June, 2021 Research Update

Amici!  It is now July!

First, an announcement.  By the consent of the Populus Paedagogorum, I have added a new tier to the Patreon, the Patres/Matres Conscripti at $8.  Patres Conscripti, "Conscript Fathers" was a common way to refer to the members of the Roman Senate (who were 'conscripti' in the sense that their names were written together - the literal meaning of conscripti - on the census roll).  For the members of the ACOUP Senate, my plan is to have an open thread (probably monthly) which will form the basis for a Q&A post on ACOUP (probably in place of a Fireside).  I don't know how often those Q&A posts will happen - it will depend on the volume of questions.

My plan is also for questions that get asked which are a bit too substantial for a Q&A response to go into a pool perhaps every few months to be voted on by the ACOUP Senate for a more in-depth response on the blog.  Of course a lot of how that works will depend on how much interest there is and the volume of questions, so we'll see how it goes.  I'll be announcing the new tier to the general blog-reading public on the next Fireside (which is not this week, but next week; this week's post is going to be a single-post aside about nations and nation-states).

June has been a busy month, though most of my time was spent working on this chapter on the organization of the food supply of the roman army.  It's coming along fairly well and I shouldn't have a problem making the deadline on it, but it is going to crowd out a number of other potential projects over the next month because it absolutely has to get done first.

Alas, for deadlines!  But more on that chapter in a moment.

On the article front, peer review for Article II (on Roman mail) is in.  The reviewers were fairly positive (reviewer 1: "Although lengthy, it is also extremely clearly and lucidly written, without an inch of wasted fat – it moves along at a cracking pace, and the argument is logically sequenced and easy to follow") but both concluded that the article was "too narrow in its scope for a 'generalist' journal like the JRS."  Frankly, I think that's nonsense given that the end conclusion touches on the causes for Roman success in the second century, which is perhaps the most 'generalist' possible question in Roman history, given that it enables all of the other questions.  But it is a fairly predictable sort of slant for a journal where a discussion of the historical impact of military equipment is 'too narrow' but an entire article on "The Reader and the Resurrection in Prudentius" is suitably broad.

Nevertheless, we are not to be dispirited; the JRS rejects about 11 articles for every one it takes.  The plan now is, as soon as time permits, to reformat the article and attempt it at another journal.  The general positive tone of the feedback gives me a pretty high degree of confidence; both reviewers suggested that the Journal of Roman Archaeology being a good fit, so that's where we'll go next.  The JRA is still very high profile and would frankly reach much of the same sort of audience we were aiming for with the JRS.

Finally, a bit about the work on the food chapter.  One of the interesting conundrums for pre-modern history is that we generally like to chart out how a system functions, as in this case where I am being asked to describe the organization of the Roman army's food supply.  That implies that I am going to set out some general rules for how the food supply was organized and functioned.

Now for a modern army, there would be field manuals, rules and regulations which would spell out in detail exactly how the food supply is managed, who was responsible for what and so on.  But for most pre-modern (or early modern) armies, no such guides existed and even if they did, they wouldn't survive.  Absolutely there are military manuals for generals, but they are generally uninterested in the quotidian concerns of logistics and more focused on tactics, strategy and personal leadership.  The general was assumed to already know how to feed their army.

So how does a historian go about laying down rules for this sort of system?  Well, the answer is that the system was what the system did.  That's especially important for any system which was governed by norms rather than laws or strict rules (or which was simply ad hoc).  So to chart out the organization of the Roman army's food supply, what I am essentially doing is collating all of the examples of its organization and looking for patterns.

In the Republic, a very important source for this is Livy (Caesar's comentarii are probably the only equally useful source).  Livy provides a year-to-year account of the activities of the Roman state.  Sadly, most of his histories are lost, but we have a nearly complete run of Livy from 218 to 168 preserved.

So what I have been doing, in part, is going through those 24 books of Livy looking for the instances when a logistics concern rises in importance to make it into his narrative.  Such instances are typically rare - most of the background of foraging, buying food, forcing local contributions, etc. simply exist well below the level of activity Livy cares about.  After all, each book of Livy typically covers at least one full year - some of them cover several years - which are full of wars and battles, legislation, debate, omens, etc.  A single short account of 2020 would, for instance, probably not contain many details about how US forces in Afghanistan were supplied with MREs.

Still, there is a lot there; I can take those examples and then start looking for patterns: who is in charge, who does the major tasks, and so on.  Fortunately for me, I'm not the first person doing this, so I can also look at other scholars (particularly Paul Erdkamp and Jonathan Roth, but there are others) who have done the same and see their judgements as well.

Some things jump out immediately, like the fact that the Senate sets the sizes, commanders and area of operations for all armies each year, at the beginning of the year, before commanders depart for their provinces.  That clearly has a logistical component - often the Senate at the same time tasks other officials with supporting some of those armies logistically.  While we don't get any reports of logistics debates in the Senate, those considerations must have played a role: each year the Senate tried to match its forces with the military needs and logistical constraints.  In a mismatch, supplies were to be sent from other provinces or from distant allies by sea to support operations.

Other things are more frustrating.  Take foraging parties.  We have a number of them attested.  The standard size for a foraging operation is pretty clear: one legion was normal, though larger forces were sent when security was a concern.  Part of the legion would stand guard, armed, while the rest moved into the fields around a town or village and cut down the wheat in the fields (Roman armies could thresh and mill their own grain on the march) and pull out any grain in granaries and the like.  One of these days we should talk in more depth on ACOUP about what foraging operations were like; I suppose I'll include that as an option on the first ACOUP Senate poll.

But who led those detachments?  A Roman army, to be clear, was typically 2 or more legions, with a matching number of allies, so we're talking about a foraging party that is a quarter or so of the army's total strength.  Important, but not most of the troops - who is in charge of it?  Well, usually we're not told, but I looked at all of the examples where we were.  We have 1 example where it was the military tribunes (6-per-legion staff officers supporting the general).  We have one example where it was the praefectus socium; he gets ambushed and killed (awkward).  One example, Pydna, it was legati - deputies appointed by the general - who commanded watering parties, which probably worked by the same rules.  In one case, the person commanding the party was 'Aquinus' - an individual about whom we know nothing except his name.  Probably he was a legate?  That brings the legate count to 2.  Finally, in at least two occasions, Julius Caesar leads his own foraging expeditions...a fact that puts 'Julius Caesar' as the most frequent kind of officer known to lead foraging parties, ahead of two difficult and dubious cases of legates doing so.

I joked to a colleague that we should take this to mean that Julius Caesar, personally, throughout all of time, led about a third of all Roman foraging.  Such a conclusion - the Time Traveling Caesar Thesis - conforms better to our evidence than Roth's single sentence suggesting it was normally the tribunes who did this (when they are only one example out of 6!).  It would certainly explain their logistical excellence.  But in truth, what this probably points to is an ad hoc system where any number of individuals could lead a foraging expedition.  Given how regularly they were done, they may have taken turns doing so (in the case where we know the tribunes were doing it, they were expressly taking turns).

But this sort of approach - charting out what the system actually does and looking for patterns - is the best the evidence allows for, at least until Time Traveling Julius Caesar shows up to do some foraging expeditions for us and we can ask him.  And it can both illuminate where there is clearly a system, like with the Senate, vs. when there is clearly some ad hockery going on, like with foraging.

In closing, I should perhaps note that the triumphant masterpiece of this kind of approach is the late F. Millar's The Emperor in the Roman World (31 BC - AD 337) (1977) which takes the same approach in assuming that 'the emperor is what the emperor does' and then charts out the 'office' of emperor based on all of the jobs and activities we see emperors doing.

And that's that for June, on to July.  We'll be finishing the Queen's Latin on the blog in July (two more parts to go), along with me hopefully handing in a finished version of this food chapter.