"Noob questions about Imperial era Roman legions" Topic

All

Apologies in advance for asking a couple of questions I could probably look up online, but my initial Googling hasn't answered these whereas I rather suspect someone on here will know these off the top of their head.

First. Looking at early Imperial era Romans, those of 0 – 200ADish, the general consensus seems to be that a Roman legion was ten cohorts of six centuries of 80 men, save the first cohort, which was ten centuries (or double strength, I've seen both). Are those strengths just for the rank and file? -I.e. would centurions, optiones etc be in that number, or in addition to it?

Second, the above structure gives 64 or perhaps 66 centuries per legion. How many centurions were there per century? It has to have been more than one; a modern infantry platoon and a legion century would have been similar in size, but there would be a lot more than just one junior leader per platoon. Was this the case with legions, i.e. would there have been more than one centurion per century?

Third, were specialized troops such as engineers and artillery crews extra personnel attached to a legion, or were soldiers detached from the centuries for these duties? – i.e, if one had a legion with attached ballistae, or a bridging train, should one weaken the cohorts to reflect the detachment of such troops?

Under the Centurions would be Decurions and optios, so think of Centurions as Company Commander in modern parlance.

Within a legion would be spare Centurions doing RSM/CSM roles etc.

A rough estimate is that a cohort came in at 500men, so a Legion was approx. 5500 with its attached Equites as well.

Ballistae etc were carried broken down and were integral to the Legion, so ordinary troops manned them, specialist engineers etc were used, but they were attached and drew from the Legions manpower. Remember legionaries were highly trained professionals, and would all have had training in those tasks.

Centurions were the first real professional senior NCO/junior officer group – the glue that held the legions together

As noted, one per century plus some others in more senior roles – the most senior centurion was the Primus Pilus, who was only out-ranked by the Legate commanding the legion, the senior tribune and the five junior tribunes and the Camp Prefect

Each century had an optio has a second in command – one requirement was that they could read and write

In addition to the legionaries, most legions had about an equivalent number of auxilae attached to them – many of the auxilae units were infantry quite similar to the legionaries, but they also supplied all of the light troops and archers as well as all of the cavalry

The first cohort is to have 5 double strenght centuries, with a total of a little more than 800 legionaries…
Engineers were normaly specialist troops but the ballistae were inded manned by ordinary legionaries from each cohort.

When looking for material on line a good place to start is Wikipedia.

As you can see from the attached link there is a lot of information on Centurions and the Roman Army It also has a list of links and references should you want to take your search further

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centurion

Thanks folks.

By way of background I've always been keen on the Romans and it seems to run in the family. My late brother was a classical scholar and my daughter is also obsessed with Roman mythology.

I have long wanted a Roman army and a set of rules, for my own use, knocked up wholly from scratch, i.e. without reading any other rules first, so as not to be influenced by them. Instead I would stick to the history and sensible inference.

My brother was both a Napoleonic wargamer and a classical scholar. He reckoned he had read – in the original Latin or Greek – everything written contemporaneously about the Roman army. It was his view that there wasn't enough information there about how battles were fought and how armies were led to write accurate rules. He thought the exercise impossible.

To some extent I see what he meant. For example, Plutarch merely said (I think) that the Parthian horse archers picked off legionaries from out of javelin range. Another source records Belisarius picking off a man from 200 yards and noted this as exceptional. This doesn't tell you enough to work out at what range Parthian horse archers should be at their most effective. No more than 100, but what was javelin range and how far away is just outside?

But there is of course archaeological, inscriptional, and reconstructive evidence to consider besides what historians have left. Archaeology finds have shown that to penetrate a Roman shield and / or armour, a Parthian horse archer would have needed to be inside 100 metres and perhaps as close as 40, the latter being further than your legionary could chuck a spear. So now we're in business with decent ranges.

I've since read stuff by Goldsworthy, Southern and Dodge that makes me think this is possible.

But the leadership point I thought was interesting hence the inquiry.

Comments on my lunacy welcome.

Another thing to remember for wargames purposes is that legions often formed vexillations, detachments for service away from the main body of the legion. So you're quite justified having say 3 or 4 cohorts plaus auxilia if the thought of painting a whole legion is offputting, or more likely the number of opposition required to fight a full legion seems impractical.

@ timbo

I've worked out that if one used a 16:1 man:figure ratio, with each figure deemed to be 4 files of 4 ranks, then one could have 28mm figures in 30-figure cohorts in two ranks of figures; which, on a ground scale of 1 inch = 10 yards, would be the correct scale depth. Hallelujah!

If a move were deemed to be about a minute, then heavy infantry would move about six inches per turn; fast enough for the action but not so fast as to shrink the table.

So that gives a legion of about 300 figures, a side of 600 figures including auxiliaries and opposition of about the same. That is 1,200 figures to paint, pretty daunting – so I like your idea of vexillations. Nice one.

Or, change your figure/ground scale. at 50:1 a legion would be 100 figures, at 100:1 it would be 25 figures etc.

Do you want a whole battle or a part of it, or a smaller action?

If you go with late Empire many fights are down to a few thousand per side, in part because no one can be trusted with a larger command – they might try to usurp the throne.

My suggestion for rules design: start with your desired effect and work down, simplifying as you need. The old school way is to start basing rules on perceived weapons effects and working up. The final result can be rather strange, driven by low level details. Also, working from weapons effects up can make for complex games that take a long time to play. It is easy to write complex rules, hard to write simple but elegant rules. That's my two cents.

And one more thing: it is easier to represent weapon effects than the conduct of humans under heavy stress. But Napoleon thought the moral was to the physical as three is to one, Patton thought it was more like five to one.

The trouble with 50:1 and 28mm is that if you want both the frontage and the depth to be correct, it's too many.

A 28mm figure is about 13mm wide and 13mm deep. If you deem that to be 4 ranks of 4 files, and if you figure each man took up a yard of front, then the width of your base gives you your ground scale; four yards = 13mm. Hence eight yards = one inch; make it easy and call that 10 yards = one inch.

So now, two ranks of figures make an eight-deep formation that's the correct depth as well as width. In effect, treating the actual model as dimensionally accurate enables you to model depth accurately (this totally does not work for Napoleonics). It also hands you an obvious move time of about one minute.

Thereafter I don't think this ground scale / unit scale stuff would need to be considered much further.

If you went for 50 men, you'd have to deem this to be 7 x 7 or perhaps 8 x 6. This makes your table instantly bigger; 14mm is now 7 yards so one inch is now 15 yards. Unfortunately your formations now have to be multiples of 6, 7 or 8 which I sense is a bit limiting.

You are right in the design points you make though. From my reading in this subject, certain effects need to be modelled. A pilum volley should disorder the enemy line; disordered Romans should be inferior to warrior barbarians; infantry armed with really heavy weapons like the falx or axe should be at an advantage; horse archers should generally retire before any opposition; archery should unnerve rather than destroy; omens and portents should demoralise; most casualties were incurred after a unit broke, so combat results should not require lengthy melee effect calculations.

And so on.

Is there any evidence for a double strength 1st cohort other than the number of barracks in one fortress?

Druzhina
Illustrations of Costume & Soldiers

One option could be to build your force for a dual figure scale, either 32 in 2 ranks at 1:16 or 8 in 1 rank at 1:64 for when you fancy a more grand tactical game. Also there's no reason to stick rigidly to the theoretical strengths as cohorts as every unit really were often understrength, unless you prefer otherwise.

There is some evidence (Names of a legion's centurions) that has been used to support the larger first cohort but is can be read either way.

Legions are sometimes describes as 6000 strong. I have seen it argued that the difference between the 4800 and 6000 figures represents the number of military slaves.

Another option is to consider a set of rules such as "Impetus", where each base represents a single unit of about 500 men. In Impetus, for 20mm to 28mm minis, each base has a frontage of 120mm with the depth varying to accommodate the miniatures used.

The number of miniatures used is not important. the one constant is the base frontage. I use 10 figures per base, though I have also seen some wonderful vignette bases with as few as 7 and as many as 13.

But in this system, a Legion is 10 bases of foot, and a base of cavalry. Most likely, a player would also add 10 bases of Auxilia. For simplicity's sake, you could also scale things down and use 5 bases of Legionary, and 4-5 bases of Auxilia,etc.

You can download Basic Impetus for free. It's a simplified set of rules, but quite fun. It also uses fewer bases, most armies being from 7-12 bases.

Regardless, have fun.

The trouble with 50:1 and 28mm is that if you want both the frontage and the depth to be correct, it's too many.

Depth is almost always off in any scale. And height… unless you want to use 1:1 ratio. I'm happy if frontage has some resemblance to the actual.

Is there any evidence for a double strength 1st cohort other than the number of barracks in one fortress?

A bit. Two or three other fortresses (all of late 1st or early 2nd century date); Ps-Hyginus (3) and Vegetius (2.6.& 2.8) imply as much, too. Ps-Hyginus might have been writing in the reign of Trajan. That seems to make the existence of an enlarged first cohort tolerably well-attested in administrative terms. Whether it made any difference to the cohort on the battlefield is another matter.

As an aside, and building on Timbo's point, a case could be made (on the basis of career inscriptions from the gravestones of some of those centurions) that a wargame-size legionary force of the Flavian-Trajanic period would be at least as 'realistic' if based on detatchments from several different legions. Which might, depending on how you feel about uniforms or their absence, make them more interesting to paint.

Depth is almost always off in any scale.

If you deem the figure to be as many ranks deep as it is wide – which is rational, given that most figures are cast onto or occupy a square base footprint – then the depth will be correct relative to the frontage.

Interestingly, even 1:1 wouldn't work with most metal figures, because they're usually incorrectly scaled. A 28mm figure is supposed to represent a man about 5'5" tall. So the scale is about 5.2mm to one foot. A musketeer in line was supposed to take up 22" in Wellington's army. In 28mm scale this is 9.5mm.

I don't know if you've ever tried squeezing 28mm metal figures onto bases 9.5mm wide per figure, but it's completely impossible. Elite Miniatures figures fit neatly in threes onto 40mm wide bases, which tells you that they're 13.xmm wide, i.e. nearly 40% too wide for the ostensible scale. In fact, given that open order was a yard of frontage per man, 28mm skirmish figures should be on bases 15.5mm wide which is only slightly wider than the narrowest they'll fit on.

"When looking for material on line a good place to start is Wikipedia.

As you can see from the attached link there is a lot of information on Centurions and the Roman Army It also has a list of links and references should you want to take your search further

en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centurion

Wikipedia is unreliable and should never be quoted!

I recommend the To the Strongest Rules set as well. I just ordered/received mine and they look like a fun set of rules that are easy to learn and can handle large battles quickly, or smaller ones as your needs be.

Like impetus the units are based and it's frontage of the base that matters, not the number of figures etc.

4th Cuirassier said:

If you deem the figure to be as many ranks deep as it is wide – which is rational, given that most figures are cast onto or occupy a square base footprint – then the depth will be correct relative to the frontage.

Who cares? Unless you are attempting to create a simulation of an historical event none of that matters. Even then, it is a fool's errand to attempt to create an exact historical refight of any ancient battle.

No one knows exactly where many of these battles were fought. Terrain changes. Rivers and streams change course. How many men really were in the ranks? How were they REALLY deployed? We can make educated guesses, but in the end all of us, even the most snooty phd types, are just offering up our best guess.

I concentrate on the "game" part of the word "wargame". I like rules and minis that capture what I believe to be the "feel" of the period. I detest the Saint Augustine school of gaming that argues about how many men can dance in line of battle. We make a guess, and go with that. Heck, we are still guessing as to the color of a Roman tunic.

So find a set of rules you like, paint up and base a couple armies, and you and your mates have at it!

YMMV, of course, but that's how I see it.