The Roman Army: A Social and Institutional History (review)

For the nonspecialist, Southern's almost encyclopedic survey of the history and customs of the Roman army will serve as a sound and up-to-date introduction. Nothing, it seems, has escaped her attention: the strengths and weaknesses of the surviving sources; the history of Roman political life, including the functions of the elected officials in the time of the Republic; the structure and organization of the army; its tactics, operational concepts, weapons, and logistics; the nature of the late imperial army; great Roman generals and famous battles; even "Further Directions of Research on the Roman Army" (pp. 326–29).

At the same time, there is little here that is really new or likely to be of much interest to specialists in the field. An unabashed admirer of the Roman army, Southern has little to say about its well-documented brutality. She seems cheerfully unaware of the argument, most eloquently advanced in Benjamin Isaac's brilliant study, The Limits of Empire: The Roman Army in the East (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), that, in many parts of the empire, the Roman military functioned largely as an army of occupation, whose principal mission was to control the local population, not to protect it. And while Southern demonstrates an enviable ability to make sense of the artifact record, her approach to the written sources is, at times, less sure-handed: it is, for example, methodologically indefensible to maintain that the figures Polybius supplies (2.23–24) for the number of men capable of bearing arms in 225 B.C. ought to be "taken at face value", because "there is neither supporting evidence nor any contemporary contradictory claim" (p. 49).

Inevitably in a work that covers so much ground, complex historical questions, like the function of the Roman frontiers, are sometimes given a less nuanced treatment than they deserve. To say that the purpose of establishing frontiers "is ostensibly to avoid having to go to war" (p. 182) is, at best, unhelpful. In North Africa (as in some other parts of the empire), there was no meaningful, external threat to the security of the regions that lay behind the frontier-lines. Finally, it is necessary to insist that, the book's title notwithstanding, this is decidedly not a social history of the Roman army. Southern has more to say about decorations and medals than about soldiers' families.