Roman Metal Armour-Polished or Dull?

[Matthew Amt]

The concept of "Caesar speed" was proverbial.

Sure, on established roads. Most of the areas that he campaigned in already had roads, even if they weren't as high-tech as a top-of-the-line paved Roman road. Even barbarians had carts, wagons, and herds of animals to be moved around.

Where speed of strategic manoeuvre was needed the Roman army traversed whatever type of ground was necessary. Any army which needed to construct roads before it could move would be laughable.

Well, if you can get even one wagon pulled by oxen and loaded with a ton of supplies through any patch of forest or swamp, or even over a steepish hill, at any speed over 1 mile an hour, I will be the first to applaud.

As a comparison, in the Zulu War of 1879, the British army was using ox-drawn wagons functionally identical to what the Romans had. They were marching across open veldt, but were still restricted to the tracks and rudimentary roads that existed. It often took an entire day just to cross a small streambed, simply because every wagon had to be completely unloaded and sometimes even disassembled, hauled across by hand, and then put back together and reloaded. This was an army smaller than a legion, by the way.

Keep in mind that even the crawling pace necessitated by building a road as you go was something that non-Roman armies generally couldn't achieve at all. They'd roll up to a forest or river and say, "Oh, well, can't get past that!" The Romans had regular procedures for clearing roads and building bridges and such, and practiced such things regularly. Heck, even with paved roads, barbarian forces almost never matched the daily distances marched by Romans regularly--they just didn't have the organization to do it. So even with the delays of clearing and bridging, the Romans could achieve unprecedented strategic speeds of advance.

If you want to laugh at such realities, go ahead, but I doubt Rome's enemies did.

Vale,

Matthew