Centurion Position in Battle

[Nathan Ross]

the bit in bold would also appear to indicate that individual centuries had a number rather

:-) I noticed that too! I was going to mention it, but didn't want to stray from the topic too much...

We might give Vegetius a bit of the benefit of the doubt here - he'd probably never seen a real military standard, and the chances of the soldiers accurately reading an 'ordinal number' in the midst of battle is pretty low. Then again, it's possible that at some point (later empire?) centuries did acquire numbers as well as names.

But that doesn't, I think, detract from the point he's making about the standards, and centurions, being at the front (nor, probably, does the 'hundred man century' estimate!)