The Roman Army: A Social and Institutional History - Karatunov.net

Preface and Acknowledgments
It has become customary nowadays to start with an apology for “yet another
book on the Roman army,” but this author, who would be the first to
admit to a very strong bias toward the subject, feels that no apologies need
be made for any amount of books on the Roman army. Not everyone has access
to large libraries in the various educational institutions in the United States and
Europe, so it is only students and lecturers who can view in one place most of
the past and present corpus of books on the Romans and their armies. For the
interested general reader, reliant upon public libraries and bookshops, the range
is more limited . Books go out of pri n t , and the older ones do not nece s s a ri ly
turn up in quantity on the Internet or in second-hand bookshops. There was a
time, about thirty to forty years ago perhaps, when you could read everything
there was available in the English language on the Roman army, but thankfully
that has changed. The plethora of modern books, some of them translated from
other languages, each have something extra to say, viewed from a different angle,
and many of them do what books should do, which is to make you think. As
for this book, it may just be the first one that a reader picks up about the Roman
army, and then he or she may want to read other books to take the subject further.
No serious-minded study on armies can afford to ignore the tremendously
successful army that established a presence over so many parts of Europe and
the Middle East, and survived far longer than any other.
My first debt , a very old one now, is to the BBC, wh i ch broadcast history
programs for schools on Wednesdays, when I suppose the teachers were glad of
the opportunity to assemble us in our small village school, all twenty-eight of
us, to listen to the radio, where it has been said “the pictures are better.” My second
debt is to those wonderful epic films that they used to do so well and still
make now and then. It doesn’t matter whether they get all of it right, if the films
foster and develop an interest that is already there. You can learn a lot by trying
to find out if the Roman soldiers were dre s s ed correct ly, i f t h ey did put thei r
shields over their heads and call it a tortoise, if chariot races really were like that,
if there was a slave revolt crushed by the armies of Marcus Licinius Crassus, and
if Marcus Aurelius fought the German tribes from a base on the Danube. My
third debt is to colleagues from the Department of Archaeology at the University
of Newcastle upon Tyne, to the late Charles Daniels who discussed things