The Ancients - The Roman Auxiliary

Episode Date: May 2, 2024

Auxiliaries were some of the most important troops in the all-conquering Roman Army. Unlike legionaries, their more heavily-armoured and widely famed counterparts, auxiliaries were recruited from across the Empire and were renowned for their versatility. Deployed as border guards in the far-away hinterlands near Hadrians Wall or as mobile cavalry in the deserts of Parthia, they helped aid the advance of Rome’s military behemoth in many more ways than one.In today’s episode of The Ancients, Tristan Hughes is joined by historical novelist Ben Kane to delve deeper into the fascinating stories of these soldiers and uncover who they were, where they came from and how important they were to Rome’s many conquests. This episode was edited and produced by Joseph Knight.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 per month for 3 months with code ANCIENTS - sign up here.You can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi, I'm Tristan Hughes, and if you would like the Ancient ad-free, get early access and bonus episodes, sign up to History Hit. With a History Hit subscription, you can also watch hundreds of hours of original documentaries, including my recent documentary all about Petra and the Nabataeans, and enjoy a new release every week. Sign up now by visiting historyhit.com slash subscribe. When someone mentions the Roman army, your mind might immediately think of the legionaries. The Roman citizen-soldiers that became some of the most feared professional fighters of antiquity, particularly during the early imperial period roughly 2,000 years ago, equipped with their iconic banded iron lorica segmentata armour, their short gladius stabbing swords, large scutum shields, helmets and so on. However, the legionaries couldn't win Rome's wars on their own. Just as important to the

success of the Roman army, if not more important, were another key troop type – the auxiliaries. Recruited from across the empire, auxiliary soldiers could be cavalry, they could be infantry, they could be skirmishers. They served various roles from frontline troops to garrison border guards along frontiers like Hadrian's Wall. The stories of these soldiers, who they were, where they came from and where they served in the Empire are amazing. And to talk through what we

know, well I was delighted to interview fan favourite and historical fiction heavyweight Dr Ben Kane. Now Ben, he knows all the things about the Roman army from cavalry to tombstones and I really do hope you enjoy. to tombstones, and I really do hope you enjoy. Ben, great to have you on the podcast as always. Welcome back. Thank you, Tristan. Lovely to be here. Looking forward to this. Now, especially after the success of our chat about the Roman Legion, we had to do that other key part of the Roman army, the story of the Roman auxiliary. It always feels as if the legionary gets the limelight. However, these other units, they were equally, if not more

important in the whole creating and sustaining of the Roman empire. Indeed, like any empire, the Romans relied on non-citizen peoples to fight in their armies, both for numbers, but also in particular types of situation where they needed missile troops or whatever. They played a huge role in the Roman army. And very frustratingly, we know very little about them. So there are lots of details that we know, but nitty gritty. There'll be a lot of times during this podcast where I'll say, well, we think this, but we're not really sure. We're all prepared for that. Don't you worry, my friend. You'll provide more than enough information anyway, I'm no doubt at all. First of all, when talking about the auxiliary soldier, what do we mean by an auxiliary? In terms of

Romans from the Republic through to the Empire, we literally mean a non-citizen soldier, generally. They could be foot soldiers and they could be cavalry. And then there's lots more detail. But the simplest explanation is a non-citizen soldier. And so someone who wasn't a citizen of the Roman Empire. And remember that for most of Rome's history, because most of Rome's history was before the Empire, during the Republic, certainly non-citizens would have been regarded as socially inferior to Romans, quite likely afterwards as well. But there was a definite difference in status between a legionary and an auxiliary soldier, or a Roman cavalryman and a non-Roman cavalryman. Because it's worth mentioning that during the Middle Republic, for example,

during the wars against Hannibal, that Rome's cavalry was formed of young noblemen, citizens, and also socii, peoples from peninsular Italy who were subjugated by Rome but were fighting for Rome. Was it almost felt as if the auxiliary was seen almost like a second-class soldier compared to the legionary at the top? Yeah, definitely. So, I mean, Britain, just because of British podcasts, it's worth mentioning, the British Empire used to use its non-citizen troops as much more expendable than British troops. So there were significant numbers of troops from India and Africa in both World War I and World War II. And I think it's to give you an idea, and I'm not throwing stones here at all, but the British Department of the War Office, whatever the name of it is, the government ministry that deals with war, Department of the War Office, whatever the name of it is, the government ministry that deals with war, Department of Defense, did not actually record the names of the African soldiers who

died in the British Army in World War II. That's only 70 or 80 years ago, and they didn't bother recording them. So that shows you the attitude that they're great, but we don't need to record their names. And so we've nothing like that from Roman times, but social attitudes were much more hard line 2000 years ago. For example, your average Roman was misogynistic and homophobic and racist. And so I have no doubt that your average legionary and your average legionary officer, particularly nobleman, would have looked down on auxiliary soldiers. And yet what's interesting is when we talk about the principate, the commanding officers, we'll come into the reason why maybe later, but the commanding officers of auxiliary units were Romans. So you would have had a real

difference there. You would have had young Roman nobles in their mid-20s, potentially even only teenagers, catapulted in to command a cohort of 480 infantry who spoke a different language and weren't Roman citizens. And there may have been real problems there with a young nobleman dealing with those men. And the centurions of that unit would have been natives as well, if you like. And they might have had chips on their shoulders against young noblemen. And to look at a British army unit in World War II, say, you get a young lieutenant comes in and he's 21 years old and he's got a grizzled old sergeant who knows 10 times more than he does. And if he doesn't get on with the sergeant, then things aren't going to go very well, are they? So you've got all those kind of possibilities that must have existed.

I guess before we go on to the origins, I mean, for looking at the auxiliaries, and I know you include auxiliaries in various books that you've written about the Roman Empire and the Roman army, what types of sources do you have available to try and learn more about these units, how they fought, how they were organized, and so on? So the sources, like they are with everything to do with the Roman military or the Roman civilization, consist of two main prongs. One is archaeological evidence, and then the second is written evidence that has come down to us frequently through multiple translations and potentially not what it was originally, but you can only use what you've got. And so, for example, the units that we know existed, the reason we know about a lot of the units is because in specific

Roman forts, and a really good example of this is the forts along Hadrian's Wall, because auxiliaries were used in border defense. If you need men to protect your borders, the legions are busy building roads and bridges and aqueducts. They were kept back, for example, close to Hadrian's Wall. The nearest legion was in York, which is a significant distance. I'm going to say it's at least 80 miles or 100 miles south of Hadrian's Wall. But the forts all along Hadrian's Wall, which were every five to eight miles, and were either cohort or double cohort in strength, those were manned by auxiliaries. And that was our primary role. And the limes,

which is essentially the border area along the Rhine and the Danube and the gap between, which was obviously where barbarians could come in more easily than having to cross those rivers. The forts along those frontiers were also manned by auxiliaries. And for example, tombstones is one of the most common ways we know. On Romans, whether they were civilian or military, would record their profession because they wanted you, the person looking at their gravestone, to know what they'd done. Roman gravestones were very much about being seen. So your listeners may know that Romans were not allowed to be buried within the confines of a town or a fort. They had to be buried outside because it was regarded as very bad luck. So the roads into Rome and Pompeii and any Roman town were lined with tombs. And you only have to go to Pompeii to see the size of some of the

tombs to realize how important it was for status after death. So the best example I can actually think of is in Cologne. There is the tomb of an ordinary legionary soldier who'd obviously done well, my son, as you'd say in England. He'd done really well for himself and probably become the equivalent of a millionaire because his tombstone's 50 feet high and there's a statue of him on the top of it. So you would have seen it for about a mile or two before you got to it. And at the bottom, you just read he's an ordinary soldier. But anyway, going back to auxiliary tombstones, so frequently you will have the name of a man, the unit he was

in, and the number of years he served, and when he died or how he died, whether he was killed or in war, whether he drowned or something. And if he was a cavalryman, he'll usually be on a horse trampling a naked barbarian. And if he was an infantryman, he'll be shown as an infantryman. The auxiliaries used oval shields, not your curved shields like legionaries. And if he was an archer, he will have arrows and a bow like the tombstone of a Syrian archer, which was found near Hadrian's Wall. So there were Syrians serving in Hadrian's Wall, there were Belgians, there were Gauls, there were Thracians, there were people from all over the empire. Something the Romans learned in the Batavian revolt of the late 60s AD, the Batavians being a tribe from modern day Germany, and they were auxiliaries serving in

their own area. And the British learned this the hard way as well. They'd forgotten what the Romans had learned is that it's not a very good idea to have men who are trained soldiers in their own area, because if they become unhappy with rule, as the Batavians did, they started a revolt that actually set up an independent kingdom and took about three years to quell. And after that, the Romans pretty much never stationed auxiliaries in the regions they were from. And we think that's also why they replaced their commanders, were from. And we think that's also why they replaced their commanders because up to that point, roughly, the auxiliary units had been commanded by essentially chieftains of the tribe they were from. Like Arminius and his cavalry, right? Indeed, exactly, in AD 9. Yeah, that's a prime example. And the Romans were very wary of that. And it was Jugurtha or Jugurtha in North

Africa who led auxiliaries there and then led a rebellion. There were examples from all around the Roman Empire. And after that, the commanders were Roman noblemen, not from the tribe that the unit was raised from, if you like. I remember seeing one of those tombstone examples in the UK, not in Hadrian's Wall, but at the Colchester Museum. And as you say, it's this auxiliary cavalryman trampling a barbarian beneath. And it's very interesting. You can see the details on the armor and so on. It's a lot of attention that's put in it. And that would have been painted as well. It's important to mention that all those tombstones were painted. And the statues of gods and goddesses, the 50-foot high statues of Augustus

or whatever, they were painted to look realistic. And just all the buildings were as well. How do we know that? Because archaeological finds from places like Pompeii and Herculaneum, and I'm not a geologist or archaeologist, so I don't know the exact reason, but it's to do with the lack of oxygen. Sometimes you will get paint surviving like whole paintings in Pompeii. You just get traces and advances over the last 10 years where scientists use fractured light. So they break light into its constituent colors to look at these stoneworks. They can actually work out the colors of the paint that were used on the individual parts of a cavalryman, for example. And so if you go to somewhere like Xanten in Germany, which is an incredible archaeological site, it is the town of Vetra, later Colonia Ulpia Triana, but it was the base of two of the legions that went and were slaughtered at the Teutoburg Forest. And outside the three-story town gate there that they've rebuilt, there are painted tombstones.

You could argue that they're not representative, but they've tried to do it accurately. And they're far more vivid when it's a guy on a horse, and his armor is colored and the horse's nostrils are flaring and flesh covered. And there's blood on the person that he's trampling and so on. hundreds of years before, let's say, time of the Punic Wars and the Republic, what do we know about non-Roman soldiers in the Roman army in this early stage of the Roman Empire, let's say, as they're expanding in Italy? So we actually know very little about the Roman armies through much of the period. I mean, there are descriptions of the Roman legion from Polybius during the Punic Wars, but I would immediately caveat this with, I'm not a Roman academic, but I've spent nearly 20 years writing about Rome and I've written 14 novels set in that period and have hundreds of textbooks. So I've read a lot about the whole Roman world and particularly the military.

and particularly the military. My only awareness of non-citizen troops during the mid-Republic is just reference to their use in a particular campaign. For example, when Scipio, who became Africanus, went to North Africa and bearded the lion in his den and beat Hannibal at his own game, he had Numidian cavalry. He was able to pay more money. He got the best in his den and beat Hannibal at his own game, he had Numidian cavalry. He was able to pay more money. He got the best Numidian cavalry and Hannibal was left with the dregs. And there are examples as well, for example, in the very late Republic of Caesar, Julius Caesar in his campaigns in Gaul using Spanish Iberian cavalry, Gaulish cavalry, German cavalry. Spanish-Iberian cavalry, Gaulish cavalry, German cavalry. By this stage, just alluding back to what I mentioned briefly, the cavalry was no longer made up of young noblemen. And there's a very interesting textbook by Jeremiah McCall that I read on the theory behind that. Why did they stop?

But it's just literally referenced to those men. There isn't reference to unit size. There isn't reference to commanders, although it's highly likely their commanders would have been their own people. And they were fighting for money, and they weren't fighting in uniform like later auxiliaries were. They were indeed very similar in appearance to Roman legionaries. But during the Punic Wars and then, say, under Julius Caesar, first century BC, you wouldn't have known they were any different to sometimes the men they were fighting. So if they were, you know, Gaulish and they were fighting in Gaul, they quite possibly looked like the guys they were fighting. It if they were Gaulish and they were fighting in Gaul, they quite possibly looked like the guys they were fighting. It's just they were fighting beside the legionaries. How did they get identified from friend from foe in the middle of a battle?

Good question. We don't know. It's quite interesting when you look at the Hellenistic period and you look at Hellenistic armies which recruited, let's say, Galatians and Gauls, and they were very clearly identified as mercenaries in the surviving sources fighting alongside the phalanx or the Seleucids or Macedonians. Does it almost feel as if these non-Roman allies, whether they're Numidians or they could be Cretan archers or slingers or Gallic fighters, can we distinguish them from the title of mercenaries? Yeah, they were mercenaries. There wasn't the promise of citizenship at the end either, like there was during the Principate.

They were literally just fighting for money. And, you know, make no bones about it, when they won a battle, they would have taken whatever they found, whether that be on a battlefield or in a town. Legionaries were supposed to hand in what they found, but of course they didn't. I mean, you just look up wars up until the modern day. There were British soldiers coming back from Afghanistan with Kalashnikovs in their luggage. It's the kind of thing people do. And kind of going on from that, like the formal auxiliaries don't emerge until you get to the early imperial period. Before that, you have

these units and then also names like the Socie as well. Yeah. So to try and describe it in a timeline, during the Middle Republic, which is the European wars, and we won't go much further than that because we know even less, you will have had mercenaries fighting with the Roman armies in different campaigns and in different battlefield situations, literally recruited locally, fighting locally, probably not going away from that area, just disbanded whenever they weren't needed. The cavalry of the Roman Empire at that time, when a consular army, there were two consular armies that were fielded each year. And until Hannibal, when they had to expand big time,

that's all the Romans used to have generally. They had cavalry that fought with them and they were citizen cavalry, young noblemen, and there were 300 of them to each legion. So 4,200 Polybian legionaries and 300 cavalry. The socii were the non-citizen troops forcibly provided to the Republic of Rome by its subjugated allies in Peninsular Italy. So I'm talking Samnites, Campanians, Brutians, Lucanians, Etruscans. There were literally all the peoples of Italy that had gradually been conquered by Rome as it expanded in the fourth and third and even second centuries BC. They had to provide as part of their tribute to Rome, if you like, troops when there was a war, and they had to provide the same number as you had in a legion. So for every 4,200 legionaries and 300 cavalry, you had 4,200

socii infantry and cavalry, and they were largely, we believe, equipped and armed the same way as the Romans were. There was very little difference between them. You then move forward in history to the first century BC, and by then, Romans did not serve as cavalry anymore. Jeremiah McCall's theory is that young noblemen could see a far quicker route to wealth and political success by staying in Rome, and particularly when there was an emperor climbing the greasy pole and all that. It's a theory, but it's a reasonably good one, I think. But anyway, by then, the cavalry was non-Roman exclusively, and it had shrunk to 120 men per legion. So there were 4,800 legionaries, all right, sometimes there were more, you could argue in the mid 50s, up to 5,000 men, but about 5,000 infantry and 120 cavalry. They were broken down

into termae, a termas, the singular 30 man termas or four termae in a legion. Each terma led by a decurion and they were non-citizens. They were Spanish, they were Gaulish, they were German. They were basically wherever they could get good horsemen. But there were also auxiliaries who did other things, like as you mentioned, the archers. We know of battles in the 130s where the Romans had archers and they'd line them up behind the infantry to lob the arrows overhead before the infantry attacked. There are images on Trajan's column of slingers, and the famous slingers were the ones from the Balearic Islands who famously, as children, didn't get fed. And the target they had

to learn to hit age six or seven was a loaf of bread on a pole, and, didn't get fed. And the target they had to learn to hit age six or seven was a loaf of bread on a pole. And they didn't eat unless they hit the loaf of bread. They apparently could hit a straw bale at 600 paces. But there were archery units, as I mentioned, from Crete, from Syria. There were cavalry units. And we don't know exactly when, but sometime either during the reign of Augustus up until the reign of Claudius, the auxiliary were formally drawn up into units and they became defined size. And we know something about that. And that's what they remained for at least, you know, another 100, 150 years until you get into the later Roman period and everything started

going wrong. We'll certainly explore, let's say, the slingers and the slingshot, because you've got two great examples of these amazing looking slingshot in front of us. But before then, let's kind of keep on those reforms of either Augustus or going up to Claudius. You said we know a bit about this. So what do we know about the structure of the official auxilia? Yeah. So we know that there were three types of auxiliary unit. There were infantry units, there were cavalry units, and there were mixed infantry and cavalry units.

And then there were two types of those each. So there were six types of auxiliary unit. So your typical cohort, as it was called, was 480 infantry. And that's, as your listeners, I'm sure will be aware, a century of Roman soldiers was only 80 men. We don't know why. Originally, probably 6th, 7th century BC, it may well have been 100 men, but it was cut to 80 and nobody knows why, but the name remained the same. So six centuries of 80 men, each commanded by a centurion, centurion number one being the most important, just like in a legion, down to number six. So the centurion number one, he would have been a man of maybe 20 or 30 years experience, whereas the most junior centurion might have only just been similarly to Roman legionaries, i.e. they had male shirts. They didn't wear the plated armor, the lorica segmentata.

So when that came in, you might have been able to quite easily distinguish a legionary from an auxiliary infantryman. They had the gladius sword. Their shields, as I mentioned earlier earlier were oval and flat possibly sometimes hexagonal but definitely not the curved shape of the legionaries that was another way you could tell the difference helmets varied would have been possibly cheaper than the legionaries ones but also looked very similar and they would have had a dagger as well and they weren't armed with a like legionaries were you could have a a double cohort. So the two types, and again, forgive my pronunciation, a normal cohort was a quinquinary, Q-U-I-N-G-E-N-A-R-Y,

and a double cohort was called a milliary cohort. And that was essentially 960 soldiers, even though it sounds like a thousand, it was 960. And then it gets more confusing when you go into the cavalry. So the cavalry cohorts were known as Ale. So singular Ala as in wing in Latin, because cavalry fight on the wings, as plural Ale. And the subunit of 30 men had become 32 men by this stage. We don't know why. And a normal sized Ala was 480 men, which was 16 files of 32. So it was just over, sorry, it was 512 men, I beg your pardon. 16 times 32 is 512. So it was slightly larger than 500. And then bizarrely, and I've just remembered I got it wrong, the infantry double-sized cohort was 10 centuries, not 12. It was only 800 men. So you'd logically think it was six double

this, but it wasn't. It was 10 centuries and it was only 800 men. And the same in the cavalry. It was not your doubling of numbers. So a double-sized ameliori cavalry ala was 768 soldiers on horseback. Your mixed cohorts then, and they were called cohorts equitata, on horseback. Your mixed cohorts then, and they were called cohorts equitata, and they were perfect for use in areas like Hadrian's Wall. For those of you who don't know the geography around Hadrian's Wall, it's very rolling countryside with a lot of ups and downs, and moving fast is not possible on foot. So when you've got potentially mobile raiders, tribesmen on horses, being able to use cavalry units of your own is very important. So there were a lot of auxiliary cavalry along Hadrian's Wall, and a mixed infantry cavalry

force is like a mini army. You're able to do lots of things rather than just one or the other. So a mixed cohort could either be one cohort in size or double cohort in size. could either be one cohort in size or double cohort in size. The figures on that are far less clear, but the assumption is it's the same as it would have been if it were one of the types. You just double it up, but we don't actually know. The commanders of those cohorts, whether they were cavalry or infantry, were called prefects and they were Roman noblemen who were, as I mentioned earlier, probably only in their early to mid-twenties and would have been literally parachuted in.

There you go, you're going to do that for a number of years. I mean, a lot of them probably were from military families, but if they weren't, it would have been like hell on earth, being sent from somewhere very civilized like Roman Gaul or even Italy or Roman Spain, which is very civilized by the second century AD, to serve on Hadrian's Wall, commanding a crowd of savages, you know, savage Gauls or Thracians or something like that. When talking about whether these auxiliaries were Gauls or Thracians or Syrians and so on, with the Roman legionaries, was there almost a threshold as to you had to, in the Republic,

be above a certain amount of wealth before you could apply to be an auxiliary? Do we know whether they had to pass a certain threshold if you're a non-Roman citizen to apply to join the auxilia? Were there any type of qualifications that someone needed to be able to join a group of the auxilia? I'm aware of nothing like that. There will have been, but we don't know. It's one of those really annoying questions. We just touched on it before we started the talk. So for example, one of the forts on Hadrian's Wall had a unit of Tongrians serving there. And Tongria is modern day Tongaran in Belgium. And how did men make their way from Tongaran to Hadrian's Wall? And how often did recruiting officers go there and say,

join the Romans, you know, come and fight for us, 25 years. So why did men do it? 25 years service, they got Roman citizenship. And when they got married after they'd left, all their children, or if they had a common law wife and then married legally after they left, because Roman soldiers weren't allowed to marry and neither were auxiliaries until 212 AD, your children instantly became citizens and so did your wife. And that was a huge thing, a very desired thing. But we don't have any knowledge of how that went on, but it must have. It didn't continue though, because just like I'm going to say the Gordon Highlanders, I don't know why that popped into my mind in the British

Army, but when a British Army regiment from, say, Scotland or Ireland or somewhere else gets moved to a base in Germany and is there for years, men join it who aren't from wherever the Gordon Highlanders started. So that very naturally happened on Hadrian's Wall because, as your listeners will know, settlements would spring up outside every Roman fort. It was called a vicus, and basically locals would come to buy and sell and trade and open taverns, restaurants, making stuff that Roman soldiers needed. Just because they were soldiers didn't mean they didn't need all the things that people need from day-to-day living.

And inevitably, relationships would start, and men would have common-law wives and families and so on. And what was quite common in Roman times was that when a man finished his service, was he just stayed where he was. Because if he had a local wife and kids, why would he go back to Tungria? He might well just stay there, especially if he wanted to open a business and talk to his other veteran friends. So what happened then, there was a big tradition in the Roman Empire, just like there is among military families in any country today, of sons joining the same regiment that their father had been in. So when you had a half-British,

half-Tungrian man joining the unit, and then you had the son of that guy, you had a quarter, you know, and so on it went. So within, say, 60, 80, 100 years, you had men in units that were called Tungrian or Thracian or whatever, but they weren't anymore. They would have been Romano-British, but the name of the unit continued. What we don't know is whether you still had fresh blood coming in from those areas. Maybe you did, but it's one of those, again, we just don't know. If we focus in on certain classes of fighters, of auxiliaries that we have, you

already mentioned the spear-armed melee infantrymen, chainmail and their spear and their oval shield. You did highlight earlier the slingers. Let's talk about some of these missile infantry because it almost feels like the missile infantry became almost completely non-Roman auxiliary troops for a large part of the imperial period. Yeah, that's true. I get asked that in talks a lot. Why did the Romans not have archers? And the simple answer is they did, but just not very often. It's difficult to answer why, because again, we don't know. But there are examples that you've mentioned of Cretan archers fighting for Caesar, I think it is, and Arian writing in the second

century AD referring to wars in the Middle East, I think, talks about the Romans having archers that I refer to shooting over the heads of the advancing legionaries, a bit like Agincourt, to hit whatever they hit. If the enemy are packed densely enough, it doesn't matter. And there are images of slingers on Trajan's Column, which is about the invasion of Dacia in the early second century. But there's very little mention of it in the text, just images of them. And interestingly, those slingers have their stones in a fold of their tunic, which strikes me as very impractical because Barley Eric slingers had a pouch. So slingers were not used very much though, because they're not very effective

when you're wearing a lot of armor. I know it's not slingers, but there's an example of when you haven't got armor. At the Battle of Telamon in 225 BC, there were a berserker goal, if you like, who ran naked against the Roman infantry and who were only armed with light spears, but apparently they butchered those goals because they didn't have any armor. So if you had a decent helmet on, sling bullets generally only weigh between 30 and 90 grams. That's between one and three ounces. If you're not wearing a helmet, it'll kill you quite easily. And the ones that we've got here on the table, I mean, they're much smaller, but if they hit you in the eye or if you're not wearing a helmet, you could still get concussion.

But if I'd been a Roman legionary, I would have looked down on them because you pretty much can't hurt me with your sling bullets. I mean, they did use them, didn't they? They used them in the Civil War. You've got those famous sling bullets from Italy and there are references to ladies' private parts and ouch and things like that literally inscribed on them, found outside town walls of Italy. But they weren't a large part of the Romans. I think they more used archers. But again, they didn't use them a lot. And I only know of that battle I referred to with Arian and the unit on Hadrian's Wall. But generally, the battering ram of the legionaries was so effective. And remember their javelins, their pila, they carried either one or two, depending on which historian

you believe. And they released them at 50 paces. And we don't know, but reenactors and historians like to try and work these things out. But a reasonable way that they might have attacked is for the first, say, five or six ranks to throw their javelins, and they start running. say five or six ranks to throw their javelins and they start running and then the men behind them throw as well and you potentially got javelins from 10 ranks of men landing as you've got a charging tide of legionaries coming in and i saw a really funny video by reenactor where he got his neighborhood street he just talked to all the local kids, American guy. And you know, what are the things when you're in a swimming pool that you can... A woggle. A woggle. That's it. The little foam strip you can put your arms over and float on in the swimming

pool if you don't want to swim, if you're learning to swim. But you know, if you're at a barbecue party and you're just there enjoying yourself, you have one of them. He got like 50 of them and he got all these little kids. He put on his Roman armor and he stood there. And obviously they'd never thrown spears or woggles, but he got them to throw them at him, practice in rows. And he said it was absolutely terrifying when you had 10 or 15 of them coming in at any one time. He didn't know what to do. So he was just theorizing, you know, imagine that was Pila, javelins coming in with a line of legionaries who were all armed and armored better than you are, because generally the Romans were. You know, battles were potentially won just from the

javelins. Because when you look at the perception of the auxiliary sometimes is providing those specialist troops, whether it's singers or archers and so on and so forth. But actually, as you've highlighted there, with the legionaries being so central and so powerful to overwhelm many different enemies, do we actually hear of auxiliary soldiers being critical to certain Roman victories? Yeah. Oh, yeah. People might think of auxiliaries as those missile troops or whatever, but the majority of auxiliaries were either infantry or cavalry. It's worth talking about the auxiliary cavalry in a minute, but the auxiliary infantry, looking fairly identical to the legionaries, apart from their oval shields, there's a brilliant example. So the Battle of Mons Graupius, which took place in

northern Scotland. If you ever have a Scottish person tell you that the Romans didn't conquer Scotland, just say one word to them, Agricola. Agricola was the Roman general who led an army up into Scotland with a fleet following him up the east coast of England and up past Edinburgh. And he took three years to literally lay waste to Scotland. And he beat everybody he fought. he fought. And at the Battle of Mons Graupius, which is potentially as far north as Inverness, which is very far north indeed, this campaign has been confirmed with aerial footage of marching camps all the way up there. And that was a battle where 30,000 Caledonian tribesmen, which is a lot of warriors, came to face Agricola. And I'm not sure of his numbers. He may have had fewer than that, but he certainly, he wasn't very outnumbered. But it's remarkable that at number one, he deployed only the auxiliaries at the beginning of the battle. And number two, they won the battle on their own. So they were just sent in as infantry and are recorded as having killed most of the 30,000 Caledonians

with the loss of only a few hundred men. Now, if you take away the likely highly exaggerated, I was fishing and I caught a fish this big, and you all know the gesture I'm making, Roman histories are very biased. Even if you, I like to divide the figures by between two and four. Even if you divide it by four, it's still seven and a half thousand Caledonian tribesmen with the loss of 300 Romans. Well, auxiliaries. No legionaries were harmed in the filming of this battle. So there's a really good example. And what's worth mentioning about that battle as well is that it's one of the only examples that we have of a specific maneuver, training maneuver, that Roman soldiers will have been taught because it won't just have been the auxiliaries.

Sadly, for those of you that are interested in me writing all my novels about the Roman army, there is no Roman training manual for the army that survived. I'm making a joke here, but it would be brilliant. But people who were writing histories 2,000 years ago didn't think of writing anything like this because they expected you to know it. If you were writing a novel set today, you wouldn't describe what electricity is or a car or a mobile phone is because everyone reading it knows it was the same 2000 years ago. So the point is about this battle that the maneuver that I use this in every talk I ever give, a Roman shield has a great big metal boss in the center of it and the hand grips behind that. I'm sure you're all familiar with what it looks like. You could polish it highly and potentially use it as a

mirror because most ordinary men wouldn't have had them, but it was used as a weapon. So this maneuver was to punch at the face of your enemy with the boss. And if you hit him in the face, you're going to break his nose or his jaw because of the impact. And he'll reel back bleeding, and then you stick him with your sword. If he dodged the move by throwing his head back, which is your instinct when someone's throwing a punch or waving a great big shield boss in your face, they stab them in the throat. So it was this one, two, one, two. So the shield was a weapon as well. It wasn't just a very protective piece of equipment. So that's a really good example of the auxiliaries being used in a frontline role

and winning a battle without the loss of any citizens. Because as I mentioned at the beginning, they would have been valued far less than Roman soldiers. Were they paid less? We think so. We don't again know, but it's thought that they were paid between half and three quarters of what a Roman soldier was paid. But bearing in mind that a Roman soldier was very well paid, that was potentially still very good money if you're a tribesman from Thrace or somewhere like that. Exactly. So what did an auxiliary expect after they signed up? Obviously, with a legionary, it's 25 years of service and then land and property at the end. No, they didn't get land or property. That was the benefit of the legionary. They just got citizenship. Right. So that's where

it differs. So what could they expect instead? It's funny. I was trying to think about it today, the benefits of having a British or in my case, an Irish passport. I mean, it means I can travel anywhere in the world, you know, without having to get visas and so on. But that doesn't quite get it across. Becoming a Roman citizen was a huge step up in your social status because it meant you could vote and you could advance your social career and climb the social ladder. And not every auxiliary wanted that. I mean, presumably, a lot of them just went back to where they came from. And what people made of them being a Roman citizen, we don't know, but they really went, so what? But becoming a Roman citizen was clearly a big draw because of the number of auxiliary units that there were and the fact

that it was something that's recorded on tombstones and so on. But after 25 years, which it has to be mentioned is longer than Romans had to serve. Although there are periods when Romans had to serve 25 years, there are plenty of periods of Roman history when it was only 16 years or 20. And as I said in a school that I was giving a talk to yesterday, that could change at the emperor's whim. So we know of times in the first century AD under Augustus when there was a shortage of manpower and there was a decree that all you guys that think you're retiring next year, you're not. You're staying in for another five years because we need the soldiers. And it was a mutiny, actually. It's one of the only mutinies against bad treatment on the Rhine. But when they were discharged from the Legion, they were given

a diploma. And some of these have survived. These would have been enormous big plaques on walls in Rome, but then they were given individual ones as soldiers. And several hundred of them have survived, both for legionaries and auxiliaries. And for me, one of my most favorite things to see, because they're little pieces of bronze, rectangular in shape, about five inches by three. And there are two of them and they have holes in them so they can be tied together with wire

so they can close like a little book. And this is important to mention that an individual Roman legionary would get an individual diploma, but auxiliary units only got unit diplomas. So the whole unit of Thracians gets citizenship and they'll all have just been given the same thing, not a different guy's name on each one. But they were a very important legal document that they would have been very proud possessions of. And it had the name, the unit, where they served, and so on and so on. Had to be seven witnesses whose names were inscribed on it as well. And there are examples of those for auxiliaries. They're just

wonderful pieces of information that open up history. They pull aside the curtain, if you like, in a much bigger way than a piece of a Roman belt or a sword or something like that, because they're very personal, even though they're unit rather than particular individual soldiers. All right. Well, let's have a look at some of these particular soldiers, whether they're from Thrace or they're Tungrians. And I'd like to ask, before we completely wrap up, because you did mention them earlier, and I don't think we've really covered this class in depth, at least following the Augustan or Claudian introductions to the auxiliaries. Talk to me about auxiliary cavalry and the role that they would have played for the Roman legion in the imperial period. So to be fair, the cavalry were a force that the Roman army never relied on massively the way other civilizations did or other

peoples did. So when they went to Parthia, they were completely undone because the Parthians were all on horses, for example. And again, we don't know, but cavalry were integral to an army because they're fast moving. So they acted as scouts. They were able to do reconnaissance and warn of ambushes potentially, also find sources of food quicker than men on foot could. They would be used to go up and down the army column as well. You need to remember that an army column in Roman times was sometimes up to 10 or even more miles in length. So the front of the army, people in the middle and the back have absolutely no idea what's going on unless there's a horse coming to tell them or a man on a horse. So, they were a very important part of the army. But when battles happened, they were deployed, but it wasn't uncommon for the Romans to face enemies whose cavalry was actually superior to theirs, Parthians being an example, and the best example, maybe Numidians as well. So in battles, they weren't as important. But it is worth mentioning here that something

that the Roman cavalry used to use a couple of things and wear did potentially mean they were good hammer blows to peoples that weren't expecting it. So Hadrian, when he was touring his empire, saw a famous cavalry display at Lambesis in North Africa, and he wrote it down. He wrote down what he saw. And we know that the cavalrymen were doing all these various drills and throwing spears and feats of horsemanship and so on. And they were wearing their parade dress. Quite a few of you will be familiar with the Roman cavalry helmet that has a face piece that can be lifted up and put down to cover the face entirely. And these would have been used in parades. What's interesting is that quite a few

of them have been found. So one of the densest number of finds of these helmets is at a place called Nijmegen in Holland, Netherlands, where there must have been a cavalry unit because they found maybe 10 or 15 of these helmets. The helmets were commonly tinned so that it looked like there was hair forming the back and sides and top of the helmet. A lot of them actually had braided horsehair on the helmet as well. So it looked like a real person's head. And the face piece was commonly covered in a very fine layer of silver, real

silver foil. And if you Google that image, if you're not familiar with it, it's terrifying. I've known this for years because Roman reenactors wear these when they're fighting and they have no problem. Think of knights in the middle ages. They were fighting with these tiny little visored helmets. They've actually found some of these helmets now with dents in them and scratches and things like that. So injuries from actual something hitting them, probably in combat. So personally, and any Roman reenactor I know, who's a cavalryman and they ride without stirrups and can throw spears and hit bales of straw, reckon that they probably used them in battle as well. And it's worth mentioning here the Draco, which is a standard used by Roman cavalry of the period.

That gives rise to the word dragon. And it was a pole on the top of which was carved a metal ravening mouth of a mythical beast. And there was a strip of colored fabric that came off the open back of that. And when you ride into battle, because they've reconstructed them, when you ride a horse fast holding one of them, it makes a horrible noise. So a bit like the carnixes, which were the vertical battle trumpets that the Gauls used in Britain and in Lake Trasimene, which was one of Hannibal's great victories. Look up Voice of the Carnix by John Kenny on YouTube. So they've reconstructed them.

The noise they make is terrifying. So a bit like those, it's highly likely that the cavalry will have been used in battles and that that could have been a real psychological weapon. in battles and that that could have been a real psychological weapon. If you're Misty Morning and 120 guys come riding out of the fog making a noise like that and they all look like aliens, you know, people might run away. So their main weapons in this period were a one-handed thrusting spear and a bundle of light throwing spears, but they also probably or almost definitely had a spaffa as well, which is a long slashing sword. It's anywhere in length from 26 inches to 36 inches blade only. So very long indeed. And, you know, much better reaching down from a horse to, to chop someone's arm off or something. So they were without doubt used in

battles, but not in the sort of way that battle of Cannae, 6,000 cavalry divided on 3,000 on each wing against Hannibal's cavalry, where they were a big part of the battle. There just weren't enough of them to do that, which is why my feeling is that they were more scouts and shock attack rather than an important part of a big, full-on thousands of men against thousands of men battle. Well, Ben, this has been great, a very comprehensive, detailed chat. Last but certainly not least, you have written many, many books all about the Roman army, which includes talks about the auxiliary units. They are all about, these books are? Yeah, so I kind of forget now. I've had 17 or 18 books, 14 set in ancient Rome. So a trilogy about Crassus' disastrous invasion of Parthia

in 53 BC, 20,000 legionaries killed in one day by arrows. And I've written two books about Spartacus, the most famous slave that ever existed. I have had a trilogy about Hannibal, about the war between Rome and Carthage in the second one. And I haven't finished that yet, finishing that in a couple of years. I've written a trilogy about the Varian disaster and Germanicus' campaigns into Germania in 1415 and 16 AD. They were amazing to write. And I've also written a duology of books about the Roman invasion of Macedon and Greece, literally 18 months after the Battle of Zama. Imagine America or Britain deciding to go into a major world war 18 months after World War II. I don't think it would have gone down too well with the population, but that's what Rome did in 200 BC and they conquered

Macedon. I've also had a book of short stories, one of which is about that lovely emperor called Caligula. All right, Ben, we get the message. There's no loss on this topic. All right. Okay, okay. Fair enough. It just goes to me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come back on the podcast today. Oh, thank you.

And I hope your listeners enjoyed it. Well, there you go. There was Dr. Ben Kane talking all the things the Roman auxiliary soldier and why these people were so critical to the success of the Roman army. It wasn't just the legionary soldiers. I hope you enjoyed today's episode. It's always a pleasure having Dr. Ben Kane on the show. He is a fan favourite and don't you worry, we will be doing more on the Roman army in the months ahead, particularly a horrific, massive defeat that they suffered in the forests of Germania in the Teutoburg Forest in 9 AD.

Varus, give me back my legions. That's all to come on the Ancients in the months ahead. Last thing from me, wherever you listen to the Ancients, whether that be on Spotify or on Apple Podcasts, make sure that you are following the podcast, that you are subscribed so that you don't miss out when we release new episodes twice every week. But that's enough from me and I will see you in the next episode.