Peasants Into Soldiers: Recruitment and Military Mobility in the Early Roman Empire

chapter 8 Peasants into Soldiers: Recruitment and Military Mobility in the Early Roman Empire

Tatiana Ivleva

The career of Claudius Paternus Clementianus (born c. 65 ce) took him to many parts of the Roman world. Beginning his equestrian cursus honorum as the prefect of a cohort stationed on the lower Rhine, Clementianus was then transferred to the Danube region to serve as a military tribune. Following this, he served in Dacia as prefect of an ala (cavalry unit). After concluding his military career he was appointed to various senior administrative posts, first in the province of Judaea, then in Africa Proconsularis and Sardinia, ending his career as governor of Noricum.1 Clementianus’ movements across the Roman world are not exceptional. As a result of territorial conquests, first by the Roman Republic and later by the Roman Empire, new patterns of mobility were cre- ated, and overall levels of mobility and migration increased.2 Such mobility was often voluntary, but could also be imposed by the Roman state. Among those whose movements were state-organised young men who joined the Roman army are particularly conspicuous. These range from recruits of humble background, enlisted as auxiliaries, to high-ranking officers of legionary units. During their careers, exemplified by that of Clementianus, members of the Roman army often covered thousands of kilometres, criss-crossing the Roman Empire individually or with their units. In general, throughout the Greco-Roman world people connected to the military appear to have moved more frequently than civilians.3 The geographic mobility of Roman army units and their personnel is a topic that has been widely researched, and the number of publications on this sub- ject in any modern language is difficult to quantify. The vast literature includes general studies on legionary and auxiliary units, detailed regional surveys focus- ing on specific units stationed in particular provinces, as well as studies dealing

1 2 3

1 ae 1968, 406; cil 3, 5776. For a career map, see Mattingly et al. 2013: 11, Fig. 14. 2 Naerebout 2014: 273, quoting Scheidel 2001: 1: “population movements on an unprecedented scale.” 3 Woolf 2013a: 363, following Bekker-Nielsen 2003.

Peasants into Soldiers 159 with deployments during the reign of a particular emperor.4 Building on indica- tions supplied by the epigraphic record and archaeological data, these publications have sought to illuminate the whereabouts of garrisons and military posts as well as intra-provincial and inter-provincial movements of such units. In recent years the focus of attention has shifted away from charting troop movements and identifying historically attested units to more anthropologically informed studies of the Roman army as a diverse community.5 This more ‘holis- tic’ approach offers a broader view of the social impact of the Roman army on the native population, and of cultural continuity or discontinuity among the troops, of the formation of soldierly communities and brotherhoods, and also of the real extent of geographic and social mobility achieved by individual soldiers. It has been tacitly assumed that most auxiliary recruits came from humble social backgrounds (i.e. from rural areas).6 Auxilia were mainly composed of non-citizens who, after 25 years of military service, were granted the Roman citizenship along with their family members.7 For many of these men their period of military service may have been a disruptive and stressful experience, since during it they were usually transferred to locations far from their home- lands, often to the very edges of the Roman world.8 The responses of the soldiers to this experience of state-organised mobility are likely to have included some form of ‘identity stress’. Such stress can occur when previous forms of identification are manipulated or adjusted in response to newly imposed cir- cumstances.9 It may be possible to interpret the detailed recording of birth- places on funerary tombstones, especially when a soldier died in a foreign land,

4 5 6 7as well the return movements of army veterans, against this background.10 8 9 10

4 Recent summaries include Roxan 1995, Spaul 1994 and 2000, Meyer 2013 and Haynes 2013. 5 Pitts 2007: 697. 6 Woolf 2013a: 352 and 354. This view is based on Vegetius 1.3 who writes that recruits from the countryside are preferred to those from towns due to the corrupt nature of urban populations. Cf. also Haynes 2013: 100. 7 This is especially valid for the Julio-Claudian period, when most auxiliaries were peregrini. By the late-first century citizens started to join the auxilia, serving alongside non- citizen recruits; by the mid-second century the number of peregrini and citizens in troops had become roughly equal. One should not, however, forget the cohortes civium Romanorum raised from the Roman citizens. Haynes 2001: 67–68; Le Bohec 1994: 98. 8 Haynes 2001: 65, cf. also Haynes 2013: 4. 9 Oltean 2009: 92–93. 10 On Roman army veterans returning to their places of origin see Birley 1982/1983; Roxan 1997 and 2000; Mann 2002; Derks and Roymans 2006; Roselaar, in this volume; Ivleva (forthcoming a).