Moving an army

[Nathan Ross]

Do you guys think that Theodosius would have used oxen and be limited to twelve miles a day... I assume they formed their traditional carrago camps each night.

While Vegetius says that Roman soldiers were trained to march 20-25 Roman miles (18-22 modern miles) a day, this was probably without wheeled transport, on good roads, and was not their usual campaign pace. The placement of marching camps seem to suggest a more usual daily march distance of between 10 and 12 miles a day - about the same as most other armies before motorised transport.

The late Roman army tended to rely on billeting soldiers in towns and cities - something that was very unpopular with civilians, and is mentioned a few times in the Theodosian code and elsewhere. They might still build camps if they were moving through 'barbarian' country, but within the borders of the empire it seems more likely that an army would move from town to town, taking over homes and requisitioning supplies as they went. There's a note in Joshua Stylites that the citizens of Edessa were ordered to bake 630,00 modii of army biscuit to feed the field army troops on campaign, and many of them were then conscripted as forced labour to transport the supplies.

Roth is good on principiate logistics; there used to be a paper called 'Crossing the Hellespont' online, about the Persian invasion of Greece, with lots more good information about supplying very large armies, but it seems to have disappeared recently.

For the appearance of the late army on the march, the reconstruction drawings of the Column of Arcadius from Constantinople probably give a good impression.