The Greeks and the Romans were comfortable with the idea that some peoples were simply more warlike than others. Possessed of a vast empire, the Romans naturally recruited heavily from such warlike folk. Of the German tribes living on the Roman side of the Rhine, ‘the Batavians are outstanding in virtus,’ Tacitus says, and so are’set aside for use in battle, like missiles and arms reserved for war.’ Through the third century a.d., more than twenty-five Thracian auxiliary units are known, and in the fourth century the Thracians were still being recruited for their special warrior qualities. It was in areas where the most warlike recruits came from — Thrace, Britain, and Batavia — that the Romans pushed conscription to the point of inspiring revolts.

The Roman army of the empire went out of its way to recruit virtus. And the army went out of its way to encourage virtus in its ranks as well. At Jerusalem Longinus the brave cavalryman had acted, Josephus says, in the hope of attracting the eye of Titus, expecting a reward if he did so. Hardly surprising; compared to the Republic, the Roman Empire had regularized and elaborated the spurs to rivalry in virtus among individual soldiers. The system of military decorations, which Polybius had pointed out as so powerful a motivating force in the Republic, was formalized and graded for rank. Decorations were mentioned in soldiers’ epitaphs, sometimes noting that they were given ob virtutem (for virtus) — and were carved upon their tombstones. Decorations were of enormous importance to soldiers.

The creation and elaboration of a permanent rank structure for the imperial army also allowed promotion in that structure to be used systematically as another form of motivation. And no wonder, for not only did promotion bring honor and easier duty, but the pay structure of the Roman army was severely hierarchical — a centurion was paid fifteen times what a common legionary earned. The decision of some soldiers, including a few never promoted to centurion, to lay out in their epitaphs each posting in their entire career shows how powerful a motivator rank was to these soldiers.

Still, despite Longinus’ expectation, Titus was not entirely delighted by him and his emulators: The commander issued an order telling them to prove their bravery without running such risks. Given Titus’ own behavior, his soldiers must have chortled; they certainly do not seem to have paid him much attention.

Five days after the capture of the first Jerusalem wall the Romans penetrated the second, were thrown back — Titus and the tribune who had accompanied him over the wall at Jotapata shot arrows to cover the retreat — and four days later pushed their way in again. The siege had now reached its climax; two walls had fallen, but the last wall stretched from the Temple Mount itself.

After giving the besieged in the city a respite to surrender, Titus set each of his four legions to building great ramps of wood and earth at opposite ends of the last wall. They raised two ramps against the massif of the Antonia Fortress, which rose from the corner of the Temple Mount. Built as King Herod’s high castle, it had afterward been the sheer aerie of the city’s Roman garrison. As the Temple dominated the city of Jerusalem, so the Antonia Fortress dominated the Temple, and unless the Temple were taken, the city could not be held.

Once again the besieged harassed the builders with raids, missiles, and projectiles from captured Roman engines. For seventeen days the Romans toiled, but underneath them, the defenders tunneled out from the Antonia and propped up the Roman works with timbers. When they set the timbers alight, the ramps collapsed with a tremendous crash. A fierce Jewish sally destroyed the earthworks at the other end of the wall where the Romans had already brought up their rams, and drove the Romans back to their camps, which they defended from the entrenchments. Once again Titus and his guard charged the attackers in the flank, and the Jews were driven back within the walls. But the Roman attack had been resoundingly defeated. The Romans were despondent. Perhaps Jerusalem could not be taken by assault. Perhaps it would have to be starved out.

Titus decided to postpone his next attack until a wall had been drawn about Jerusalem. He wanted to stop the smuggling of provisions into the city, so that famine would press even harder upon the defenders. They might even surrender. Building a circuit of entrenchments around the whole of that great city — nearly four and a half miles, with thirteen attached forts — took the Romans only three days, a striking credit to their training. But the achievement reveals something else about the Roman army.

Josephus, to whom it seemed the soldiers labored as if possessed, was astonished by the speed of the work, and he reveals how they were motivated. Each section of the circuit was assigned to a legion, each portion of a legionary span to a cohort, each cohort’s share was split between centurions, each centurion’s share split between his subordinates. So at every level soldiers, units, and officers competed with their neighbors under the watchful eye of their superiors, and Titus, the supreme commander, toured the works and was umpire over all.

If fighting in the Roman imperial army was competitive, so too was Roman military building. ‘When I was assigning shares of the work, so that each would know what part of the tunneling was his, I arranged for competition between the soldiers of the fleet and the infantry, and thus they cooperated in drilling through the mountain together,’ records a Roman military engineer from the second century a.d. Competition seems to have been the usual method by which the Roman army carried out large projects, like Hadrian’s Wall and the Antonine Wall in Britain.

Suddenly the long stretches of Trajan’s Column devoted to legionary building make sense. These are not merely a robotic transfer of material from a written account to sculpture, but illustrate the competitive excellence of the legionaries. Labor was the Latin word for such excellence in hard work, and along with patientia (endurance), labor formed part of the wider concept of disciplina. What seems so puzzling — the unheroic activities of legionaries on the column, in contrast with the fighting of the auxiliaries — is less puzzling if the legionaries’ work is understood to manifest disciplina, one of the two fundamental military values of the Romans.

Pages: 1 2 3 4