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Augustus and his Legionaries
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 11 February 2009
Extract
In the Monumentum Ancyranum Augustus makes some interesting and, if we can unravel them, undoubtedly important statements, from which certain deductions seem possible as to the number of his legionary soldiers, the rate of mortality among them, their length of service and the provisions made for them after their dicharge. Quite early in the Monument (I. 16–19) we get the following general assertion: ‘About five hundred thousand Roman citizens were bound to me by the military oath. Of these, after the due expiry of their service, I settled in colonies or sent back to their own municipia somewhat more than three hundred thousand. And to all of them I gave land purchased by myself, or in lieu of land sums of money out of my own resources.’ From the place of this statement in that part of the record relating to his earlier career we might be tempted to infer (a) that the five hundred thousand legionaries were those who formed his armies at the time of Antony's collapse, and (b) that the discharge of three hundred thousand of them, whether planted in colonies or sent back to their domiciles, took place at one and the same time. With regard to the second point, we shall see presently that the vague and indiscriminate statement made here is cleared up by a later passage (III. 22 sqq.), from which it appears that the assignation of land belongs to two distinct schemes of colonizations, separated by sixteen years, and that the restoration of discharged soldiers to their municipalities, to whom alone the words ‘pecuniam pro agris dedi’ are applicable, belongs to a still later date.
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References
page 188 note 1 Besides III Augusta there were III Gallica and III Cyrenaica, the former perhaps from the army of Antony, the latter from that of Lepidus. The duplicates were IV Macedonica and IV Scythica: V Alauda and V Macedonica: VI Val. Victr. and VI Ferrata, the latter always an Oriental legion: X Gemina and X Fretensis. Of course both Antony and Lepidus had a large number of legions, but these were probably for the most part uernaculae, and perhaps even composed to some extent of slaves, like the army of Sex. Pompeius. If this was the case, we can understand why Augustus incorporated so few in his own army. They would not be of the best material. The slaves might be handed back to their masters, like those in the Sicilian army, while the rest would be simply disbanded.
page 189 note 1 Mommsen held that in addition to these six Augustus only retained twelve of his own, and that legions XIII to XX were all created in the course of the Pannonian rebellion. I have given reasons against this view in the paper referred to above.
page 191 note 1 In V. 35 Augustus enumerates the provinces in which he planted colonies of soldiers, and Mommsen is much exercised because, though Emona, Salonae, Narona and Iader were colonies, Illyricum is absent from the list. Two possible reasons are suggested for its absence, (1) Illyricum was perhaps not a separate province, but under the administration of the governor of Macedonia. But between the treaty of Brundisium and the unification of the empire after Actium, Macedonia had belonged to Antony, and Illyricum to Octavian, and as Illyricum had become important through his own campaigns between 36 and 33 B.C., it is unlikely that he would have at once merged it in another province. In any case, Illyricum was certainly as much a separate province as Pisidia, which finds a place in the list. (2) Augustus may have promised his veterans lands in Italy, and then, unable to get sufficient land to fulfil his promise, he may have settled some in Illyricum, a breach of promise which he would be anxious to keep out of sight, and therefore omits Illyricum from his list. On this it seems enough to ask, why, even if at the time he could persuade his veterans that they were settled in Italy, when they were really in Illyricum, should he still have had recourse to this futile expedient in drawing up his record forty-four years later? I make the suggestion, for what it is worth, that these places in Illyricum were not military colonies at all, but are covered by Dio's ‘elsewhere,’ and that, like Dyrrachium and Philippi, they received settlements of dispossessed Italians.
page 191 note 2 This, as we shall see, was granted in 13 B.C., in consequence no doubt of urgent demands on the part of the soldiers.
page 194 note 1 Not all, however, who had shared in these campaigns were discharged, for the veterans complaining of thirty years' service in the mutiny of 15 A.D. must have been among those enliste in 14 B.C.