Soldiers weren't allowed to keep slaves
Submitted by A.I. Watcher on March 2 2002 20:49:22
In reply to Ah! submitted by Heather on March 2 2002 19:27:02
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Now this gets complicated. The Roman army changed dramatically during the life of Gaius Marius, Gaius Julius Caesar's uncle by marriage. Before the reforms Marius pushed through the Senate, the army consisted of heavily armored, heavily provisioned private landowners. In fact, qualifying for one of the economic classes was a prerequisite to service. Even a member of the fifth class had to have some sort of regular income and had to own some sort of property - even if it was just a condo. (Yes, the Romans invented condominiums. *grin*) The mark of a respectable man of the classes was slave ownership. If a man did not own at least a couple of slaves, he was considered destitute. A man going off to war would take a slave or two with him, along with a wagon full of possessions and a mule to pull them. But after the Italian wars, the pool of eligible men of property was drastically small - even among the Italian Allies who had not yet gained the full Roman citizenship. Gaius Marius took advantage of the situation to create a professional army. First, he bullied the Senate into allowing him to recruit from the Capite Censi, the economically classless poor. One sometimes hears them referred to as the Proletariet, though this term is misleading because of the Marxist references most of us would attach to it. Marius arranged for his soldiers to be paid a small wage as well - unheard of at the time. Soldiers traditionally shared in booty but were not compensated for their time. He reorganized his legions tactically, eliminating the decury as an actual manouvering element. He improved the pilus (spear) allowing for it to be recyclable and he eliminated the private baggage trains and herds mules. Slaves were OUT, except for centurians, who could keep one and no more than one. Paid , free non-combatants were employed for many logistic and clerical functions. Marius's legions kicked butt, to overuse a phrase. It didn't even really matter that he was a superior strategist. His changes allowed him to move 2 to 3 times as fast as a typical legion. His revolutionary new wheeling tactics gave him much more of an advantage against undisciplined foes. Marius was, however, a nobody. He had no ancestors who had ever been Senators, let alone magistrates. He wasn't even from from Rome. He was country gentry. This meant that his political foes could not let him outshine them on the battlefield. So in order to compete, even though they seemed to loathe his changes, they adopted them and used them for themselves. Within ten years of the first Capite Censi army, every legion fielded by Rome used the new Marian organization. His nephew Caesar further refined the model - made it leaner, faster and harder. He ran circles around the Gauls and Belgii who outnumbered and outsupplied him massively. His small, speedy, manouverable armies made mincemeat out of even disciplined, Roman-trained Gaulic forces. After his successes, there was never any question of returning to the heavy, slave and wagon encumbered days of yore. So the question of sex with slaves in the army is almost moot. There simply weren't any, except in the hands of Centurians, who were small in number. The average soldier certainly would not have had access to slaves in any case. As to my reference of executions for homosexual behavior, I'm afraid I don't have a ready reference. Somewhere in Caesar's memoirs, taken from his dispatches to the Senate when he was campaigning in Gaul, there is a discipline report that includes mention of one or more of those executions. If his memoirs are on-line somewhere, a text search might yield some results. His memoirs are dreary, cumbersome reading - mostly facts, figures and paragraph after paragraph of confusing references to various tribes and alliances. BTW, I forgot to mention Sulla, a rival of Marius and reportedly a lover of young men. Cato the Younger was delighted to report rumors that Sulla was sleeping with a comedy performer who was also a slave. He mentioned that this rumor could have (and his tone indicates that he thought it well should have) ended Sulla's career before it ever got started. One can't quite ascertain whether he was more outraged by the fact that the young man was a performer or that he was a slave. But obviously some sort of opprobrium existed if Cato thought the rumor would have been damaging to Sulla's career. On the other hand, it's CATO we're talking about - and Cato was thought even by the Boni to be unnecessarily prudish at times. Cicero in particular was known to make fun of him. Anyone reading much of the primary sources from the Republic runs across a lot of anti-homosexual sentiment - the only real question is just when did the changes in attitude become common - when did Hellenization finally take root in the sexual mores? For it seems as if the pre-grecified Romans were not as liberal about homosexuality as many assume they were. |
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