Where did they keep the mules in garrison?

[D B Campbell]

:roll: ... the figures I have given are not even remotely "wildly wrong".

Ah, it's the infallible McDonnel-Staff again, with his rolling-eyes icon. You appear to have a hotline to the ancient psyche, unconstrained by the limits of archaeology or historiography.

... each Legion had a broad daily requirement of some 4,000-10,000 Kg (4.4- 11 U.S. tons) of hard fodder ...

I certainly wouldn't like to be your quartermaster. "We might need 4,000 kg, and we might need 10,000 kg ... every day." There's not much difference, is there?!

No need for a "marathon bludgeoning match", provided you do not continue to distort Roth's views.

Ah, but you do love your bludgeoning matches, don't you? I quote a relevant passage from Roth (pp. 77-8) and suddenly I'm "continuing to distort Roth's views". But it is you who have distorted Roth's views by adding the phrase "in the very rare occasion that the soldiers were issued more than 5 days rations". That's a value judgement that Roth doesn't make. You have decided that a campaigning legion did not normally carry more than 5 days rations. I, on the other hand, concede that we have no idea how many days' rations a campaigning legion might carry.

Roth is quite clear that the "norm" was a single mule, and any attempt to postulate otherwise is a clear distortion of his expressed views in both papers and his book.

Not so. Note, besides the mention of two mules on p. 78, also on p. 83: "Assuming two mules per contubernium, as suggested above, this would mean ..." Somebody's guilty of clear distortion, and it ain't me.

But the original question, which (in best debating tradition) you have managed to bulldoze out of the way, was: "is there any consensus about how many animals a single legion had?" The correct answer is "no, there is no consensus". If there were, you wouldn't need to quote a daily variance of 6,000 kg of fodder! (And you can roll your eyes as much as you like -- it can't change that basic fact.)