Legions of Rome

by Stephen Dando-Collins

  Second Jewish Revolt, AD 132-135.

  NOTABLE COMMANDER:

  Marcus Ulpius Traianus, father of the future emperor Trajan.

  THE FAMOUS TENTH, OR NOT THE FAMOUS TENTH?

  For centuries historians were convinced that this was not Julius Caesar’s famous 10th, but a new perspective suggests that it was. Rampaging through Armenia and unstoppable at Jerusalem and Masada, it was almost wiped out in the Second Jewish Revolt.

  The 10th Legion which served Caesar during the Gallic War and much of the Civil War of 49–45 BC was the most famous legion of its day. Raised by Caesar in person, the 10th Legion swiftly became his favorite unit. “Caesar placed the highest confidence in this legion for its bravery,” Caesar himself wrote of the 10th in 58 BC, only months after he began campaigning in Gaul. [Caes., GW, I, 40]

  Caesar said that the men of the 10th commissioned their military tribunes to thank him for his high opinion of them, and to assure him that they were ready to take the field at any moment. [Ibid., 41] Over the next fourteen years the 10th served on the prestigious but dangerous extreme right of his battle lines and helped him achieve his greatest victories.

  Of the loyalty of the 10th, Caesar had no doubt, and he told the legion that it should serve as his bodyguard. [Ibid., 40] This led to a celebrated event. When, in that same year, 58 BC, Caesar agreed to a parley with a German king, Ariovistus, and the king stipulated that both leaders should only bring a mounted escort to the meeting, Caesar grew suspicious of his own allied Gallic cavalry. Telling the cavalrymen to dismount, Caesar gave their horses to the infantrymen of the 10th, on whose devotion he felt he could rely absolutely. [Ibid., 42]

  In response to this, one of the legionaries of the 10th remarked, no doubt with a grin, “Caesar is being better than his word. He promised to make the 10th his bodyguard, and now he’s making Equestrians of us!” [Ibid.] The Equestrians that the soldier was referring to were the Equestrian Order. In modern times, this remark has sponsored much debate among historians about the identity of Caesar’s 10th Legion, for there were two 10th legions during the imperial era, the 10th Fretensis and the 10th Gemina. One of them was the direct descendant of Caesar’s 10th. But which one?

  German historian Theodor Mommsen claimed that the 10th Fretensis could not have been Caesar’s original 10th Legion, and his claim stood on two apparently firm hypotheses. The first related to the title “Fretensis.” This term, which literally means “of the strait,” had puzzled scholars for centuries. Mommsen proposed that the title derived from fretum Siciliense, the Strait of Sicily, which we know as the Strait of Messina, that narrow stretch of water between the toe of Italy and the island of Sicily. This 10th Fretensis Legion, said Mommsen, must have been a new creation of Octavian that fought for him during his epic sea battles against Sextus Pompey off the coast of Sicily in 36 BC, while the original 10th served under Mark Antony in the East.

  During these Sicilian sea battles, Octavian’s deputy Marcus Agrippa put large numbers of men from Octavian’s legions aboard ships of his fleet, and it was these men, fighting as marines, who won the Battles of Mylae and Naucholus for Octavian. While a 1st Legion and a 13th Legion are mentioned by classical historian Appian as being in the general area at the time, none of the legions that Agrippa used to achieve his naval victories for Octavian was ever identified by classical texts or inscriptions.

  Mommsen, noting that the 10th Fretensis Legion showed warships on the coins minted for the legion, concluded that the 10th Fretensis had been one of those legions that took part in Agrippa’s naval victories against Sextus Pompey and had appropriated the title Fretensis to commemorate that fact. It is generally accepted by historians that Caesar’s original 10th Legion joined Mark Antony in late 44 BC and continued to serve him until the 31 BC Battle of Actium. Therefore, went the Mommsen argument, if the 10th Fretensis fought for Octavian off Sicily in 36 BC, there was no way it could have then ended up in Antony’s army at Actium by 31 BC; with relations between Octavian and Antony souring from 36 BC, there was neither the will on Octavian’s part to send Antony troops nor an opportunity for the 10th Fretensis Legion to have gone from Italy to the East to join Antony. Consequently, so went the Mommsen theory, the 10th Gemina legion created by Augustus in 30 BC from Antony’s 10th must have been the direct descendant of Caesar’s 10th—not the 10th Fretensis.

  In support of Mommsen’s conclusion he, and others, have pointed to Italian gravestones from some time after 41 BC for men who had served in a “Legio X Equestris.” The “Equestris” in these inscriptions, some said, was a reference to the occasion in 58 BC when Caesar mounted men of his 10th Legion as his bodyguard—the Equestrians of the legionary’s quip. This, the argument goes, definitely made these men veterans of Caesar’s original 10th.

  Mommsen’s theory was said to be supported by an inscription on an altar at Rome, dating from after 2 BC, dedicated by centurions and other ranks of the “Legio X Gemina Equestris.” According to the Mommsen “school,” this inscription made the 10th Gemina Legion and the 10th Equestris Legion one and the same; accordingly, the 10th Gemina Legion was Caesar’s 10th Legion, and, conversely, the 10th Fretensis was not.

  This all makes sense until each skein of the argument is tested for strength; the argument then begins to fall apart. Keppie points out that the unique altar reference to “Legio X Gemina Equestris” makes this the only legion of the Civil War era to have been given two titles in the one inscription. [Kepp. CVSI, 2.2, n. 44] Secondly, this inscription is the only one ever found that links the 10th Gemina and the otherwise unknown 10th “Equestris” Legion. Thirdly, the date of this lone inscription at Rome is at least forty-two years after the death of Caesar, and possibly somewhat later, putting it at long remove from Caesar.

  Then there is the term Equestris itself. It was only assumed in modern times that the term applied to Caesar and the brief incident relating to men of his 10th on horseback. No classical author, including Caesar himself, ever wrote that men of the 10th Legion subsequently adopted the title Equestris.

  Next, we have the “10th Gemina Equestris” inscription at Rome. It is pure assumption that the “Equestris” reference relates back to Caesar’s legion. Keppie, in fact, remarks that the wording of this inscription is curious and may not yet have been correctly interpreted in every respect. [Kepp., CVSI, 2.2, n. 41]

  Why were these legionaries in Rome to dedicate the altar? There is no occasion on record in the late first century BC or early first century AD when the entire 10th Gemina Legion, which was based in Spain throughout this period, was in Rome. Apart from civil wars much later, or the rare occasion early in the reign of Tiberius when the 9th Hispana Legion passed by Rome on its way to southern Italy from Pannonia for a special posting in Africa, the legions did not go near Rome. In fact, there is no record of the 10th Gemina Legion visiting Rome at any time during its long history, even during civil wars.

  The “Equestris” inscription undoubtedly related to men on horseback. But it is possible that the soldiers of the “Legion X Gemina Equestris” referred to in the Rome inscription were a detachment from the 10th Gemina’s mounted squadron—its equites legionis—led by centurions of the legion, sent to represent their legion at the capital for a special ceremony, such as the dedication of the Alter of Peace or the funeral of Drusus Caesar.

  Then there is the origin of the title of the 10th Fretensis Legion. Professor Starr, a leading authority on the imperial Roman navy, has shown that Theodor Mommsen “was completely wrong,” and repeatedly so, with some of his conclusions about ancient Roman maritime matters. [Starr, III.2, III.3, V.1] Similarly, it may well be that Mommsen’s assertion that the word Fretensis meant the Strait of Messina is also completely wrong, for the following reasons.

  No ancient source, be it a book or inscription, puts a 10th Legion aboard Agrippa’s ships at the Battles of Mylae and Naucholus. Even if a 10th Legion did take part in those battles, why would it, and only it, assume the title Fretensis following the b
attle, when a number of other legions also took part yet did not assume a title referring to the battles? More importantly, the Mylae and Naucholus battles were not fought in a strait. They took place off the north coast of Sicily, some distance from the Strait of Messina.

  Where, then, could the Fretensis title have originated? What other strait could be connected with a 10th Legion? Caesar himself offers the answer—the Otranto Strait. In his memoir about the Civil War, Caesar tells how he and Mark Antony shipped twelve legions from Brundisium, today’s Brindisi, in southeastern Italy, to the Epirus region on the west coast of Greece to take on the senatorial army led by Pompey. To reach Epirus, those legions had to cross the Otranto Strait. Caesar identifies his 10th Legion as one of the legions he took to Epirus, via the Strait, and he writes of how the 10th subsequently formed up in its usual position on his extreme right at the 48 BC Battle of Pharsalus.

  But Caesar’s troops were transported by sail-powered merchant ships, while the coins of the 10th Fretensis show oar-powered warships. Caesar also offers an explanation for that, an explanation involving a battle in the Otranto Strait. He writes that, because of a lack of shipping, on January 4, 48 BC he took seven legions with him in a first wave to Epirus, leaving Antony and the five other legions allocated to the campaign back at Brundisium along with his cavalry. Those units had to wait for Caesar’s ships to return to collect them for a second landing. [Caes., CW, III, 5]

  Caesar says that the legionaries left with Antony comprised three of his veteran legions, which had taken part in the campaign in Spain, plus two newly recruited units, and auxiliary cavalry. [Ibid., 29] It might be assumed that Caesar took his best veteran legions with him in ferrying the first wave of across the strait, but two of those veteran legions, the 7th and 9th, had rebelled in Mark Antony’s camp at Placentia in central Italy some months before, demanding their overdue discharges, and Caesar had resorted to decimating the 9th to restore order. The 10th Legion, meanwhile, would soon be siding with the 7th and 9th when they again mutinied, and by the time of Caesar’s amphibious invasion of Greece it is quite possible that he left these three increasingly troublesome units in Brundisium and gave Antony the task of bringing them along in the next wave of the invasion.

  Further, we have a remark from Appian about the 10th Legion in 43 BC, when he noted that the 10th had been “led in the past by Antony.” [App., III, 83] There is no occasion on record prior to this when Antony could have led the 10th Legion. It must have been one of the three veteran legions under his command at Brundisium in 49–48 BC.

  To prevent Antony from convoying the remainder of Caesar’s troops across the strait, senatorial admiral Lucius Libo set sail from the west coast of Greece with a fleet of fifty warships laden with marines, infantry and archers, and sailed to Brundisium. Libo landed his troops on an island opposite Brundisium’s harbor, out in the Otranto Strait. Dislodging the Caesarian troops who were holding the island, Libo’s force captured several of Antony’s transport ships and caused panic in Antony’s ranks. No merchant ship subsequently dared to leave Brundisium’s harbor.

  Antony, boxed in, set out to recover the island and reopen the strait in order to reinforce Caesar, who was sending increasingly impatient letters ordering him to cross the strait without delay with his remaining troops. To do this, Antony fitted sixty ships’ boats with protective wicker coverings and screens, then put hand-picked legionaries aboard them. Antony had just two oar-powered warships at his disposal, a pair of triremes he had built at Brundisium, and on to these he also packed troops from one or more of his veteran legions. Now, Antony was ready to launch an attack on Libo.

  Antony’s two triremes came out of the harbor, entered the strait, and slowly approached the island, as if their recently recruited rowers were being exercised. The veteran legionaries on board were meanwhile keeping low. As Antony had hoped, Libo dispatched five large quadriremes from the island to attack the triremes. “When these came near our ships,” Caesar was to write, “our veterans began withdrawing toward the harbor.” [Caes., CW, III, 24] As Libo’s five warships closed on Antony’s triremes, Antony gave a signal and the sixty smaller vessels came rowing on to the scene from all directions.

  The veteran troops on board the triremes now emerged from hiding and launched their javelins at the vessels alongside, while the sixty smaller boats swarmed around the five large warships like angry bees. Antony’s veteran troops boarded the nearest quadrireme and captured it together with all its rowers and marines. The remaining quadriremes fled. It was, said Caesar, a “shameful rout” for Libo’s senatorial forces. [Ibid.] Following this defeat, Libo abandoned the island and his blockade of Brundisium, and withdrew to Greece. Through the fighting skill of the veteran Caesarian legions left with Antony, the Strait of Otranto was reopened, and Antony was able to transport his five legions and Caesar’s cavalry across the water to Greece. Had these reinforcements not reached Caesar, he would have faced disaster.

  Were the men of the 10th Legion at the forefront of this action on water? Was it men from the veteran 10th who were on Antony’s two triremes and led the way to victory that day, or who manned the sixty small boats, or both? Such a scenario is more than likely: a naval action in a strait, in which it can be postulated with a high degree of probability that Caesar’s 10th Legion took a leading part—unlike the Strait of Messina scenario—gives us a very likely reason for Caesar’s 10th Legion to take the honorific title of Fretensis. If we accept this scenario, which is much stronger than that involving the Strait of Messina, then the later 10th Fretensis Legion was without doubt Caesar’s original 10th Legion, and the 10th Gemina Legion was not.

  It is highly probable that Caesar raised this legion in Further Spain when he governed the province. Legions numbered 5 to 10 were traditionally stationed in Spain, which had been Roman territory ever since the Carthaginians were expelled in 206 BC. Roman praetors had been governing Baetica since 191 BC, and the recruitment of legionaries in Spain was certainly being undertaken by 50 BC, and probably somewhat earlier, with six legions permanently stationed in Spain under Pompey’s control while Caesar was campaigning in Gaul. Plutarch wrote that, as soon as Caesar arrived in Corduba in 61 BC, “he got together ten new cohorts of foot in addition to the twenty which were there before.” [Plut., Caesar] These ten cohorts of foot became the new 10th Legion. Furthermore, Appian, talking about the 10th Legion specifically in 43 BC, noted that it had been previously “recruited from non-Italians.” [App., III, 83]

  This 10th Legion then—raised in Spain, seeing service under Caesar, and appropriating the Fretensis title for itself after the Otranto Strait battle—was inherited by Octavian, who, after Mark Antony’s death in 30 BC, stationed the unit for a time in Macedonia. [AE 1936, 18] Within two decades it had been transferred to the East, where, in 4 BC, following the death of Herod the Great, king of Judea, the legion was cut off at Jerusalem by rioting Jews. It had to be rescued by a Roman force led south by the governor of Syria, Quintilius Varus, who was later to be made famous by the Teutoburg disaster.

  By the time that Germanicus Caesar arrived in Syria as Roman commander-in-chief for the East at the end of AD 17, the 10th Fretensis Legion was stationed at Cyrrhus in Syria, not far from Antioch. The legion took part in both Corbulo’s Armenian campaigns and, in an AD 62 battle at the Euphrates, helped throw back a Parthian attempt to invade Syria; but only after its by then undisciplined legionaries had been toughened up by several years of intense training by Corbulo.

  The legion provided four cohorts for Gallus’ failed AD 66 counter-offensive against the Jewish rebels in Judea, while the entire legion took part in Vespasian’s Judean operations the following year, before marching down the Jordan river and taking Jericho. In AD 70, the legion was one of the four that besieged and captured Jerusalem. Titus then stationed the unit at Jerusalem, as Judea’s “home” legion, where it built a base for itself amid the rubble. Between AD 71 and 73, the 10th Fretensis overran the last strongholds of Jewish resistance s
outh of Jerusalem, the fortresses of Machaerus and Masada.

  In the early stages of the AD 132–135 Second Jewish Revolt, the 10th Fretensis Legion suffered extremely high casualties, with the cohorts stationed at Jerusalem apparently being wiped out. Hadrian was therefore forced to transfer Egyptian sailors from the Misene Fleet to the legion, granting them citizenship, to swiftly bolster the 10th’s ranks. This discharge from the navy, granting of citizenship and transfer into the ranks of a legion was so unprecedented that on the discharge diplomas of the sailors involved it was recorded as being ex indulgentia divi Hadriani—“From the kindness of the Divine Hadrian.” [Starr, V, I]

  Some historians came to believe that the 10th Fretensis adopted the wild boar as its emblem after the First Jewish Revolt because the image of a pig was raised by Hadrian at Jerusalem, where the legion was based. But Eusebius, Bishop of Caesarea during the time of Constantine the Great, pointed out that Hadrian placed a marble idol of a domestic pig, not a boar, over Jerusalem’s Bethlehem gate, for the purpose of “signifying the subjugation of the Jews to Roman authority.” [Eus., Chron., HY 20] The Jewish faith, of course, both forbade the eating of the meat of the pig and the display at Jerusalem, their holy city, of graven images of any kind. So, this use of the pig emblem over the city gate was contrived by Hadrian as a double insult to the Jews. Consequently, coins of the 10th Fretensis which later showed a pig image—not the running boar used by other legions as an emblem—refer to the city of Jerusalem, not to the legion stationed there. When the 10th Fretensis later transferred to Arabia it was no longer associated with the pig symbol of Jerusalem.

  The legion was still based at Jerusalem by AD 230, but later that century it was transferred to the remote Red Sea town of Aela, today’s Elat in Israel, which came to be under the control of the Duke of Palestine in the fourth century. It was there that the legion was last heard of. [Not. Dig.] The 10th, Julius Caesar’s most famous legion, whose Fretensis title seems never to have been officially bestowed, had proved to be a solid performer throughout its career, and earned more than its share of glory.