:Roman Military Service: Ideologies of Discipline in the Late Republic and Early Principate

Abstract

It was only a matter of time before critical theory finally attacked the walls of Roman military history, among the last bastions of empiricist dead-enders. Sara Elise Phang brings some big guns to bear in her study of military discipline during the late republican and imperial eras: Max Weber's typology of forms of authority, Louis Althusser's theory of ideology's role in social and cultural reproduction, and Pierre Bourdieu's concepts of habitus and symbolic violence. After deploying her theoretical weaponry, Phang proceeds to examine discipline as it was applied in various aspects of military life. Combat training did not emphasize mass drill but rather individual weapons-handling skills and aggression, which meant that the social control later European armies imposed through parade-ground exercises had to come from elsewhere. In the Roman case, work and camp-building became the means by which discipline was imposed. Roman soldiers lacked a standardized uniform. Hence a military identity or habitus was formed both through the wearing of weapons and armor and from the inculcation of a masculine self-image. Punishment in theory was always quite severe but in practice less so. Shaming was preferable to execution since excessive rigor here could lead to mutiny. Money had to be given to soldiers in a rationalized, bureaucratic way, such as on the occasion of imperial accessions or the adoption of an heir, thus subordinating its recipients while at the same time avoiding corrupting discipline through the perception that the army's favor was being bought. Discipline demanded that the soldiers be kept constantly at work, and their performance of these tasks (rather than in actual combat, which was rare) came to be considered a measure of their military excellence (virtus). However, the work could not be demeaning in their eyes, which would have put them in the same category as slaves; the soldiers' propensity to acquire slaves to relieve them of much of their drudgery reveals the extent to which they resisted the dictates of work-discipline. Finally, discipline required eliminating luxury from the soldiers' lives and enforcing an austere regime when it came to food and drink, made palatable by the emperor or commander being seen occasionally sharing the soldiers' grub.