Imperial Roman Armies 1st. Cohort

[tadamson]

The impression of tight consistent organisation is very common but there is surprisingly little evidence to support it.

Archaeology suggests that units could be of quite varied size, even down to how many men in the very basic units.
Literature identifies large numbers of men, and particularly officers on detached duty.
Pay records show widely differing numbers of men.

I was also much taken by Shepherd Frere's thoughts on how many auxiliary units seem to jump from place to place. He picked out I Hispania  who during Flavian period seem to have had multiple sites. He suggested that perhaps the base in Spain was a good recruiting point and that perhaps they had so many recruits that they could support multiple detachments (like the battalions raised by British regiments in WW1) and the single cohort might actually have several operational units 400-500 strong.

Tom..

[Patrick Waterson]

Intriguing.

We are however presumably justified (if trying to recreate an army for, say, wargaming purposes) in assuming that the basic patterns of quingenary cohort, millarian cohort and ten-cohort legion with a double-size first cohort were the starting-points from which the variations diverged.

Archaeological work that turns up camps from AD 69 will give the impression that legions were all over the place.  Just about every legion in Gaul and Illyria left their customary haunts and hied hot-foot to Italy with, or in support of, an imperial hopeful (even the one in Spain brought Galba).  Combine this with subsequent peregrinations to new/old stations and to fight Dacians et. al. and Flavian era legions and auxilia may well give the impression of being either unusually peripatic or fruitful and multiplying.

Would this explain the multiple sites for I Hispania?

[tadamson]

The answer is perhaps maybe :-)
Though the same thing happens in the Dacian Wars and again it's hard to reconcile forts (rather than marching camps) with what we know of the campaigns.
Also dating for camps, fortresses etc is really difficult.  :-(

[aligern]

fascinating indeed. One wonders whether we might have been imposing modern concepts of company battalion and brigade too readily upon the Romans because they looked like a regular army to 19th and 20th century historians, or rather a regular army as they understood it. It is an interesting idea. That a cohort of Spaniards could be many hundreds strong, just recruiting and dispatching men to sites which had received a cadre that formed the core of a unit.
It has always mildly puzzled me that , in the sixth century, we get numbers of troops , but they are not described as units  . For example 9000 infantry are sent with an apparently unrelated list of commanders. Why not say that nine or eighteen units , or whatever, are sent, why not list the units, or at the very least mention some by name. On earlier Roman tombstones we get chapter and verse on who the soldier and his unit are, but hat does not translate to the history writers. The nearest to doing that is Ammianus, an army officer, though we cannot even there tie names to numbers.
Presuming that Caesarian legions recruit to 5000 initially there must be a lot of wasteage and non replacement to get a legion down to 1000 or 2000, yet these much reduced units are used in action which must play hell with deployment . Lord knows what some of the cohort strengths might be down to and yet, when Caesar creates a detached force it is of X cohorts, but they could vary between 500 and say 60 men.( I know some of those problems affect modern battalions)
Roy