05-05-2024, 01:54 PM
In the (excellent) Ancient Warfare XVII.2 I read the article by Wolfgang Wilsch and prof. dr. Dreyer about the onager.
Very interesting, epecially the amount of wear & tear after a relative low number of shots!
However, there was a statement that I vehemently have to disagree with:
On page 10 ('the history ofancient torsion engines'), the author(s) claim that:
"[..] At this time [235 AD], however, the Roman army no longer had the mobility and striking power of Augustus'time. For this reason, the writer Vegetius pointed out and recommended to his emperorat the end of the fourth entury thestriking power of the army of the Augustan period."
Two mistakes are made in this statement:
One, we can only conclude from Vegetius' statement that in his opinion, the Roman army had much degraded. However, as a historian I must counter this by pointing at the general gist of Vegetius' work, which is a lament about changing times and a subsequent praising of the army in better times. At NO point in his work can we find the details that Vegetius had actual knowledge of the army in Augustus' day - and in some cases, not even of the army in his own day. Our general conclusion therefore must be that this lamentation is just that, and we are NOT allowed to come to any conclusions about the state of the Roman army of the fourth century based on just a passage from Vegetius.
Two, I think a common mistake is made between 'striking power/mobility' and effectiveness. Nobody would argue that the Roman state in Augustus' time was more powerful than that of the third century.However, that does not mean the army was of any less value. And apart from other written sources, archaeology also comes to such a conclusion - opposite of what Vegetius has us believe. Without going too much into depth, I simply will refer to the Harzhorn battlefield. This was a campaign from just about the very same period referred to by the authors, in the midst of the so-called 'Third century crisis', when the army supposedly was in worse shaped than in the preceding or following centuries. Yet that same army managed to march from the Rhine to the Elbe and back, including battlefield artillery, to strike at the heart of their enemy.
This is why we should not believe Vegetius at face value, and assume that the Augustan legions were 'the good old days' forever gone by the time of Vegetius, who saw the sate of the empire in his day and wrongly assumed it was mostly the fault of a degraded military.
Very interesting, epecially the amount of wear & tear after a relative low number of shots!
However, there was a statement that I vehemently have to disagree with:
On page 10 ('the history ofancient torsion engines'), the author(s) claim that:
"[..] At this time [235 AD], however, the Roman army no longer had the mobility and striking power of Augustus'time. For this reason, the writer Vegetius pointed out and recommended to his emperorat the end of the fourth entury thestriking power of the army of the Augustan period."
Two mistakes are made in this statement:
One, we can only conclude from Vegetius' statement that in his opinion, the Roman army had much degraded. However, as a historian I must counter this by pointing at the general gist of Vegetius' work, which is a lament about changing times and a subsequent praising of the army in better times. At NO point in his work can we find the details that Vegetius had actual knowledge of the army in Augustus' day - and in some cases, not even of the army in his own day. Our general conclusion therefore must be that this lamentation is just that, and we are NOT allowed to come to any conclusions about the state of the Roman army of the fourth century based on just a passage from Vegetius.
Two, I think a common mistake is made between 'striking power/mobility' and effectiveness. Nobody would argue that the Roman state in Augustus' time was more powerful than that of the third century.However, that does not mean the army was of any less value. And apart from other written sources, archaeology also comes to such a conclusion - opposite of what Vegetius has us believe. Without going too much into depth, I simply will refer to the Harzhorn battlefield. This was a campaign from just about the very same period referred to by the authors, in the midst of the so-called 'Third century crisis', when the army supposedly was in worse shaped than in the preceding or following centuries. Yet that same army managed to march from the Rhine to the Elbe and back, including battlefield artillery, to strike at the heart of their enemy.
This is why we should not believe Vegetius at face value, and assume that the Augustan legions were 'the good old days' forever gone by the time of Vegetius, who saw the sate of the empire in his day and wrongly assumed it was mostly the fault of a degraded military.
Robert Vermaat
MODERATOR
FECTIO Late Romans
THE CAUSE OF WAR MUST BE JUST
(Maurikios-Strategikon, book VIII.2: Maxim 12)
MODERATOR
FECTIO Late Romans
THE CAUSE OF WAR MUST BE JUST
(Maurikios-Strategikon, book VIII.2: Maxim 12)
