek and Latin military terms. However, neither of these provided sources for their entries and it always struck me as rather crucial to do so. When I came to produce my Handbook to Roman Legionary Fortresses (Bishop 2013), I included a brief yet pertinent glossary in the back that attempted to remedy this, and it struck me at the time that there was a need to do this for the Roman army in general, on a much broader scale.

A Pompeii-type gladius

A Pompeii-type gladius

This, then, is an exercitologist’s guide to the terminology of the Roman army. There is no guarantee that the Romans themselves jargonised to the same extent as modern armies, but the rich and complex system of abbreviations they use on inscriptions might be thought to suggest that they did in this aspect at least. However, abbreviations only work if they are understood and the purpose of many inscriptions is to communicate to as wide an audience as possible, so it might be argued that whilst formal texts sought to cram as much as possible into as little space as was available, epitaphs wished for the widest readership possible so had to be decipherable by their target audience.

Ut Milites Dicuntur cover