Roman Soldier Operations Manual: Daily Life • Fighting Tactics • Weapons • Equipment • Kit

This book is very well laid out and extremely well illustrated with some excellent images though these are mainly of modern re-enactors or painted reconstructions, apart from ancient sculptures and inscriptions. It's printed in good quality paper and easy to use. There are so many books on Roman soldiers and Roman military equipment that it's hard to stick out and in this regard it looks good.The text is thematic, readable and lively, and replete with Latin terminology but, importantly, it has very few references. This means there is no way of following up the author's claims - very little of what he says is substantiated. There is a bibliography but as we will see, it's a moot point where he actually used any of them. This won't matter for many readers but for those who want to look further it's a bit of a dead end. He's a bit light on dates too which means he gives a lot of information from various different times over several centuries. That's unavoidable but it does need to be made clear when a piece of information belongs to.And there's the rub. The author isn't an expert in the subject and it sometimes shows - glaringly. On p. 65 is an extended caption covering Roman coinage. Almost every statement is wrong, and had the book been even glanced at by an expert on the author's behalf this could easily have been avoided. These are the mistakes: Diocletian did not introduce the gold solidus coin in 301 - it was introduced by Constantine I in 310; the silver denarius was not introduced in 267 BC, but in c. 212-11 BC during the Second Punic War; the silver denarius was only equal to 10 bronze asses until 141 BC when it was retariffed at 16 asses which it retained throughout the main period discussed in the book, whereas he says it was worth 10 asses throughout; the sestertius was originally worth 2.5 asses (hence the literal meaning of its name) but by the time of the emperors it was worth 4 asses, thereby retaining its original equivalence to 1/4 of a denarius, whereas he says it was worth 2.5 throughout. A lot of this detail isn't going to be of great interest to most readers but if you're going to include it, it's best to try and get most of it right - not all of it wrong.It's actually pretty remarkable to see such a pig's ear of a passage in any book. Every author makes mistakes and production errors create more, so every book has imperfections. But this passage demonstrates that the author simply doesn't know what he's talking about. The trouble is it immediately means to this reader at least that nothing in the book can automatically be trusted. There were certainly one or two passages that I recognized instantly as having been derived from Wikipedia. This isn't to say that the book isn't fundamentally okay, but clearly that cannot be taken for granted. You certainly cannot assume what you are reading is correct.On p. 79 the author lists rank names and roles, and other positions. This includes frumentarius, which he describes as someone 'in charge of food acquisition/supply'. Yes, that's true - originally. Such men, working the markets in search of supplies, got to hear about all sorts of information. They evolved into imperial military spies. Hadrian kept them on his staff to spy on his friends and family and several examples are attested in Rome to where they had been detached from their legions. The author seems completely unaware of this.He also seems confused in his main list of ranks by the position of praefectus which he calls 'third in command of the legion'; yes, if he means the praefectus castrorum ('prefect of the camp', a man promoted from the centurionate) but he makes no mention of this post, going on immediately to refer to the praefectus equitarius, 'commander of a cavalry unit', which is not a legionary position but an auxiliary one (and I've never heard an auxiliary cavalry prefect called that anyway - the word equitarius is not in the definitive Lewis and Short Latin dictionary - equitiarius is, but that's an inspector of a stud). His definition of a centurion is jumbled and seems to be made up of definitions of a centurion and a cavalry decurion which he has mixed up.The internet seems to have been his source - the main list here is virtually identical to the one on a wikivisually web page, including the mysterious equitarius (which you will struggle to find anywhere else). This list doesn't include frumentarius - I don't know where he got that definition from - but ironically if he'd searched frumentarius on wikivisually he would in fact have discovered that such men acted as imperial spies.Another example is on p. 72 where he says Theodosius I outlawed paganism 'in AD3'. I think he means this to represent 'in the third century, but in fact Theodosius made that order in the early 390s (he reigned 379-95) in the late 4th century.On p. 37 is something even more mysterious. He itemises the totals of the auxiliaries in c. 130 at 223,728 as estimated by Paul Holder. I'm not going to go into all the details here, but this is not the figure Holder gives in his paper (2003, p. 120) which is 217,624 (but see below). Forty also provides different subtotals to Holder, and without explanation. This puzzled me because not a single figure given by Forty appears in Holder's paper. The answer came when I found Forty had clearly taken the figures from a Wikipedia page on the Roman auxilia. The Wikpedia page cites the Holder paper. The Wikipedia sub-totals of unit numbers have been added up from some of Holder's running figures. They are very hard to tie up and have some discrepancies (for example, Wikipedia and Forty specify 381 auxiliary units but Holder's own summary only seems to give 367 (the total of infantry cohorts with or without a cavalry contingent at 279, and 88 cavalry alae).Either way Holder derived his figure of 217,624 men (not including centurions and decurions) from his count of the known auxiliary units in 130. Even Holder didn't get it right. His subtotals for the manpower of the various types of unit (143,200 infantry and 74,624 cavalry) actually add up to 217,824 but that's just a typo of his. You will look for the 223,728 given by Forty and Wikpedia in vain.The order of the text is sometimes incongruous. For example, the Varian disaster of AD 9 in the Teutoburg Forest during the reign of Augustus appears in a box section on p. 33, a part of the book concerned with the army of the Second Punic War over two hundred years earlier.The index is a bit of a shambles. Many topics, places or persons are omitted. The treatment is inconsistent. The highly important Varian disaster on p. 33 is unmentioned in the index, as is another reference to the battle and picture of a tombstone of a centurion killed there on p. 76. Yet Sol Invictus, pictured once on p. 70, gets an entry.Overall, this is a nice book to look at or browse. It has some strengths but a lack of care in getting it all checked through means that you cannot assume it is reliable, which is a shame. I found all this within two days of acquiring it, which says a lot. Basically it's a picture book. If you want serious detail and reliable sources look elsewhere.

Great

Excellent information in words and pictures, for modellers.