The Life of a Soldier
Roman soldiers fighting against the Dacians by Nicolas Beatrizet, 1553.Credit.Heritage Art/Heritage Images, via Getty Images
By Thomas E. Ricks
In his encyclopedic
GLADIUS: The World of the Roman Soldier (University of Chicago, $30), Guy de la Bédoyère collects pretty much every fact known about what it was like to be in the military arm of the Roman Empire which was pretty much the only limb of government power outside Rome.
Rome’s soldiers were surprisingly literate, because the Roman Army emphasized precise record-keeping. They also were a remarkably diverse group. A document from Egypt that listed the birthplaces of 36 members of two legions had them coming from today’s central Turkey, Syria, Cyprus, France, Italy and Egypt itself. Some of the soldiers who died in Britain in the first century A.D. had been born in today’s Bulgaria, Spain, Hungary and Italy, according to their tombstones. The common soldier tended to remain with one legion for