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

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The Roman A rmy
mals and vehicles would be needed for a campaign. Carts and wagons could be
manufactured, requisitioned, or bought, and pack animals could be assembled
from private owners, paid or unpaid. In some cases, private shipowners (navicularii)
were necessary if transport overseas or along navigable rivers was envisaged.
How this vast assembly of supplies and the means of transporting them
was achieved is not known. There may have been a central administration, perhaps
under the Praefectus Annonae, whereby an established but dormant system
for requ i s i ti onand purchase swung into acti on , but this is spec u l a ti on . Som e
scholars think that each emperor intent on campaigning beyond the frontiers
had to assemble their needs from scratch (Roth, 1999). Once the army was assembled,
there is slightly more information as to what it required and what it
carried, but the evidence is uncoordinated inasmuch as it is derived from a variety
of different sources from different periods.
A pri m a ry requ i rem ent in the stu dy of l ogi s tics is to try to establish how
much of each commodity would be carried and what it would weigh, but there
a re diver gent esti m a tes of h ow mu ch food and equ i pm ent was requ i red on
campaign, and how all these items were obtained and transported. Like other
campaigning armies, the Romans carried with them not only their food, fodder,
and drink, but also the means of harvesting crops, hunting animals, processing
and eating food, and vessels for drinking water, wine, and beer. They also carri
ed we a pons and cl o t h i n g, pers onal ef fect s , tools for en tren ch i n g, ti m ber
felling, and mending wagons and carts, medical and veterinary equipment, one
tent for each contubernium of eight men, field artillery for each century, and the
siege train consisting of larger artillery if cities and citadels were to be stormed.
This list is by no means complete.
The terms that the ancient authors used most frequently for food supply are
frumentum, commonly found in Caesar’s accounts—meaning the grain supply
but occ a s i on a lly app lying to food in gen eral—and less com m on ly ci ba ri a ,
wh i ch stri ct ly speaking refers to non grain food but can stand in for all food
stocks. In working out how much food the soldiers would consume, some facts
and figures are available, but they only succeed in confusing the issue because
exact equivalents of ancient weights and quantities depend on interpretation.
Several modern scholars have investigated the amounts of wheat that were
necessary to sustain an entire legion or an individual soldier for a specified period
of time. Using Greek measures, Polybius says that the Roman and allied infantrymen
received about one-third of a medimnus of wheat per month, while
the Roman cavalry received two medimni of wheat plus seven medimni of barley.
The allied cavalry were supplied with slightly less, receiving only one and a
half measures of wheat and five of barley. Translating Polybius’s figures of onethird
of an Attic medimnus per month into Roman measure, Roth (1999) estimates
that one legion required 600 modii of wheat every day. Estimating not by
m e a su re but by ac re a ge , G o l d s wort hy (1996) su ggests that a legi on , ro u n ded