The Roman Army, 31 BC–AD 337: A Sourcebook

102 The Roman Army
(see Plate 8), to eliminate all places of refuge for an enemy, whom the legions
could always defeat in open battle. For artillery, siege engines (see Plate 9),
weaponry, and armour (see Plate 10), which are outside the scope of evidence
that can be presented in this book, see Marsden 1969; 1971; Connolly
1981:281–303; Webster 1985; Bishop and Coulston 1993.
163 Dio, 71. 3
Rivers are very easily bridged by the Romans since the soldiers are
always practising it like any other military exercise, on the Danube,
Rhine, and Euphrates. The procedure, which is probably not familiar
to everyone, is as follows. The ships used for bridging a river are flatbottomed
and are anchored some distance upstream from the intended
place for the bridge. When the signal is given, they first let one ship
drift down with the current close to the bank that they occupy, and
when it is opposite the place where the bridge is to be made, they throw
into the water a basket full of stones fastened by a cable, which acts as
an anchor. Since it is secured by this, the ship remains anchored close
to the bank, and by means of planks and fastenings which the ship
carries in large amounts, they immediately lay out a floor up to the
landing spot. They then launch another ship downstream adjacent to
the first, and another one adjacent to that, until the bridge has been
extended to the opposite bank. The ship closest to the hostile bank has
on board towers and a gate and archers and catapults.
164 On the Fortifications of a Camp (2nd C.AD), 57
Particular attention should be paid to the road which borders the sides
of a camp. Furthermore, whatever the strategic position of a camp, it
should have a river or a source of water on one side or the other.
Unfavourable terrain, called ‘a stepmother’ by previous writers, should
be avoided at all costs; so, the camp should not be overlooked by a
mountain, which the enemy could use to attack from above or from
which they could spy on activities in the camp; there should be no
forest in the vicinity which might offer concealment to the enemy, and
no ditch or valleys which might allow a surprise attack on the camp;
and care must be taken that the camp is not inundated and destroyed
by a sudden overflowing of the waters of a neighbouring river.
‘Step-mother’ was presumably soldiers’ talk using the pejorative sense of the
word common in Roman literature. This treatise, wrongly ascribed to Hyginus,
the writer on surveying, dates from the second century (possibly Trajan’s reign),
and is an account of the construction of a camp for a hypothetical army, and