Romans in Cornwall

[Tim]

No it is not a new play rather a question raised by a article on the BBC.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cornwall-48841598

states 'Romans left few marks of their presence in (Cornwall) and it is thought fewer than 1,000 centurions were based there'. Unless the organisation of a Roman Legion was different in Cornwall to the rest of the empire, any number vaguely close to 1,000 centurions based in Cornwall means we really need to revise our understanding of the size of the Roman garrison in Britian. Is my understanding correct that this implies about 1,000 cohorts or naval equivalents based in Cornwall? If so that is amost every Legion in the Western Empire...

[Jim Webster]

No it is not a new play rather a question raised by a article on the BBC.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cornwall-48841598

states 'Romans left few marks of their presence in (Cornwall) and it is thought fewer than 1,000 centurions were based there'. Unless the organisation of a Roman Legion was different in Cornwall to the rest of the empire, any number vaguely close to 1,000 centurions based in Cornwall means we really need to revise our understanding of the size of the Roman garrison in Britian. Is my understanding correct that this implies about 1,000 cohorts or naval equivalents based in Cornwall? If so that is amost every Legion in the Western Empire...

it does leave you wondering what word they meant to use. Soldiers would make sense but isn't really something you could easily confuse with centurions, not even with predictive text

[RichT]

'Soldiers' - they've corrected it now.

To the non-nerd. centurions, legionaries (which is probably what they meant to say) etc are all the same. Romans, armour, helmets with red plumes. 

Compare: "The Cylon Centurion is a fully armored, metallic automaton that functions as the basic foot-soldier of the Cylon ground forces." (WP, Battlestar Galactica)

Wider implications - the writer of the BBC sentence is presumably just a journalist and the archaeologist - "'It looks as if there were about 500 soldiers based at Calstock, so this is an unprecedented opportunity,' said Dr Smart." probably did say soldiers. Are Livy, Diodorus etc more like the nameless journalist, or like Dr Smart, when it comes to military terminology? Discuss...

[Erpingham]

Are Livy, Diodorus etc more like the nameless journalist, or like Dr Smart, when it comes to military terminology? Discuss...

Livy, Diodorus & co were probably more expert in their subject than a newsroom hack at BBC South West. 

[Patrick Waterson]

Livy, Diodorus & co were probably more expert in their subject than a newsroom hack at BBC South West. 

If nothing else, they certainly studied it for longer and were more familiar with the source material.

[Mark G]

Let's not be too hard on the journalist.
I read a review of Catch 22 last month that went on about Gallipoli because that was in Italy where the book was set.

It's the sub editor who missed it who should be looked at. 

[RichT]

All true and I wouldn't want to be hard on the journalist - the number of people in the general population who know the difference between a legionary and a centurion is probably extremely small. Although that said, GIYF... I bet not many people know the difference between a captain and a major either and that's the contemporary army. I just wondered (out loud) how much more familiar the Roman army was to Roman civilians than the British army (say) is to British civilians. More, probably much more, but perhaps not vastly more?

[Erpingham]

All true and I wouldn't want to be hard on the journalist - the number of people in the general population who know the difference between a legionary and a centurion is probably extremely small.

But then most people aren't paid to accurately report events to the public at large.  I suspect carelessness is the culprit, though.  BBC reports are bashed out fast and then exist in a fluid state as they are updated, which frequently leaves grammatical errors, repetition and references to things no longer in the article (I perhaps spend more time on the BBC website than I should )

On the wider question of knowledge, I would suggest it depended who you were.  A discharged veteran probably had a very good idea how the army worked, a farmer or a mule wrangler probably less.  In the absence of published media, folks relied on social media (what people were saying in the forum), which was perhaps not the most technical of sources.

The situation for the professional writers and their wealthy educated clientele was probably different again.  They had access to published works and to social networks made up of those who ran things and had a good idea how they worked.

[aligern]

Its a very interesting question Richard. How much did Romans of differing grades and geographies know about a whole variety of subjects? One is reminded of the itineraries that served for maps, if you were located along a main artery of Empire then quite a lot of news, coin issues, official bulletins and gossip must have flowed, but if you were off on a limb, then it was very likely that not much information flowed.

Roy

[RichT]

I think it's interesting too! We assume that someone who lived in the ancient world knew a lot about the ancient world, but that ain't necessarily so (or rather, their knowledge would be within certain bounds, deep but not necessarily wide).

On military matters specifically I was pondering Polybius who slags off his fellow historians for being ignorant (in his view) of Inherent Military Probability - even those like Callisthenes who knew all the right people (of course, Polybius may be talking out of his rear end too in some cases). Even well read and cultured types might not have known much about military realities in practice. Though this is slightly different from knowing about technicalities (ranks, names etc) - someone well read (like Livy) would certainly be exposed to good info on that aspect of things.

[Patrick Waterson]

I think there was a fairly good understanding of military organisation and practice among Greek writers of the pre-Roman period, not least because they on occasion personally participated in it.  I should perhaps revise that to say they understood the military organisation and practice of their own time and culture.  Polybius, for example (as Richard indicates), failed to comprehend how Alexandrian phalanxes were deployed or cavalry used.  Livy was even more questionable about Macedonian military practice, but reasonably au fait with Roman.  The well-travelled Herodotus was well able to describe Persian military equipment, hint at organisation and give only the barest outline of tactics.

Roman pre-empire writers would also have had a good understanding of their own military system, not least because by the time they set writing implement to receiving medium they would have a certain amount of service under their own belt or close association with men who had served.  Again, the challenge would come when dealing with the military systems of the past, but they could at least draw upon material from those who had served during that past period.

Dionysius of Halicarnassus is an interesting case, because he is a non-solider but a very thorough scholar.  As a result, he has amassed much detail on weaponry and organisation, but tactics are not his forte and he arguably gets his interpretation or periphrasis of at least one item of weaponry embarrassingly wrong.  Perhaps fortunately, many of our principal sources are soldiers (Arrian, Caesar) or serious scholars (Dionysius, Plutarch) and hence would know relevant ranks and units whether or not they fully understood the military system.

And this is probably why Roman historians were principally generals and scholars, while Greek historians appear to have been drawn from a wider range of backgrounds and occupations.  It is incidentally noticeable how the quality of Roman sources drops off once senators cease to be generals.