B. U. G. S.

Roman military might was developed in the early days of the citizen-soldier. The discipline that made Rome was not the Oriental slave-mass charging in with fanatical zeal, but a stolid, solid group of men, each with his shield against his neighbor’s shield, each one RESPONSIBLE, not to the God-Ruler, but to the man beside him.

While other howled around them, they just went straight ahead, a solid wall of shields, each one confident that he could do his job because the man beside him was doing his. It made the huge, shrieking wall of attackers into a mob. From that day forward it was said,

“A savage can beat a civilized soldier. Three savages can right toe-to-toe with three citizen-soldiers. But ten thousand savages cannot defeat a hundred citizen-soldiers.”

But Rome was never able to build a slave-army. So eventually the disciplined army took over Rome.

One of my favorite incidents in Roman history reminds me of early American history. The techniques of Roman warfare had been developed by citizen-farmer-soldiers who brought their own equipment. Their tiny semi-city had defeated the titan of the Italic Peninsula, the Etrurians, and the commanders decided it was time to take the war into enemy territory.

So on command, the Roman citizen-solders marched forth. They reached the borders of Rome. The commanders kept going. The soldiers sat down. They were there to defend their land, their own farms. The commanders were told to come and explain to them why they should get killed fighting on somebody ELSE’S land.

And before you go all gooey about this democratic feeling, be sure not one of the guys sitting in the road would have hesitated to fight to keep Roman slaves in line, whether they owned any or not.

But I like to have to have one critical point in each essay, and this is it:

By about the sixth century BC, when those citizen-soldiers sat down in the road, the Roman method of warfare was already fully developed. There were adjustments, but you could have looked at a Roman Army in action then and a THOUSAND YEARS later and, if you were familiar with the differences in armies, you would recognize the two as the same approach.

That is why Gibbon wrote “The Decline and Fall” of the Roman Empire. It had huge numbers of scribes from its height to its collapses, but we have no information at all on its BEGINNINGS.

In other words, we know nothing about the important part.