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

104 The Roman Army
the cohort mentioned above, from Ostia on the Tiber, willingly, happily,
and deservedly paid his vow.
Zosimus has a Greek name and was presumably posted to the cohort of
Aquitanians from civilian life in Ostia.
167 CIL 6. 20=ILS 2092, inscription, Rome, AD 82
In honour of Asclepius and the good health of his fellow soldiers, Sextus
Titius Alexander, doctor of the fifth cohort of praetorians, made this
offering in the consulship of [Domitian] Augustus for the eighth time
and Titus Flavius Sabinus.
168 CIL 7.690=RIB 1618, inscription, Vercovicium (Housesteads),
Britain
To the spirits of the departed, in honour of Anicius Ingenuus, doctor
ordinarius of the first cohort of Tungrians, lived twenty-five years.
169 CJ 10. 53(52). 1, 3rd C.AD
The Emperor Antoninus to Numisius. Since you say that you are doctor
of Legion II Adiutrix, you will not be forced to undertake civic duties
during the time when you are absent on state business. But when you
have ceased to be absent (on state business), after the termination of
your exemption on that basis, if you belong to that group to whom are
applicable the privileges granted to doctors, you will benefit from that
exemption.
INCENTIVES AND PUNISHMENTS
Soldiers could be rewarded after a successful campaign with a
distribution of booty, extra rations, or promotion. Military decorations
were more a symbolic recognition of an individual soldier’s courage,
and in the Republic were bestowed unsystematically in a way that
emphasized the nature of the action rather than the status of the
recipient. In the imperial period donatives replaced booty as a reward
for the troops. Moreover, by the end of the first century AD the award
of military decorations had been reorganized in a much more
hierarchical structure in which there were a limited number of
decorations whose design was largely based on items of captured enemy
equipment or Roman weaponry or celebrated acts of valour, like
storming a town or fort. According to his rank and status, a man received
a combination of the various types of decoration and a certain number