Another meaning of the Latin word disciplina was training. Like fighting and building, Roman training too was fiercely competitive. A particularly successful soldier recorded his triumphs in training on his tombstone:

Once I was the most renowned on the
Pannonian shore
Amidst a thousand Batavians the
strongest.
With Hadrian watching I swam the
huge waters
Of Danube’s deep in full arms.
While a bolt from my bow hung in the
air —
while it fell — I hit and shattered it
with another arrow.
Neither Roman nor barbarian, no
soldier with his javelin,
no Parthian with his bow, could
defeat me.
Here I lie. I have entrusted my deeds
to the memory of this stone.
Whether another after me will
emulate my deeds has yet to be seen.
I am the first who did such things: I
emulated myself.

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Swimming, archery, javelin throwing: This paragon excelled in all. An extended description of auxiliary cavalry drill also survives. Beneath standards and writhing serpent banners, the cavalry competed in riding and charging, wheeling and circling, in casting spears at targets and blunted javelins at one another.

Disciplina, existing in counterpoint to virtus, included not merely obedience and punishment but nearly every military excellence that was not encompassed under virtus, including training and building. Roman disciplina was at once something imposed upon the Roman soldiers from above, and something soldiers were expected to feel in their hearts. Like virtus, disciplina was fiercely competitive: It was a source of honor, something on which soldiers prided themselves. When they failed in disciplina, soldiers sometimes felt crippling shame, just as when they failed in virtus. Neither disciplina nor virtus took precedence over the other in the Roman military mind.

Under the empire, the opposition of virtus and disciplina developed and flowered exotically into a tacit distinction between the legionaries, among whom the stress was upon disciplina, and the auxiliaries, among whom the stress was upon virtus. It was the exemplars of virtus who were increasingly used in battle, and the exemplars of disciplina who were increasingly used in construction, to erect the sophisticated engineering works that, as the Jerusalem siege demonstrated, gave the Romans a considerable part of their relative superiority in war. This was a matter of emphasis, not a schism; the auxiliaries were not relieved of drill and building, and the army did not cease to recruit and encourage virtus in the legions. But the differing roles of soldiers at Jerusalem and on Trajan’s Column betray a degree of matter-of-fact specialization.

After the wall around Jerusalem was complete, Titus ordered four new ramps, larger than the old ones, to be raised against the Antonia; presumably each ramp was assigned to a legion, as the previous ramps had been. In twenty-one days they were complete. The Romans threw back a badly coordinated attack on the ramps by the besieged, and brought up rams against the walls. The defenders cast down stones, missiles, and fire, but the Romans held their positions at the bottom of the walls, the rams did their work, and legionaries even pried out four great stones by hand. In the night, when fighting was suspended, the Roman efforts were rewarded when the wall of the Antonia, undermined by the countermines dug beneath the first ramps and weakened by the rams, collapsed. But behind it loomed another wall, erected in haste by the defenders against just such a development.

Now Titus appealed with promises of reward and promotion for volunteers to lead the ascent up the rubble to this new wall. The Roman commander found twelve volunteers, led by a frail, shrunken Syrian auxiliary named Sabinus. The Syrian led on bravely but tripped at the top of the wall. He was overwhelmed, and the assault failed.

Two nights later the Romans captured the Antonia in an unexpected way. Twenty legionaries on sentry duty banded together and decided, apparently without informing their officers, to make an attempt upon the wall in the dark. They recruited a standard-bearer of the Fifth Legion (presumably their own), a trumpeter, and two auxiliary cavalrymen for their adventure.The first Titus knew of the assault was when the Roman trumpet sang out from the top of the wall, the attackers having climbed by stealth and killed the sentries. The general called the sleeping Romans to arms and hastened with his bodyguard and staff to reinforce the lodgment. He found the Antonia empty of enemies. The defenders, on hearing the same trumpet blast as he, fled in panic into the neighboring Temple, thinking the Romans were inside the Antonia in force.

The fact that there were no forces held in readiness to exploit the ascent of the wall indicates that, like the undermining of the tower at Gamala, the taking of the Antonia was the independent project of common soldiers who drew a more sen-ior man, the standard-bearer, in with them. That so great an event should hang on the private initiative of private soldiers would be surprising in any army. But it is especially so in the Roman army, which had for centuries — in principle — doomed to death sentries who left their posts, a custom upon which Josephus remarks. To attack the wall unordered was to risk death at the hands of both Jews and Romans. Why did the Roman sentries attempt it?

The answer lies in the oddest detail of the ascent. Why, on a night so dark as to allow climbing the wall unseen, take a legionary standard? For the soldiers to take a trumpeter up the wall made sense, because they used the trumpet to signal their success from the top. But no one would be able to see the standard of the Fifth Legion atop the Antonia. Yet they carried the awkward object up the wall because, seen or unseen, it symbolized the unit of the soldiers engaged in the perilous ascent. Later in the siege, standards were carried up the Temple wall in the heat of fighting — and lost in a Jewish counterattack. Taking the standard suggests that the soldiers’ brave, punishable, valuable initiative was a product of the ferocious competition between units in the Roman imperial army.

The rivalry between units of the Roman army was powerful. In time of mutiny, three legions could agree to amalgamate, but unit pride prevented them from extinguishing their identity in another unit, so the standards of all had to be planted together. In time of civil war, rivalry could lead to fighting between units and influence which of the rival leaders units chose to follow. Romans relied particularly on unit rivalry to push forward military building projects, like the wall around Jerusalem. Later in the siege, when the Romans were trying to advance from the Antonia to the Temple, access was narrow. Rather than simply assigning the task to a limited number of units, Titus selected thirty of the best centuries from many, so that the goad of unit rivalry would not be lost and the Roman soldiers would ‘vie man with man and unit with unit.’

It is tempting to associate the rivalry between Roman military units with the bonds of soldierly cohesion so valued and encouraged in contemporary armies. No doubt many years of living and fighting together did produce connections of friendship and mutual loyalty among small groups of Roman soldiers, and no doubt those bonds did contribute, to a degree, to the effectiveness of the Roman army in action. But ancient authors stress far more frequently the fierce rivalry that existed between individual Roman soldiers.

Thus the rivalry between units in the Roman army should perhaps be understood as a form of outward-looking solidarity, rather than inward-looking solidarity arising from internal bonds of friendly sentiment. A Roman unit was less like a modern family and more like a modern professional sports team, whose members come together to compete against other teams but whose members’ feelings toward teammates are often more rivalrous than affectionate.

The taking of the Antonia Fortress was the decisive moment in the siege of Jerusalem, for now there was no question that the city would fall. Yet there was much more savage fighting, both for the Temple, which was burned, and for what lay beyond. On the Roman side, the fighting followed the same pattern as earlier in the siege: brave acts by individual centurions and common soldiers, Roman masses advancing without orders and suffering for it, and Titus charging with his cavalry or wanting to fight but being restrained by his staff.

As final victory came closer, the Roman soldiers became increasingly uncontrollable. When Titus finally gave them permission to sack and burn the city, he was merely giving his official imprimatur to what was going to happen anyway. When, after the destruction of the city, Titus paraded his army, decorating and promoting and rewarding with booty those who had distinguished themselves and thanking his soldiers in general for their courage and obedience, we may suspect more than a slight note of irony at the latter.

When the last resistance in the city failed, the Romans slaughtered until their arms grew weary: Now devouring fire and quenching blood fought their own battle for control of the streets. The total Josephus gives for the dead in the siege — 1.1 million, or nearly half the Jews in Judea — may be somewhat less unlikely than most such stratospheric figures that survive from antiquity. The siege of Jerusalem was probably the greatest single slaughter in ancient history. Not only was the city sacked and burned, but Titus gave directions that what remained should be wholly demolished, except for a stretch of wall and some high towers that were left as a symbol to the world of Roman strength — and as a warning to anyone who might again defy the fury of the Romans.

Titus returned to Rome soon after the capture of Jerusalem, leaving the final mopping-up operations in Judea to his successors. The final drama played out at the fortress of Masada, perched on a gaunt fourteen-hundred-foot prominence and besieged by the Tenth Legion and several thousand auxiliaries. In a massive engineering feat, the Romans built an enormous ramp to the walls of the fortress and winched up their siege engines. The end came in April of a.d. 73, when more than nine hundred of Masada’s defenders — all but two women and five children — chose suicide over inevitable defeat.

Bedazzled by the contrasts between the Romans, the chaotic Galileans he commanded, and the Judeans whose fighting and infighting he witnessed during the Jewish war, Josephus pointed to discipline and training as the key qualities that set the Roman army apart. Josephus’ own narrative, however, shows that his formulation was far too simple.

Roman soldiers of the empire remained highly volatile, not only subject to panic (like all armies, in all generations) but also to disobedience born of individual and mass aggression. Roman generals understood that Roman victory depended on maintaining a balance between competitive disciplina and undisciplined virtus. Generals could preach and rail against the heedless boldness of their troops, but they did not execute them for it, knowing full well that the success of their soldiers in battle depended on the qualities of spirit that produced their disobedience and being happy to profit from the initiative that spirit produced, as when soldiers without orders undermined the tower at Gamala or made their night ascent up the Antonia.

The Romans saw no contradiction between their training and discipline on the one hand and recruiting and using in battle men not brought up in Roman ways on the other. They did not worry (as many modern commentators have) about the increasing use of barbarian soldiers in the Roman army. To the contrary, the army actively sought out wild soldiers, confident that disciplina was easier to teach than virtus, which came in the blood or had to be inculcated from birth and could only be evoked, not created, by leadership. A professional army with long terms of service needed to recruit wilder soldiers to preserve the balance of disciplina and virtus upon which victory depended.

The Romans in fact exploited the variations in degree of virtus and disciplina that their recruiting and training produced, the legions coming to be valued and used especially for their competitive disciplina, the auxiliaries for their competitive virtus. The vaunted discipline of the Romans drew its strength from the ancient Roman culture of competition, and even so, the Romans knew full well it was of little use alone. Roman victory came from mixing civilized competition in duty, training, and restraint with savage courage, from joining the dark forest to the shining city.

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This article was written by J.E. Lendon and originally published in the Summer 2005 edition of MHQ. J.E. Lendon is an associate professor of history at the University of Virginia. This article is excerpted from his book Soldiers and Ghosts: A History of Battle in Classical Antiquity, to be published in May 2005 by Yale University Press. Copyright ©2005 by Yale University. Reprinted by permission.

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