Roman military history can seem to proceed along divergent paths, with studies of tactics, logistics and the materials of ancient warfare occasionally intersecting historiographical or philological approaches to the textual evidence. P.'s monograph is among recent exceptions, blending close readings, archaeological and spatial analysis, and an appreciation of the nuances of source-criticism with detailed syntheses of a great deal of information. The central argument has two sides: that the development of an administrative apparatus for Rome's legions occurred relatively early in the Republic, and not as the result of Augustan-era reforms, and that it is possible to reconstruct the mechanics of this apparatus at work both at Rome and in the field; the former is argued by means of the latter. The significance extends well beyond mid-Republican military history, insofar as this suggests that a strongly centralised military bureaucracy was not coterminous with a strong central executive. Thus P., in proposing that even the modest campaigns of the fourth century bce necessitated and produced the basic forms of organisation and paperwork that persisted under the emperors and that these have left discernible literary and material traces, contributes to ongoing recent reassessments of the Augustan era and provides a model for the greater integration of republican-era evidence within models built from the richer documentation of the imperial period. She concludes that Augustus’ interventions in the apparatus of military bureaucracy represent the ‘reinstatement, not creation’ (p. 189) of systems and expectations well established by the mid-Republic.
This volume presents P.'s revised doctoral thesis and, after a brief introduction, is arranged topically in six chapters: ‘Dilectus’; ‘The Census and Centralised Military Bureaucracy’; ‘Recording Men on Campaign’; ‘Tributum and Stipendium’; ‘Documents and Archives’; and ‘Record Producers and Record Keepers’. A synthesising conclusion integrates the main points of each chapter and situates these conclusions in the context of their later manifestations under the Empire. As the table of contents illustrates, the core of P.'s analysis lies in four main venues in which administrative organisation may be sought – the levy, census, deployment and loss in the field, and expenditures – before considering the material, settings and personnel who may have been involved. Heavily demographic in their argumentation, the chapters on the levy and the census make an important contribution to our evolving understanding of the humans, and the societal and political mechanisms, that lie behind phrases like ‘Rome's manpower resources’. Both the third and the fourth chapters bring a specifically military-historical lens to bear on historiographical and economic questions, respectively. The final two chapters, on physical records, archival space and the writers themselves, are requisite to P.'s subject but ultimately cannot resolve the key questions of who wrote, on what and where. The limitations of the evidence in this area do not detract from the preceding chapters’ interesting and detailed expositions of what was written, when and why.
Throughout, P. is concerned with the small questions that can lead to larger answers. For example, in considering the size and volume of materials that would be required to maintain a legion's personnel records, her discussion ranges from computations of tablet size and transport needs to matters of communication and military hierarchies, and it includes intriguing suggestions about the role of military tribunes and of former commanders’ private maintenance of campaign archives. Her analysis of Roman casualty figures in the Latin historiographical tradition offers a practical approach to advancing the discussion beyond Quellenforschung and criticism of Valerius Antias, and a balanced appreciation of the narrative complexity of Roman historical writing and its modern function as historical evidence. While acknowledging the paucity of that evidence, P. carefully follows the implications of each stage of her argument on to its next proposition, and this is one of the notable strengths of her study. From establishing the likelihood that different types of records were produced at various stages – from the census and levy to logistics and losses in the field – she turns, in each case, to the issues of who wrote, on what, for what audience, and with what mechanics of storage and preservation. If much of this remains inconclusive, P.'s methods nonetheless provide a map for further studies to explore and refine.
Without detracting from the value that the book will have for many readers, several aspects of its argumentation may render it less useful as a teaching tool or uncritically used point of reference. While making the most of the lacunose and chronologically disparate evidence, P. acknowledges the speculative or tentative nature of many points, but subsequently invokes those points as the factual antecedents for further arguments; the discussion of leaf-style tablets in Chapter 5 is one example of a practice that informs the structure of the whole. On the one hand, it is this approach that allows her to advance the analysis to its fullest extent, and that is not a criticism; caveats in every paragraph would render a book unreadable. On the other hand, readers of individual sections or chapters may not apprehend that much of what they read is predicated on accepting P.'s interpretations of Polybius in Chapter 1, reconstruction of key aspects of the census process in Chapter 2 or (for example) what was acknowledged as ‘largely hypothetical’ and concluded from a ‘balance of probability’ (p. 128) when first adduced. Given the price of the volume, and the resultant likelihood that many will access it carptim through the Taylor and Francis online platform, it is worth underscoring that readers should heed P.'s careful (and appreciated) internal references to prior and subsequent stages of her argument when citing or otherwise engaging with her conclusions.
A related matter concerns the bibliographic bases for P.'s arguments, which often lie in the 1990s or earlier and are heavily anglophone; this affects the utility of her assessments of subjects from Italian demography to Polybius’ account of the Roman army. To take one example, Chapter 6, while presenting detailed and interesting explorations of a number of questions related to the production and preservation of records, offers little engagement with paradigms of enslaved labour; recent critical work on Roman authors’ assertions of agency offers a genuine challenge to the reconstructions here, while alternative types of evidence – from references to soldiers’ wills to the staffs of the duumviri navales – could suggest different lines of interpretation. Others can already be found in French-, German-, Italian- and Spanish-language scholarship on (for example) scribae or the stipendium. A competently literate plurality of legionaries and an unseen reliance on the enslaved would transfer the innovative impetus of an emergent bureaucracy away from the magisterial class and thence undercut the proposition that it was tribunes, quaestors, praetors and consuls who (with their staff) developed practical and efficient solutions to the demands of Rome's expanding empire. My point here is not to dwell on minutiae, but to note that P.'s reconstructions, while they may well be correct, do not necessarily reflect the ‘state of the question’ on matters of detail.
It would be a shame to end on a critical note. This book contains a wealth of detailed argument supported by a broadly interdisciplinary appreciation of the surviving evidence and models for its interpretation. P. pursues important questions to intriguing conclusions and has provided a welcome stimulus to the further integration of mid-Republican military history within Roman historical studies.
