The Ancients - The Roman Centurion

Episode Date: March 29, 2026

What did it take to become a Roman centurion? To command, to punish and to lead from the very front of Rome’s armies?In this episode of The Ancients, Tristan Hughes is joined by Dr Ben Kane to uncover the reality behind one of the most iconic ranks of the ancient world. From the brutal discipline of life on campaign to the prestige and pressure of command, discover how centurions became the backbone of the Roman military. How were they chosen? What kept their soldiers in line? And why were they so crucial to Rome’s success on battlefields across the empire?Watch this episode on our NEW YouTube channel: @TheAncientsPodcastMORE:The Roman LegionaryListen on AppleListen on Spotify The Roman AuxiliaryListen on AppleListen on Spotify Presented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Aidan Lonergan. The producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.All music courtesy of Epidemic SoundsThe Ancients is a History Hit podcast.Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here:https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe. Dawn breaks cold over the Rhine frontier. Mist rises from the river as hundreds of Roman soldiers wake in their turf-walled camp. Marcus, top centurion of the elite first cohort, gears up after 20 years of service. His curved chest armour shines with metal discs from battles won. Leg guards protect his shins, and he grips a vine star to keep his men in line. His helmet's horsehair crest stands out as he marches past his troops lining up, the second-in-command Optio at his side.

Today, they have a grueling 20-mile march with full gear, followed by ditch-digging until dark, and punishments for any soldier he thought was slacking. Tomorrow, a clash with German raiders awaits. He is the Legion's backbone, ready to lead and dish out harsh discipline. Welcome to the ancients. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and today we're exploring the story of the Roman Centurion, one of the most recognizable military ranks of antiquity that was so critical to the Roman army's success.

Our guest is Dr. Ben Kane, best-selling author and expert on the Roman military. Ben, it is such a pleasure to have you back on the show. It's lovely to be here, Tristan, thank you. Oh, and to talk about the Roman Centurion, is a good. Is it fair to say that they are the real backbone to the Roman army and its great success? Yeah, 100%. There were 60 Centurians for pretty much the whole Roman period in each legion, and they were the men who led soldiers into battle, and if they did badly, if the Centurians died, potentially

the battle would go against them, but in desperate situations, they would lead from the front. They were 100%. They're a linchpin to the whole system. Yeah, definitely. So we had to be able to make decisions in the moment. and in extreme situations would, you know, lay down his life if he had to. They were disciplinarians quite extreme at times as well, but they were also being men who rewarded their soldiers for their valor,

you know, with recommendations for bravery and so on. Yeah, they were the beating heart of the Roman army. It seems like there's quite a lot of information that survives about these figures, whether it's from stories from ancient history or archaeology, so we can actually explore those various different strands that you mentioned just then in quite a lot of detail. We can, but we also can't. So a lot of the details are interesting and fascinating and give us a little insight,

but often have nothing else to back them up. So frequently the detail is scant, which is really, really frustrating. But I sometimes compare a Roman history of all kinds, whether it's military or social or religious or political, telling people it's like a thousand-piece jigsaw where you've got maybe the four corners and some of the edge here and there. And in some areas, you've got all the pieces. and in other areas you've got gaps between the pieces,

and then there are loads of gaps, huge gaps everywhere else. So that's the really frustrating thing with Roman history. Well, indeed, all ancient history. Well, we can explore the stories and then evaluate the quality of the evidence. Yeah, that's fine, yeah. And in regards to their position in the Roman army, so hierarchically wise, they're not right at the top of the chain command, but they occupy that sweet spot in the centre, that makes them so vital?

Yes, so a century confusingly wasn't 100 men. It was only 80. Centurion led those with four junior officers, and there were six, well, we've got to also say, when are we talking about? Because Rome's history went on for more than a thousand years. So most people who are tuning in are probably thinking about the Imperial Army during the period of the Roman Empire being at his greatest expanse from Israel and Syria to Britain in the West and the whole of the Mediterranean world. And in that time, a legion. had 60 Centurions, six to a cohort, so 10 cohorts, each cohort had six centuries of 80 men. So that was 60 Centurians, and they were the main middlemen, almost senior commanders. Above them, you had six tribunes, and then above that you had the Legate, and he was the man who commanded the army. Although, interestingly, he was sometimes only parachuted in at the very last moment, like Julius Caesar did, made a legate, appointed one the day before a battle. So it's likely that he wasn't actually leading the Legion at all, that Caesar was telling the Legion what to do. But certainly in situations where they're operating independently, a Legate would have been

the commander. And you mentioned there how a Centurion is in command of 80 men and not 100, slightly confusingly. Do we know why that comes about? Why they're called Centurions when, in fact, they just control 80 men? We do, but again, it's not guaranteed that this is correct. But one of the most prominent theories is that the word comes from the Latin Seinum, which is actually refers to an amount of land, which is a hundred Uyghurat, which is a subunit of land. And this would have been, in deepest antiquity, an officer would have been chosen according to his social status and his wealth

and ordinary legionaries, and their rank was dependent on the social status and wealth as well. So one of the ancient sources tells us that's where the word century came from. But at no point was a century of men, 100 men. It was always 80 men. Yet it's 100 runs of cricket and it's 100 years, you know, if you think about time. No, I certainly have to raise that question earlier. So thank you for explaining it. You mentioned already how the nature of our sources, I said like the edges of a piece of a jigsaw.

The edges of a jigsaw and we have all these bits missing. But can you elaborate a little bit on the types of sources that we do have surviving to learn about the Roman centurion? So they're fragmentary usually. You've got two types of sources. You've got the earliest sources we have, and then you've got the later ones who are often potentially just copying what the earlier guys wrote. And you can tell that by looking at what they've written. I'm sure you know this yourself.

It doesn't replicate a lot of what was written earlier. So you've got sources like Livy and Plutarch and Aryan and other sources, but they're literally all quite fragmentary. One of the best ones for the size, unit size, and number of legion. and information about centurions is Polybius. So he refers to literally the Republican army and what it was like. And then you've got someone like Josephus,

who was actually present at Vespasian's war in Judea. And there are quite a lot of nice details from that about Roman soldiers like a centurion who was chasing some Jews who were running away during, I think it was the siege of Jerusalem, and they were fleeing from him even though he was on his own, but his hobnails slipped on the page leaving stones because it was like running on wet tiles with football boots and he fell over and then the Jews came back and killed him.

But it was an example of this. They were running from the Sanjurian because he was so scary, but then he ended up dead. And another detail from Josephus is the marching order of a legion, which is one of the only examples we've got. So you literally, with Roman sources, you take what you can get and you've got to treat some with a grain of salt, particularly if they're hundreds of years after the events are describing, but when you've literally got, only those pieces of a jigsaw and maybe some evidence from archaeology or from statuary or steels, you're literally, you know, it's like trying to assemble an IKEA piece of furniture without having the guide. And so there's a funerary monuments.

Yeah, sorry, the funerary monuments, which frequently in the background of the big figure, you've got lots of soldiers and so on and maybe details of military equipment and so on and people zone in and they, oh, is that a centurion's helmet or is that an enemy helmet? And literally you can have people, marine actors who are, you know, passion-led people, but are really rigorous in their detail of how accurate their replica equipment is. They will be using images like that from all around the Roman Empire and all the museums that they can get pictures from to make an accurate helmet, you know, like this or whatever. We're certainly, we're not going to avoid the helmet in the room here.

We'll start to delve into these details in a bit. But also I want to pick up, you mentioned kind of those two important literary sources there, Polybius and then Josephus. So there's a few hundred years between the two, isn't there? So Polybius second century BC, Joseph's first century AD. And once again, that

reinforces the point earlier that you made that this is a long period of time that we're talking about with the Roman centurion and their role, their equipment, everything would have evolved over that period too. Oh, completely. So I give a talk on everyday life in the Roman army and one of the

first slides of God is a picture of two men at arms from a hundred years war, who fought the French, interestingly, for 117 years, not 100 years, but, and then British infantrymen from World War II, and I say 600 years of history separates these two soldiers, and their equipment's completely different. Well, Rome was nominally founded in 753 BC, I mean, probably a bit later actually, but it didn't fall again nominally until 476 AD, and that's nearly 1,200 years of history. So to suggest that Roman soldiers looked and dressed the same, or their unit size or command structure was the same, but it didn't happen.

And so, you know, the earliest Roman soldiers looked and dressed like Greek warriors because of the heavy Greek influence. And then by the late empire, I mean, they looked totally different again with spears as the main weapon, not swords, and massive helmets, and round shields, not ascutum and so on. But the Centurion did last a very, very long time. And indeed, it wasn't until the very late Roman Empire that we have some evidence that it may have changed.

but also the titles of the centurions. So within the cohort, the six centurions in a cohort, listeners may be aware that the Republican legions, for example, when the Romans were fighting Hannibal, there were three types of legionary. The first rank were called the Hastati, the second rank called the Princopes, the third rank called the triari,

and they were dressed and armed differently. And there were centurions of those, often in double-century form, which is called a mannipal, and the names of those centurians survived for hundreds of years. So even in an imperial legion, the six centurions in a cohort were called the Pellus prior, as in the first spear, and that would have been a centurion of the triari, the Pellus posterior, the second centurion of the triari, and then the Pryncaps prior and the Pryncaps posterior, and the Hestatus prior and the Hustatus posterior.

So they were hundreds of years after those forms of soldier disappeared. They were still known as that. Real history lesson as you're learning. Yeah, I mean, I don't use those in my books because it were just, I mean, the Roman names ending in US and all the little Latin words that I like to weave in, it just gets too confusing if you're doing that kind of thing. But it's interesting. So it sounds like this idea of a centurion in the Roman mindset in a Roman army does seem to stem back quite a long way. I mean, do we have any ideas around the origins of the creation of this position of centurion? Could it once again be influenced by the Greeks and maybe a position like the Stratagos or something like that?

potentially, I mean, I'm not an ancient historian by profession, potentially, but it's not, I mean, the origin that we think is a Latin word, and the word Tribune, which comes from that time as well, that comes from originally tribe, and the word legio comes from the Latin word, which means a levy, because, as again, as your viewers might realize, during the Republic, it was your civic duty to fight for Rome if there was a war. You literally presented yourself on the plane of Mars outside the walls of Rome and you were put into the army according to your wealth and social status. And the centurion would have been one of those men who had more potentially combat experience, but they did exist from those early days.

And if we can explore two key periods for a centurion now, and to kind of get a sense of what they looked like, what we should think of when someone mentions the Roman centurion. And I guess we should do it alongside those two key. literary sources that you mentioned earlier. So Polybius, first of all, so that's the time of the wars against Carthage, isn't it? And then Josephus in the early imperial period a bit later. So if we focus on the time of Polybius, first of all, in the Republic, what do we know about the Roman centurion at that time and how he would have looked? Very little. Very little. We know that he

wore a male shirt, like two of his types of soldiers, the brinkabes and the triari. We know that he probably carried a shield like they did, a skew to him. Now, the Republican shield was a good bit larger than most of your viewers are used to. It was curved top and bottom, so it was a good six inches, 15 centimeters taller, top and bottom. So if you're an average height Roman, which is 5'6, 1.65 meters, it literally comes up to about here. So he carried one of those. When you get onto the subject of helmets, I mean, this is probably one of the most iconic images of Rome in the world today. Most people of any

knowledge of history will say that's a centurion's helmet. What's curious is that there are very few images of centurions wearing these tombstones of centurions, which are quite numerous. They're not wearing their helmets because the viewers wanted them to see their face. And there are images of Centurians wearing other helmets. Now, the earlier ones, they potentially didn't have transverse crested. They may have just had like a top knot of horsehair, or they may even, we've got at least one example of the Centurion with a forward to back crest as well.

Okay. Which, again, a lot of your viewers will associate with an Optio, the second in command, but that's from later in the period. Oh, is that kind of a distinguishing factor between the horizontal and a vertical with the idea of the... Yes, but it's not entirely certain that Optios had them. They may have had them. But, you know, reenactors, that's the way they've gone.

So this is what, increasingly, that's what we think. And then you get textbooks with images like that. And it just, it's funny how these images just get anchored tighter and tighter into people's awareness until it's quite hard to actually say, well, actually, it's not necessarily based on a huge amount of evidence. It may have been something else. People go, no, no, no. I've seen, you know, whatever program or. But from the time of Hannibal Barker, I mean, this type of helmet we have in front of us now, with that kind of great guard about this material.

No, that was that's interior. So the helmets were a lot, sorry. Hamlets were a lot simpler. Most soldiers wore a Montferrino. Right. What is this? That is a very simple bronze bowl helmet. Again, your viewers would be familiar with with a very short neck guard and a complete cheek piece,

unlike this one which has a cheek piece which allows you to hear. In other words, the, and I can tell you from wearing that earlier helmet, when your cheek flaps are down, you can't hear what the man beside you is saying. let alone the Centurion 20 meters away. So they would have worn one of those. They may have worn Apulocarinthian helmets. Again, the history on that's not great. Some people think the Triari wore that.

Maybe Centurians did. It may well have been quite individual as well. If you look at any army in the field today, you look at pictures of soldiers in World War II. When you're in the field, you do what fits. You do what works. And actually your officers don't mind that much. But Centurians did like to stand out.

So any of them that had awards for valor, and these would have existed in the Republican period, would have had filari, which were literally medals, Roman equivalent of medals, worn in a leather harness on the chest, and you could hold up to nine, so in three rows of three. And they were frequently of silver or gold, but they could even be ceramic or glass. I've seen glass ones in museums in Germany, frequently with images like the Medusa or something like that or a god. And these would have advertised the Centurion's bravery and his bronze. prominence of the enemy. He would have carried a sword, and during the Republican period that we're talking about, the fighting sword of the Legionary was the Gladius Hispaniensis, or the Spanish sword, which was 25 centimeters or 10 inches longer than the sword most people think of as Roman legioners using, called the Spanish sword because it was probably nicked from Spanish tribesmen who'd been fighting for the Carthaginians in the first Punic War and an immensely successful weapon, not just at thrusting or stabbing, but also for slashing. There's a quote from just after the Second Punic War when the Romans invaded Macedon about the Macedonian phalanjists being so scared of the Gladys Hispaniensis that it could remove arms, legs and heads with ease. Wow. I love to try and prove theories. I didn't go and attack someone with a sword, but I'm a vet.

So I know what a blade does to flesh. And I started a thread on now defunct, sadly, Roman Army Talk Forum, which used to be a website. It's now just on Facebook. And I started a thread about, has anyone ever seen someone killed with a blade in off-topic? And I went dead for six months.

And I loved telling this in schools because the students' eyes are out on sticks. The thread went dead for six months or so, and then I got a reply. It'd been answered. I mean, I was straight on the computer. Anyway, there was an old American guy, compared to me, because he was in Vietnam.

He was in the Vietnam War in the 60s. And back then, when you were out in the jungle, The US Army, apparently, certainly, maybe this was early days. They didn't supply the soldiers with machetes. So they used to buy their own in the local towns, and they'd just have them hanging on their belts. And they'd come in from close open country. They'd been in contact with the Viet Cong.

They were all knacker. They were lying around in the jungle clearing, literally just zonked. And one of his buddies went nuts. No one knew it. The guy just got up, took out his machete, walked across the clearing, and chopped one of the heads of their own.

other buddies off. And he said it was one chop of a cheap Chinese steel machete casually swung, and the guy's head just jumped off his shoulders. So his answer was 100% trained legionaries who would come straight from Zama to Macedonia. They would have been chopping a heads off. So to me, that made the source, you know, much more likely to be true, because oftentimes I've noticed as a non-academic, I don't know whether you experience this. Sometimes academics will say, oh, well, the Romans couldn't have done that, or the Egyptians couldn't have done that. It's way too difficult.

And then they find that they did. A good example is Alicia. People used to say that there was no way Julius Caesar built a double circumvulation. You know, he was attacking Alicia, built a wall around it. Then the 200,000 goals came to attack him, so he didn't run away. He built another wall sandwiching himself in the middle and still won the battle. And everybody said he couldn't do it. And then they found it in the ground.

So, yeah. I went off topic there, but it was fun. I'm very happy for you to do this once in a while, Ben, and it's also great because, yes, the classic idea is the kind of the stabbing sword, isn't it? And that's realistically probably what it was. When I'm giving the talks that I do, I draw the sword, and I hold up the blade, and I say, you only need to stick about this much of this into somebody, and he's done.

So, about 15 centimeters? Yeah, 16, you know, what we see in films is totally skewed and totally inaccurate. what we think humans are capable of. I know a thoracic surgeon and if someone gets stabbed today in the abdomen, they're down and bleeding out and they're not doing anything else

unless they're superhuman. So you do expose yourself if you hack with a sword. It is far more efficient just to stab somebody and keep yourself behind the shield. So they probably did that most of the time but they could hack when they needed to.

And I know it's a bit of a generalisation but if we imagine that the Centurions are usually the figures with the more battle-hardened experience. Yeah. And if they're using those same weapons as the legionaries, I mean, they're probably even more capable of using them in force in the front ranks. I mean,

imagine one of Julius Caesar's centurion standing out, you know, with the same equipment, but something showing them, making them distinct from the rest to show their rank. And, yeah, being quite a sight for an enemy, you know, to come up against. Yeah. But shall we turn to the classic image of the centurion,

today when they're wearing helmets like this. So that's an Imperial Gallic. That is the standard helmet of the Roman Legionary in the first and second centuries AD. And can you describe the features of it? Yeah, sure, it's got brows here, basically look like eyebrows. It's got a guard to protect the forehead

from a blow from a weapon there. You commonly hear this being referred to in all kinds of four as being something that was brought in to protect against the Dacian Falx, which is a scyth-like brutal weapon from the Dacian tribes in Eastern Europe, which was wielded two-handed and would split one of these, no problem. But it's not based on very much evidence. So it may have been brought in for that, but possibly not.

But it's certainly to strengthen the helmet. I was very worried if you touch this, it will fall down to yours. So it's got various circular gilded discs. It's got a really prominent earpiece for your ear, so you can hear what the centurion is saying. It's got a mount here for the crest. So even if an ordinary soldier was wearing it, he could mount a crest, which they potentially did on parade and so on. Oh, yes, look at that.

And it's got a loop on the back of the neck guard. The neck guard's really big. It's about four inches, about 12 centimetres in depth. And that's to protect you from blows from behind. And it's got a loop for a strap for wearing it around your neck because they're really heavy. They're about two kilos, four and a half pounds. So they're actually quite uncomfortable to wear when you're marching. and there are loads of images, most famous of which is Trajan's column shows the Legionaries marching along with their helmets hanging around their necks.

And it's actually quite comfortable place. And when you're doing Hadrian's wall, you can put your modern water bottle in there so that people don't see it and your mobile phone. The feathered crest is obviously for the Centurion. As I mentioned earlier, we actually haven't got a huge number of images of Centurians wearing them, probably only a handful. And we've got other images of them of them wearing front-to-back crests or even just top-knock crests. but they did wear these, and we don't know whether they were painted the feathers, but they quite likely were. And that would have been quite potentially cohort by cohort, maybe even century by century,

but that would have been probably too complicated. But there may have been identifying cohort one to ten. Right. So distinctive plumes. Yeah. Yeah. For sure. For sure.

The Romans lived life in vivid technicolor. When you go to Pompeii, you go to a Roman museum and you see bare pieces of stone and so on. We think of the Romans in black and white, but modern science using fractured light and other techniques and pieces of wall and fresco that have been buried underground, sometimes where there's no oxygen, traces of paint can be found on those statues and the steels, for example. And so what has happened in the last 15 to 20 years,

which is really exciting, is you get accurate reconstruction, painted images of things like this or Roman soldiers or emperors and so on. So, yeah, it's highly likely. We know from the Noticea Dignata from the 4th century AD, which was the only imagery of Roman shields that we've got with different shield army units. A beautiful source, yeah, beautiful source, but it's 400 years too late.

But you can infer from that that legions might have had different emblems, and therefore so might centurians. And they were very brave men, but they were peacocks, too. They were there to be seen. And just like any officer in their dress uniform, they would have wanted to look good. And if these were painted in various whatever patterns, red and white, I mean, you see a lot of the reenactors now, particularly a Caesar,

I can't pronounce his surname, sorry, Caesar Vineski, I think it is, from Legion 21 Rappax. He's kind of led the way in the world on the research of these. And if you see images of him, I mean, he looks amazing. And he's got blue and white feathers and red and white. Yeah, yeah. Because it's interesting, once again, the common idea is that they all have their red plumes and like red is the big color of, right.

Again, you know, that's open to conjecture. We have paintings from Pompeii with soldiers in red. We know the generals wore red cloaks and generals wore red boots and they had a red sash. But we also know Roman Legionaries wore blue, maybe Marines in the Navy did. We also know that ochre was a very common color. But certainly blues or reds or who knows? Anyone that tells you that they know this Centurion or that Legion had this color, they're lying. But the thing is, you find them out there.

So just describing as well to our audience who are listening who aren't looking at it but I'll also make sure that we get some lovely pictures of this stunning helmet that you've brought in for us today Ben. I mean, the feathers, they're black and white feathers that you've chosen for this particular helmet and are they glued in to the top? No, as you saw outside the studio, they're not yet. So this mount was made for me specially. I know so many reenactors now.

When I need something, I don't go and look for it. I just ask some of my reenactors. So somebody made this for me. and they sent it to me in pieces because you can't send that in the post all the feathers get broken so I think the feathers they have to be glued in

because they're forever falling out and that wouldn't look good if I was about to go on parade or something so yeah and is it also very much conjecture around types of feathers they would have used? Yes, because we don't have any surviving examples

I believe the only surviving example of a possible Centurion's crest is one in a museum on Hadrian's wall which is horsehair otherwise they haven't survived No. But horsehair, I guess you can understand the logic behind that, especially, you know, with all the horse barracks and the stables along Hadrian's wall and places like that.

But, you know, again, experimental archaeology, when you're walking Hadrian's wall and you're wearing one of them and it rains, the horsehair falls down like this and you look like you've got a central parting and they do not look good. Whereas that wouldn't happen with feathers. Right. Yes. I love experimental archaeology. I've learned, I've done Hadrian's wall twice in full Roman gear and the amount I learned is off the sky. scale with just reference to the kit and what it feels like and so on. Always bang the drum for experimental archaeology in doing this stuff,

because they're at the forefront of learning more about, especially what we're talking about now, the kit of a Roman centurion. And if we go down the body from the head, let's say in the imperial period, you've got this stunning helmet. Further down, can we imagine them wearing similar types of armour to the everyday legionary, the classic banded iron armour, the segmentata pads? No, no, interestingly, they didn't wear that. It's called the Larica Segmentar.

It sounds Latin, it's a modern name. We don't know what the Romans called it. They called male the Laraca Hamata. And interestingly, when the soldiers gradually moved over to the plated armor, the segmentata, the centurions did not. So from the early principate, the centurions looked different in uniform, not just when they were wearing their helmet. So male shirt is actually very effective protection against weapons. You wear a padded tunic underneath it, not just straight over the ordinary tunic. And together, they're like a stab-proof vest.

If you have someone who's very powerful and they ram a spear into it, they might break through, especially if it's not complete ring-mail, but it's actually still very, very effective armor. And then sometimes it had doubling over the shoulders as well, but again, that would have not necessarily been all the time. Then they would have worn, so they would have had a very simple tunic, they would have had a focale or a neck-neck kerchief. that is because the open necks of Roman tunics are really wide.

So your straps rub on your bare skin. I know this again from experimentation if you don't have a neckerchief. And then wear their tunic, padded tunic, male shirt, which goes down to just basically below groin level. And then a metaled belt. And the metal belt was basically the same as a soldiers, but often more ornate. And this was a very distinctive feature of a Roman soldier.

And so if you see someone in a motorway service station in this country or wherever you live in the world and they're in combats and boots and they've just got out of a Jeep, you know they're in the army, if you saw a man in off-dress, if you like, in the street, in the town, anywhere in the empire, with it wearing a metal belt with its jingly groin-guard that goes jingle, jingle, jingle, you heard that noise. We have a Roman poem of a man standing in a shop hearing that noise on the street and knowing a soldier is walking by. Right. It wasn't a distinguishing that this is a Centurion. No, this is just a soldier. But again, Roman soldiers liked to individualise their kit, and they would sometimes actually use precious metals, say in the scabbard of their sword. So a centurion may have had a really expensive sword scabbard

and may have had a much more expensive, he may have had silver or whatever in his belt and so on. And he then would have potentially worn a chest harness with those filaree that I mentioned, the awards for bravery, and he would have had a pugio or a dagger. He wore his sword on the left or on the right, depending on the time,

but often on the left, which is different to the soldiers. Sold soldiers wore it on the right and drew with the right, which was possibly because that's quicker to get out from behind your shield, which is rather big rather than drawing it across your body. But for whatever reason, whether that was to do with the rank, we don't know.

But Centurians wore theirs on a Baldrick, which is a leather strap from the shoulder to the hip, not attached to the belt like the soldiers did. And then they would have had Caligay studded sandals or potentially boots. Officers tended to wear boots. And I mean, if you're in a muddy country like Britain, you're going to wear boots.

But they still have the hobnails on underneath regardless. They would have still have the hobnails as well. We've got examples of the hobnails being sharpened as well. So you can imagine that in muddy ground or on someone's head in the middle of a battle. Quick segue into the laces of Roman boots and sandals. This would have applied to Centurions as well. I only found this out recently.

I unfortunately never put it as a mistake in my books because it just didn't happen. But all Roman sandals that have been found with, or boots that have been found with laces, they were laced at the back. Okay. Because the laces are really long. When they're undone, they come up to your knee,

and that's possibly in case I reckon the leather parts, and you've then got enough to make, you don't have to replace it. But when they're new and before they've parted, they come up to your knee. So you loop them around the bottom of your leg, loads of times, and then you lace them at the back. presumably so you don't stand on one end in a battle.

Oh, gosh. Funny little things like that. Little details like that. So again, when I'm doing a talk, I say people, what do you think of my book? And no one ever guesses it. But we haven't come yet to the vine stick, which I knew you would. Ben, well, I was going to say, I have two other bits of equipment, which have become so linked to Centurians today that want to talk about.

You've preempted the vine stick, but I'm going to save that for the last one. Okay. Because the other one that has become big. And we talked about this before. It's the whistle. Ben, the whistle. I don't know if I started on the whistle. This is because of this TV series, Rome.

HBO Rome, yes, there's that famous scene right at the beginning where one of the Centurians is using a whistle in battle. Is there any evidence that Centurians could well have carried whistles in battle? No. Okay. Moving on. I have a Roman whistle. Shema didn't bring it with me. I have a Roman whistle.

The original found in the Ligiery Fortis, Regensburg, in Austria, which has a little lead square on the end for scratching your name on it, so it doesn't get lost. And so it was found in a military context, but there is no documentary evidence at all for whistles. They commanded by the voice at close quarters and by trumpets and bugles at distance. And each century had musicians and each legion had musicians as well. So there's no evidence. It looks great, but we can't prove it. And so one of the things that I'm constantly saying to my readers or people I'm talking to is just because we want it to have existed and it makes common sense that it might have existed doesn't mean it did exist. You've got to have some

evidence or else it's just a theory. And so often today, in whatever period we're talking about, people want something to be true. And if enough people talk about it, it almost becomes a fact. But we've got no evidence. So it's possible, but it's also possible that did loads of other things. Don't completely kick it out the water. But yes, exactly. Yeah. But what we can talk about, a bit better, is the vine stick. And so describe the vine stick to us. So the vine stick, it's basically a piece of the trunk of a vine plant, which grows grapes, and it was the symbol of a Roman centurion.

It's generally about two feet, two and a half feet long, thicker at one end than the other, and curved and polished, so it's quite curving, if you like, and was a symbol of office but also used as a weapon of punishment. So slightly smaller than the average staff, more like a baton, I guess? Yeah, yeah. So an umbrella, thinking of umbrella, it's probably slightly shorter than an umbrella, but without the curved handle. So this wasn't something that was polished and kept on the mantelpiece. The Centurion would have kept it with him pretty much all the time, not in battle, but certainly in camp and when he was training his men.

And, I mean, it's still used today in that up until very recently British Army officers had what was called a swagger stick. And that's, you know, basically a descendant of the vine stick. So this was something that he could beat his men with whenever he felt like it. And you've got to try and take off your modern spectacles, put away your modern values. The world was just a totally different place. When you were being trained by a centurion to be a Roman soldier, you swore your oath of allegiance to the emperor,

your physical characteristics were recorded because there were no cameras, your scars and so on. You signed X for your name because you probably couldn't write to sign up anywhere between 16 and 25 years, and then you were handed over to your centurion. And he was like, your mom, your dad, your boss at work, the biggest nightclub bouncer you've ever seen, and God Almighty rolled into one. When he said, run, you said, yes, sir. When he said jump, you said, how high, sir.

And when he said, charge those men and kill them, you said, yes, sir. And you didn't. If you didn't, he beat you with his vine stick. When he was training you, this was the school of hard knocks. You know, if you got injured, you would be kicked to your feet again. and if you said you needed to go to see the surgeon, he said, you better not be shamming because I will literally beat you unconscious.

We know of at least four offenses that the Centurion could execute his men for, but before he got to that, he would encourage his men with his stick, whether it was just tapping them on the helmet or banging them on the shoulders or literally beating them. And the most extreme example of that,

which I'm sure you know the guy's nickname in Latin was Cato Alteram. So this is a German, a centurion in Germany, I should say, in the first century AD, who was so brutal that his nickname was Cato Alteram, which means bring me another. In other words, he was so fond of breaking his stick on men's backs, he would click his fingers and say, Kato Alteram, and his men would just get him another. So nobody would stop him beating a man unconscious. And as I mentioned, four offenses that we know of, at least that he could execute a man for. And they were falling asleep on

sentry duty, running away from the enemy in battle, stealing from a comrade, or taking your sword off while digging a ditch, which means that you can't fight immediately if the enemy attacks. Because that one feels a bit less, I don't want to say important, but compared to the three previous that you mentioned, it feels a bit more like... Yes and no, but so, so let me put it into a situation. Roman Legion on the march, enemy territory, they come to the end of the day, and again, your listeners and viewers will know, they dug out of camp every day. So half the Legion acts as a screen, half the Legion digs. The guys that are digging say there's a sudden attack that broke through the screen.

They've got to be ready to fight. Even if you saw it's just a few meters away. So the example we have, again, these are, when we, to reference you at the beginning about the things we know, they're only often just little vignettes that we have. But there's a scene that is described from the second century BC, which is a Roman Legion digging out a camp and the Legate or one of his tribunes is riding along the ditch. on his horse, and he comes across a sword lying on the side of the ditch, and he says, who's is this sword?

And this unfortunate soldier puts his hand up, and he's taken out and executed on the spot. Wow. Yeah. Wow. So, and the form of death was not usually like that for the centurion. It was the fustuarium, which is, if it's a contoburnium of men, and I've just had a chat with an academic about this, oh, the contuburnium wouldn't have served on the line together. They wouldn't have been on sentry duty together.

Okay, so we don't have time for that. But let's say it's these eight guys who were on Century Ducid together and one fell asleep, while you seven are going to beat him to death with sticks in front of the rest of the century. Hang on a sec. I'm in a really bad mood because I was up all night on the wall checking up on you guys. Beat him to death with your fists because that takes longer. I was going to ask, like, with the Centurians, were they always the ones who would deliver out the punishment? It sounds like there, sometimes they would give it actually.

to the poor victim's mates. Yes, they do. From those formal punishments we do, but I have no doubt. I mean, we're talking about a world where infant mortality was potentially 50% by the age of infant or child mortality, 50% by the age of five.

We're talking about people being used to killing their own chickens, to seeing animals slaughtered outside temples, to seeing crucifixes on the side of the road, to going to gladiator fights. Life was really brutal. And when you were a soldier, you know, you basically,

would get very rough justice. There'd be nobody would stop the Centurion. So I have no hesitation in saying if a Centurian felt that a soldier had done something severe enough and they executed him on the spot, I don't think many senior officers would have done very much about it. That was the question I was going to ask. Do you feel then that Centurians had a lot of freedom over their particular unit, over their particular soldiers? And there's not like they could petition the Legate higher up if they felt that they were, it was like undeserved. No, I don't think so at all. I don't think so at all.

The centurions, interestingly, we didn't mention it, but it's worth mentioning here, were ranked 1 to 60. Right. So in other words, the 6th Centurion of the 10th cohort was the lowest ranked. It's a hierarchy. There's a clear hierarchy, yeah. Within each cohort, and it goes all the way up with the first centurions, sorry, the senturions of the first cohort were the most senior. They were known as the Premier Ordinese. They were more senior than anybody in the Legion.

But even if you complain to a more senior centurion, again, unless you, this centurion had done something really unjust, I don't think there would have been any comeback at all. They were judged jury and executioner, quite likely, in my opinion. Also, keep on that hierarchy bit's a little more, because centurions, you also have them commanding the auxiliary units, so the non-Roman citizen units. Did that hierarchy extend to them as well? If you were a Roman centurion commanding legionaries,

would you see yourself as superior to a centurion commanding of auxiliar? 100%. I mean, generally, the only Roman officers in auxiliary courts where the men commanding the cohort, the centurions would have been auxiliary cindurians, and they were very definitely, yeah. They were very definitely inferior. I mean, Romans were really quite racist,

and that's the reason auxiliaries manned Hadrian's wall, not real legionaries, because the less valuable soldiers, you put them nearer the danger, as it were. So not to say there wouldn't have been a working relationship, and many of them might have been friends if they were on campaign together, but there was a definite social difference

between auxiliaries and citizen legionaries. But you can imagine, can't you, the soldiers who are under the command of that particular centurion who are being taught, you know, and making sure you avoid those horrific punishments. Can you also imagine that individual soldiers would have gained more potentially loyalty to the centurion that they were serving than actually the person right at the top of the legion? Yes, yes. I mean, you can think of someone like Julius Caesar who led an army for seven years in goal and they won and they won and they won and he gave.

them the amazing rewards. I mean, after Elisa, he gave every legion in his army a slave. They took 50,000 slaves. Here you go, guys. But certainly the Centurion would have been the man to whom you owe most of your loyalty, because he didn't just beat you and train you. You know, he quite, again, this is just common sense. I can't prove it. But it is, from what we know, we know of Centurians referring to their men as boys, my boys, you know, like my lads. So they would, and in desperate situations like Gargovia, where Julius Cesar lost 300 legionaries or 700 legionaries, but 46 centurians. This is the battle that he loses, isn't it?

Yeah, the one that no one talks about in asterisk. Yeah, so, but that massively high percentage of centurions, and very little else has known about the battle, but that tells you they were leading from the front. And so you just talk to any serving members of military today, have been in combat. You know, you have to support your mates. And if your officer is putting himself in danger to help you,

you feel duty bound to do the same. And if you survived, he's going to buy you a round of drinks. He's maybe going to put you up for an award for Valor, whether that's First Man Over the Wall. These are Roman awards, or whether it's saving the life of a fellow citizen, things like that, or a gold bracelet or a silver bracelet. And he would quite possibly have been involved in the, you know,

when they were getting their pay, which is three times a year there to, I don't know, but they would have loved and feared their centurions. And there were bad ones, but there were probably some really amazing ones as well. Very charismatic leaders. And so that's how they're expected to act on the battlefield. Is it they're in the front ranks, they're leading their men.

As also, you said earlier, they're peacocking at the same time. They are standing out. They are showing like Alexander the Great's officers. You know, they're at the front ranks and risking in the lives of the men who they've tortured over all the men. Alexander famously used to lead his own charges. I mean, he was nuts and lead his own cavalry charges and survive. Just crazy.

But did Centurians also have the freedom to command their particular kind of their centuries in battle? Maybe they've presumably they've received their main orders from HQ as what they're supposed to do. But if they see, as you know, all those best plans don't often go to plan in the heat of battle, if they could see that the tide was turning or that a new opportunity was rising, did the Centurians also have the freedom in battle to make adjustments? Possibly, I can think of an example of an adjustment being made in a Roman battle, but it was a more senior officer than a centurion. During the Battle of Kynoskephalae, which was when the Macedonian phalanx came up against the Roman legions,

which were far more maneuverable than the phalanx. Just to try and quickly paraphrase it, the phalanx was coming down a hillside, and it wasn't, the two halves of it were not, didn't have a common front rank. One was slightly in front of the other. Yeah, think of it like a big wall of spears, but part of that wall of spears is not in the same position. And there were Roman soldiers advancing to meet the part of the phalanx that was behind the other part. And when they were doing so, one of the senior officers, I think he might have been a tribune, noticed that the flank of the part of the phalanx that he wasn't attacking,

which he was now alongside, didn't have light infantry protecting its side, which it needed. and they were therefore completely exposed and he turned his mannples only maybe a thousand or two thousand men and they smashed into the side of the Macedonian phalanx and won the battle. So centurions may have done that

but I've never read of an example again I haven't read all Roman histories but I've read a lot and pretty much every book about the Roman army that's been written in the last 30 or 40 years and I can't think of an exact example I can think of individual examples

of centurians leading from the front. So, for example, the battle that Budica was defeated at, which may have been near St. Albans, north of London, a very outnumbered Roman army. The general picked the terrain with a hill at his back, woods at each side, open ground in front. British tribesmen thought, we're just going to slaughter them.

And the Roman general had his men form up in what the Romans called the saw, which may have been a multiple repetition of the Cuneas, which we think was a wedge, in other words, a triangle like this, pointing forward. So a century forming a triangle with the centurion at the point.

He was the one right at the front of the wedge. Yeah, so they formed a saw, and that meant there were centurions at the front of every triangle. So you imagine how dangerous that is with 50,000. I mean, the sources say 200,000. So I always say,

divided by four, divided by five. There were only 20,000 Roman soldiers, though. So say 40,000 British tribesmen against 20,000 Roman soldiers. You think the British are going to win, but they came up against the centurions, obviously first, and the rest of the

legionery so tightly that the sources tell us that they couldn't use their weapons. The British tribes and couldn't use their spears, and the Romans just slaughtered them like fish in a barrel. But the death, we don't have the deaths of the numbers of centurions, but it was probably higher than normal there just because of that. Leading your men, and that is literally leading from the front at the point of a wedge. Terrifying. So, yeah, especially for us in 21st century. And I'm also glad you mentioned sinusineineine there, because that's a lot of the same.

That was the example I was thinking of in my head. I didn't realize it wasn't a Centurion. It was actually someone higher up. Yeah, it was someone more senior. I think it was a Tribune. Okay, got it. So outside of fighting, if they're not in an open war zone, if they're not on campaign, let's say they're in a more peaceful part of the Empire, maybe even Hadrian's wall, but at a time

where there aren't all these raids going across the wall and anything like that. Do we know much about how an everyday life of a Centurion, how it would have changed if they weren't in an active war zone? Yeah, we do. We've got some nice little snippets from actually Egypt. So often in remote areas of the empire like Egypt could be, you had centurions who would have been operating more or less as a sole commander and they acted as patrols, but also for the collection of tax. And that would have been out throughout the empire and also as effectively judges. So there's a wonderful piece of pottery. or a piece of papyrus actually, so the oxyrincus, massive cash, 50,000 pieces of pottery. Yeah, the papyari and pieces of pottery, I think there are some as well. Estraca? Estraca, yeah, from Egypt. There are all these different examples we've got that tell us things.

And one of them, interesting ones, which I always find, it's a little bit amusing, because we know so little about ancient women because generally they weren't taught to read and write. We know they were because of the famous images from Pompey of the woman with the stylist in front of her face and so on. But this one example of a centurion is where a man's wife has run away to a town 20 or 30 miles away and has set up home with another bloke. And he's written to the local centurion, who's presumably acting like the local justice, asking for help to get his wife back. And we don't know anymore.

Now, clearly, probably nothing was done. But there's an example of a centurion as a justice, if you like, and also an example of ancient women might not have known how, to read and write, but they did what they wanted. But yeah, a great example of how a centurion's duties could change between war and Pete. Yeah, and so being a quartermaster and making sure that there were enough supplies

for their century, this is something that we've got from the Vindelanda tablets. And although junior officers would have maybe been doing more of it, the Centurion would have been keeping an eye on they had enough leather for their sandals, they had enough food, they had enough, you know. This is the management, this is the logistics.

The logistics, yeah. And what's quite interesting about some of those letters from Vindal is they show that in peacetime you can have a unit. There was one cohort, I think the Tungrians, and they were down to less than half strength with numbers of men that were often different vexillations or sick or, you know, just not where they were supposed to be. And I guess overseeing the pay for their men,

you know, that must be very, very important to them. Well, again, one of the junior officers that tended to do, the Tesserarius was in charge of the money, but the centurion would have been in charge of that. And men sometimes asked for advances on their pay if they didn't have enough. And so they might have to get permission from that. And, you know, there was, you would have been a sort of like a godlike figure.

If the Centurion says you can have an advance, you can have an advance. If he says you can't, you can't, you know, that kind of thing. He recommends you for a medal. If he noticed your bravery in battled or something like that, then that's very good. Because what I was going to say was they weren't always promoted from the ranks. There were three routes to becoming a centurion, one of which was really quite rare. They were generally men who'd risen from the ranks. And if you joined the Legion at, say, 18, approximately, you could have been,

younger and lied and who's going to check. And I saw a gravestone in France of a 15-year-old boy who died in World War I. So, you know, 2,000 years ago. So you joined the army at 18. If you did well and were, you know, dutiful and so on, you could become an immunist, as in the word immunization. And that meant you didn't have to do certain nasty things like digging ditches and digging latrines.

And if you continued to impress, then you might be promoted through the ranks of junior officer, which were Tessera. i.e. the man who has the tessera, which is the piece of pottery in the open sometimes, which had the orders for the password and so on, for the knight. And then you had the signifer who carried the standard or the signam, and you had the Optio, who's the second in command, and then you had Centurion. And if you worked your way through those, you know, and not everybody did, definitely everybody didn't, because we have examples of an Optio, and after his name, it's written as a candidate for the centurionate,

which means he was preferred to be advanced to become a centurion. So you might just be a junior officer all your life, but if you were one of those who did, you could become a centurion. It's thought by your early 30s. So if you're a centurion six in cohort 10, you then, in theory, had to climb up the ranks, but you didn't have to go through 60 promotions.

You could be leapfrogged. But again, that would take years. You were usually seconded to another Legion when you were promoted as a Centurion or moved as a Centurian or advancing up the Centurion ranks. Right, so you wouldn't be commanding the people you'd previously served alongside. You could be. We have examples from Tombstones where they did within a Legion,

but it was normal not to. And that may have been something as common sense is, from modern day, you don't want the guy who's been promoted from the ranks telling 60-80 guys what to do. Yeah, and also will they do what they're told? Whereas you put him in a new unit, they don't know who he is. And then another route into the centurion rank was basically being leapfrogged in because you were wealthy.

Wealthy status, right, it's okay. Because daddy wants you to be a centurion. And, you know, we've got lovely examples of that, of it happening to various noble families. So equestrians would frequently become centurians. And what must have been very frustrating for men who were promoted from the ranks is that if you became the first spear,

the primus Peele, which is the most important rank of Centurion you could be, when you had that post done, which was only a year, you then could be elevated into the equestrian level of nobility. Yet these young guys coming in in the 30s, say, who were already equestrians. They don't get that benefits. They don't get that, yeah, yeah.

So they, what that means is that because after, after Centurians retired, they were known as ex-Premi-Peeley, they frequently then ended up getting jobs in urban situations, whether that was leading urban cohorts or even as political appointees to governors and things, they could move all around. And then we have great examples from tombstones. But those young equestrians who joined in as appointees would have been far. We've got evidence there are more of them who went higher at the end than the guys from the ordinary.

Wow. Yeah. So, which is kind of understandable. And then the third way, which was less common, was you could move straight from the Batorian Guard. So obviously this is during the Empire. You could move straight from the Batorian guard to become a centurion. But we haven't got as many examples of those. So there's no equivalent of an officer training corps back then. The closest thing is the equestrians,

the inexperienced, but their rich backgrounds, allows them to leapfrog. Yes, yeah. A bit like, you know, the tribions. That's what the tribions were. And as I mentioned, that one example of a legate with Julius Caesar. He had no military experience, potentially, but he was suddenly given command of a legion the day before a battle.

And so what material benefits could you get if you were a centurion? They were paid 15 times more than a legion. Oh, man, hell, that's a lot. It was a lot. It was really was. And the premis Pellus was paid considerably more than that. And we have an example of an amount paid, whether it was like a cash payment when they retired of a Primus Pellus,

and there's been quite a bit of controversy about it because it was so big. But academics have compared it with a... level of pay that a premiums peeglass has gotten gone well actually it wasn't it wasn't unreasonable we're talking hundreds of thousands of cisterci as a cash payment to a premium premium spilus when you retired so they were paid really really well and this is at this point worth mentioning that because of all the things we've been talking about their their leadership skills their bravery the way that they welded their men into units they stayed in the army for a very long time. So soldiers, I mentioned 16 to 25 years, that's dependent on when we're talking about,

but say 20 years is an average. You came in at 18, you could retire at 38 if you were still alive, but centurions didn't leave after 20 years because they were climbing that tree. And they were also so valuable, presumably, that they didn't want them to leave, particularly because wars frequently happened. So we've got this incredible example of, again, a tombstone of a centurion called Fortunatus, which means lucky. He was lucky because he was 80 when this tombstone was built and he'd been in the army for 50 years and he had served. It lists, again, any of your viewers or listeners

who are familiar with military tombstones, they often list the legions that they were in and it lists the legions he was in. Now, he may not have been in all those legions but he was probably maybe in a vexillation that was serving with those legions because it's possible he didn't change legions that often. It's very vexillation, you mean?

Sorry, a vexillation is a subunit of a legion that's sent from A to B to help with something like a rebellion or building a road or something. So it may have been that he was just in a vexilation with that legion. But this guy served all over the empire, literally, from Israel and Syria to Britain and Romania and North Africa. And he was still in the army in his 70s. He just kept climbing. And just kept climbing, yeah.

Yeah. They didn't always climb. They sometimes stayed a century and they didn't always become a prince of people. Well, I was going to ask, are there actually any extreme cases where someone who was once a centurion, could have risen and become one of those army generals that ultimately became an emperor. I think, yeah, Vespasian's grandfather was a centurion. He was a centurion, okay, so you see the family line kind of rising.

And we've got Maximinus Thrax in the third century AD. The seven-foot emperor, if you believe that. Maybe he was seven feet tall, but he climbed all the way up to the top and became an emperor. Pertanax in 192, the emperor, I think he was a... an ordinary legionary originally. So yeah, there was, you definitely, very unlikely, but you could do it. But there are those really interesting cases. Yeah. Well, having that kind of centurion background. Ben, I can ask so many more questions, but we're running out of time. Lastly,

the legacy of the centurion, how big an impact do you think this role, that important role, has had in the development, in the inspiration of armies since? The only opinion I feel able to would be an opinion on the effect on the British Army because of my knowledge. I'm not, obviously, for my accent, I'm not British, I'm Irish, but I have a reasonable knowledge of British military history, pretty good knowledge of some areas.

And from what I know, during the period of the British Empire, it happened at the same time as the first massive interest in ancient history happened with archaeology and texts being written, in the 1800s, in other words. And there was a definite,

identification by the British hierarchy, maybe the military as well, of identifying themselves alongside the Romans who had been so successful for so many hundreds of years with their military. So it definitely happened to some extent. But what you've got to quickly add in is that the Roman army was different to the modern ones. So we talked briefly about the Contaburnium, which was the 10th group of 8 men. There were 10, 10th groups in each century. They weren't a platoon. They weren't a sub-platoon, which a lot of people, they like to break down a Roman army, like a modern army. It didn't happen like that. The difference in command was huge.

You had these 60 centurions, and then a massive gap between them and above, and a massive gap between them and below. But I don't know. I think just the sort of overwhelming image would be the successful Legion in battle, marching forward, nothing can stop them. They all look amazing. They're really well-trained. They're highly disciplined. And they're led by these centurions with the helmet, I think that's the biggest identifying thing. A military historian might be able to give you more. It was a big question to ask. Yeah, that was a big one.

Yeah, that's all right. But Ben, this has been absolutely great. It just goes to me to say, thank you so much for taking the time to come back on the show. Thanks, Tristan. Cheers. Well, there you go. There was fan-favorite Dr. Ben Cain returning to the show to talk all things, the Roman Centurion.

I hope you enjoyed the episode. And don't you worry, we're going to have been returning to the show very soon for a follow-up episode on another awesome Roman topic. A famous gladiator who led a revolt against Rome. That's to come in the near future. In the meantime, thank you for listening to this episode of The Ancients. Please follow the show on Spotify or wherever you get to your podcasts. That really helps us, and you'll be doing us a big favor.

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