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Many considered Lieutenant General Gnaeus Domitius Corbulo one of Rome’s finest soldiers since Caesar. He was certainly the toughest. When he arrived in Germany in 47 B.C. to take command of Rome’s Army of the Lower Rhine, he summarily executed a legionary who was digging a trench without wearing his sword belt. After centurions read aloud to their men the regulation requiring troops to be armed at all times while on duty, a soldier was found digging a fortification wearing his weapon belt and nothing else. Corbulo had no sense of humor—the naked legionary was also put to death, for insubordination.
General Corbulo arrived in the East in A.D. 54 to take up an assignment as Governor of Galatia and Cappadocia, but with a secret brief from the new emperor Nero and his chief ministers Seneca and Burrus to return Armenia to the Roman fold after the Parthians had installed their own king in the mountainous country. Tacitus describes Corbulo as “an old and wary general” at this juncture. It’s likely he was promoted to major general prior to A.D. 21, making him in his sixties by the time he took up his eastern appointment.
Some modern historians have postulated that a Domitius Corbulo mentioned by Tacitus in about A.D. 21 may have been General Corbulo’s father. This Corbulo, a “former praetor,” was affronted by a young noble who had not given place to him at a gladiatorial show, and demanded and received an official apology. Tacitus says this Corbulo also objected to the state of Italy’s roads, which he blamed on the dishonesty of contractors and the negligence of officials, and went on to personally take charge of road maintenance. The roads of Italy were soon no longer in ruin, but the determined Corbulo managed to ruin numerous Italians previously involved in the road business by attacking their property and credit through a series of convictions and confiscations. So if he was Corbulo’s father, it seems his son inherited many of his traits, but it’s just as likely this was none other than the pragmatic general himself.
In any case, General Corbulo arrived in the East with a reputation for ruthless efficiency in both civil and military administration. Determined to keep his preparations low-key, he quietly recruited new auxiliary units in the region. Some were destined to support Corbulo’s legionary army; others were stationed at a series of border forts, with orders not to provoke trouble in Armenia. And Corbulo chose two legions currently with the Syria command to spearhead his Armenian project—the 6th Victrix and the 10th.
That both were Spanish legions was probably no coincidence. As we know from Josephus, the reputation gained by Julius Caesar’s Spanish legionaries had lingered long after their exploits had seen them labeled Rome’s best troops in the 1st century B.C. But General Corbulo was in for a shock. He obviously chose the legions before he saw them.
What Corbulo found when he arrived at the base of the 10th Legion at Cyrrhus were lame fifty-five-year-old second-enlistment men lazing around barrack rooms. The younger thirty-five-year-olds were busy in town running businesses and standing over the locals. “Sleek moneymaking traders,” Tacitus calls them, perhaps echoing Corbulo’s own remarks. The disease of indiscipline introduced by Piso all those years before had become an epidemic facilitated by decades of inactivity. “Demoralized by a long peace” is how Tacitus describes the legionaries Corbulo discovered in Syria.
Many soldiers of the 10th Legion had sold their helmets and shields. There were second-enlistment men of the 10th who in all their time with the legion had never dug a trench or thrown up the wall of a marching camp, who had never done picket duty or stood guard in the lonely hours of the night. Corbulo soon fixed that.
General Corbulo dismissed the sick and the lame, and the remaining men of the legion were very quickly pulled back into line. Transferring the two legions up from Syria to his base of operations in Cappadocia, the general implemented a training regimen that would have seen his flabby legionaries doing twenty-five-mile-route marches day after day, digging entrenchments, undergoing hour after hour of weapons drill. When the winter arrived he marched the men of the 10th and the 6th Victrix up into the mountains of Cappadocia and made them camp out in their flimsy tents until the spring, on ground covered with ice and swept by bitter winds. It was so cold that some men suffered from frostbite. Several froze to death on night guard. Deserters, when caught, were executed immediately, and not given a second or a third chance, as in the past. The desertion rate within Corbulo’s units quickly plummeted.
But Corbulo endured the same hardships he imposed on his men. He camped with them through the snow and the blizzards. He marched on foot and bareheaded at the head of the column wherever he took them. He would have eaten what they ate, and presumably if they didn’t eat at all because of supply problems, then neither did he. Tacitus says that throughout this period Corbulo had praise for the brave, comfort for the feeble, and was a good example to everyone. And as the legionaries toughened up, they acquired a grudging admiration for their old son-of-a-bitch general.
Corbulo spent four years building the two legions into a crack fighting force, until, in the spring of A.D. 58, he launched his Armenian offensive. His unheralded drive from Cappadocia east into Armenia involved two forces in a classic pincer movement. Taking the enemy completely by surprise, Corbulo led one force made up of the 10th Legion and auxiliary and allied support that swept through the middle of the country and went against the major Parthian fortress at Volandum, which is believed to have been to the southwest of Artaxata and just north of Mount Ararat.
His deputy, Brigadier General Cornelius Flaccus, took the second force against several lesser forts farther south. His battle group was made up of his own 6th Victrix Legion and six cohorts of the 3rd Augusta Legion under Camp Prefect, or Major, Insteius Capito, who had come up from their bases in Judea—where they’d left their remaining four cohorts on garrison duty. Corbulo had personally trained the tough little Syrian legionaries of the 3rd Augusta when they’d been stationed with him on the Rhine a decade earlier, and he was well aware of the ferocious capabilities of these worshipers of the Syrian sun god Baal—or Elagabalus, as the Romans were to call him. General Flaccus’s troops proceeded to overrun one enemy fortress after another—three on a single memorable day.
Volandum looked to be a tougher nut to crack. Urging his men to win themselves both glory and spoils, General Corbulo divided the 10th Legion into four divisions for the Volandum assault. He had undertaken a careful engineering survey of the defenses, and now he personally led one group in an attack beneath a testudo of shields, against a section of the outer wall considered the most vulnerable to undermining. While this group labored at the base of the wall, two more went against other parts of the rampart with scaling ladders. The fourth group covered the other three with dense artillery fire from prepared artillery mounds.
The assault lasted eight hours. By the time they had finished, the men of the 10th had stripped the walls of their defenders, had overthrown the fortress’s gates, and had scaled its fortified bastions and taken them one after another. The 10th Legion massacred the adult defenders of Volandum to a man. All the nonmilitary survivors were auctioned off to the traders following the army. During the attack, Corbulo’s units had suffered a few wounded, but not a single fatality. Now the men of the 10th were allowed to plunder Volandum to their hearts’ content.
The two assault groups then linked up to the south of the Armenian capital, Artaxata, a walled city not far from Lake Sevan that sat in a formidable position beside the Avaxes River, the modern Aras River. Archaeologists suggest that Artaxata was actually on an island in the middle of the river, but this is not mentioned by Tacitus, who indicates only that it was reached by just a single bridge. The last Roman general to venture near Artaxata had been Germanicus, forty years before.
Crossing the Aras well downstream, Corbulo led his task force on Artaxata from the southeast. As they advanced along the Aras valley floor in battle order, with elements of the 10th Legion in the center, the 3rd Augusta cohorts on the right flank and the 6th Victrix on the left, the Romans were shadowed by tens of thousands of mounted Parthian archers led by Tiridates, the Parthian prince who had taken the Armenian throne.
At any moment the Romans expected the fearsome Parthians to attack. Many in the 10th would have remembered how General Crassus and his legions had perished at the hands of mounted Parthians like these at Carrhae back in 53 B.C., and they would have shuddered at the thought that history might be about to repeat itself. But apart from a Roman cavalry lieutenant on the right wing who ventured too close to the archers and was drilled with arrows, there was no blood spilled this day. As night fell, the enemy melted away. The Parthians, daunted by the reputation of General Corbulo and his by now crack legions, didn’t have the stomach to take them on.
Artaxata fell without a fight. The city opened its gates to Corbulo, just as it had to Germanicus four decades before. But knowing he could be cut off and destroyed here if he tried to hold the 250-year-old Armenian capital, the pragmatic Corbulo gave the residents a few hours to collect their valuables and flee, then burned the city to the ground. Having decided that the more accessible southwestern city of Tigranocerta would make a better capital, he led the army down through central Armenia toward it.
The men of the 10th had only one complaint as they tramped through Armenia—the task force ran out of grain, and the troops were forced to eat meat. There is an old joke, put into writing by Juvenal, that Romans could be kept happy on a diet of bread and circuses, and it was true. Roman legionaries loved their daily bread.
Arriving at Tigranocerta on the Nicephorius River, General Corbulo installed a king of Rome’s choice on the Armenian throne, Tigranes, a Cappadocian prince, making the substantial 120-year-old city his capital. For the next four years, a cohort from the 10th Legion and one from the 6th Victrix were stationed at Tigranocerta as bodyguard to the king, supported by fifteen hundred auxiliaries.
In A.D. 62 the Parthians invaded Armenia and laid siege to Tigranocerta. In response, Corbulo, who was now given the wide-ranging powers of a modern field marshal by Nero, promptly sent a relief force across the border. Led by Brigadier General Verulanus Severus, latest commander of the 6th Victrix, the force was made up of the balance of the cohorts of the 6th and the 10th. The Parthians rapidly withdrew from Tigranocerta, but their king, Vologases, began to make preparations to invade Syria.
To defend Syria, the field marshal dug in along the Euphrates River. Retaining his best units, the 10th and the 6th Victrix, he once more brought six cohorts of the reliable 3rd Augusta Legion up from their station in Judea to add to his force. At the same time, to help Corbulo, Lieutenant General Caesennius Paetus was sent out to the East by the Palatium, Rome’s combined White House and Pentagon. General Paetus, a man apparently afflicted with both a squint and a massive ego, subsequently led the 4th Macedonica and 12th Legions into Armenia against the Parthians.
The Parthians avoided a full-scale battle and withdrew ahead of this advance, unaware that neither of these units had benefited from Field Marshal Corbulo’s personal training, unlike the 10th, the 6th Victrix, and the 3rd Augusta.
General Paetus had boasted that he would show Corbulo how to deal with the Parthians, but the omens for his operation were not good from the start—as he was crossing a bridge over the Euphrates into Armenia, the horse carrying his lieutenant general’s standard bolted and galloped to the rear.
While Paetus overran several outposts, the main Parthian forces kept a wary distance for months, and with the weather deteriorating, the inept Paetus made camp for the winter at Rhandeia in northwestern Armenia beside the Arsanias River, the modern Murat River. He let many of his troops go on leave, sending a message to the emperor at Rome declaring that he had as good as won the war against the Parthians.
Meanwhile, King Vologases was ready for his invasion of Syria; he led his Parthian army in a full-scale assault against Field Marshal Corbulo on the Euphrates. The 10th and the men of the other two legions dug in along the eastern bank of the river, the 3rd Augusta and the 6th Victrix, fought off one desperate attack after another. To increase his firepower, Corbulo threw a wooden bridge across the river, and on the bridge he built towers, and on the towers he installed heavy artillery, which raked the Parthian cavalry whenever they came near. In the end, unable to penetrate the defenses of the 10th and its fellow elite legions, the Parthians gave up on their assault along the Euphrates, and turned north against General Paetus at Rhandeia. They swiftly surprised and surrounded his army at their camp on the Murat.
With his quickly demoralized troops putting up a halfhearted defense from their camp walls, Paetus sent desperate pleas to Corbulo for help, and the field marshal carefully prepared a relief force inclusive of men of the 10th and a column of camels from the Dromedary Wing carrying tons of grain—he was determined that his men wouldn’t run out of bread the way they had four years before. Only when he was satisfied that all was in readiness did he march up from Syria and through Commagene and Cappadocia. Just as Corbulo was about to cross the Euphrates into Armenia, he met Paetus coming the other way, withdrawing with his disheveled army. To escape with his life, Paetus had agreed to humiliating peace terms with the Parthians—he’d made his legionaries build the enemy a bridge across the Murat, and he’d left his fortress at Rhandeia intact for them, inclusive of his artillery, heavy equipment, and baggage train. His men were forced to leave behind all personal possessions apart from what they could carry on their backs.
As Paetus returned to Rome in temporary disgrace—he would be forgiven by Nero and given important posts by a later administration—Field Marshal Corbulo prepared a new Armenian offensive. The Palatium sent him reinforcements, the 15th Legion from the Balkans, along with its attached auxiliary light infantry and cavalry. He also brought his reserve unit, the 5th Legion, down from Pontus. Leaving the dependable 10th dug in along the Euphrates defense line to cover his rear, Corbulo swept into Armenia early in A.D. 63 with the 3rd Augusta, 5th, 6th Victrix, and 15th Legions and sent the Parthian army scampering out of the country, as much by his fearsome reputation as any shedding of blood. He then settled the Armenian question by putting on the throne Tiridates, a Parthian prince who swore fealty to Nero, emperor of Rome.
Following this campaign, the 10th returned to base in Syria and prepared for its next discharge and reenlistment in the new year. This would be the legion’s eighth enlistment since Caesar raised the legion in 61 B.C. Already the recruiting officers, theconquisitors, were out looking for recruits in the legion’s home province if Baetica, Farther Spain, and a contingent of 10th Legion centurions would have now set off from Syria to take charge of the product of their efforts.
Precisely how the legion’s latest enlistment day played out is not recorded, but all the evidence points to something very much like the following. On a fall day at the beginning of December A.D. 63, in the ninth year of the reign of Emperor Nero, who would turn just twenty-six in several weeks’ time, thousands of young men gathered on the sands of the amphitheater at Córdoba, capital of the province of Baetica. To ensure that none of the youngsters tried to go home, fully armed auxiliary infantrymen from the military base outside the city would probably have circled the perimeter of the amphitheater, which they normally used for their training drills, when gladiatorial contests weren’t taking place there for the pleasure of the local populace.
Roman citizens all, the youngest men in the arena had just turned twenty. City boys, country boys, the sons of blacksmiths, shopkeepers, farmers, and fishermen. Their heads would have been full of tales they’d heard about bloody battles and brutal legion discipline, tales of fabulous adventures told by retired legion veterans that invariably involved wine, women, plunder, and crushing victories over barbarian hordes. Some were volunteers—the out-of-work, even a few petty criminals. Most were draftees. All were about to enroll in the Roman army’s 10th Legion.
They would sign a binding contract with the state to serve for an enlistment period of twenty years, during which time they were not permitted to marry—although many would form relationships with female camp followers and father children out of wedlock in years to come. In return, they could expect to be paid nine hundred sesterces a year—increased to twelve hundred sesterces a year by the emperor Domitian twenty years later—plus bonuses and booty, and the legion would feed, clothe, and house them. On retirement, they were guaranteed a discharge bonus of twelve thousand sesterces plus a small grant of land, although the location of that land would be at the discretion of the government. After their retirement, they would also be required to make themselves available in times of emergency for service in the Evocati, a militia made up of retired legion veterans. Once they signed that contract, as a legionary they would no longer be subject to civil law. But they would have to follow rigid legion regulations and obey their officers’ commands without question, on pain of death. And they would have to swear allegiance to the emperor, a vow they would renew every January 1, and put their lives on the line for him time and time again.
To reach this stage, the recruits would have passed physical inspections by the recruiting officers, who sent home the lame, the obese, the mentally deficient. Ninety years earlier, Augustus had set the basic requirements for Rome’s legion recruits before the Senate. According to Cassius Dio, they had to be “the most active men in the population, those who are in their physical prime.”
Members of a party of 10th Legion centurions recently arrived from Syria would have moved among the recruits. They would have separated several score of them from the rest, men who professed riding skills—they would go to the legion’s own small cavalry unit. The centurions then quickly, roughly sorted the rest into groups of eight. No discussion, no argument, lining them up with a gap of perhaps three feet between each man. Each group of eight was a contubernium, a squad. Unless he perished or was promoted, a man would spend the next twenty years in this squad. Its members would share a tent and sleep together, cook together, eat together, relieve themselves together, train together, march together, fight together, and, if need be, die together.
In 1963 Lieutenant General Sir Brian Horrocks, a British corps commander during World War II, remarked that in an average group of ten fighting men two will be leaders, seven will be followers, and one just doesn’t want to be there. It’s not unlikely that a similar generalization applied to the men of a Roman legion contubernium.
Having created their squads there on the sand at Córdoba, the centurions would have lined up ten squads, one after the other. This was a century. Then another ten squads. The two centuries formed a maniple, 160 men strong, the equivalent of the modern company. Then they created another maniple, and another, leaving places in each century for a centurion and his two deputies, an optio, or sergeant major, and a tesserarius, an orderly sergeant. Together, the three maniples created a cohort, or battalion, of 480 men.
The centurions would have made up as many cohorts as required, as many as seven or eight. The local recruiting officers would have received orders from the Palatium to enroll a specific number of recruits to fill the gaps in the legion’s ranks left by illness and battle casualties and by the men who would soon retire from the legion after serving out their twenty-year enlistments. Some veterans of the 10th would have already volunteered for a second enlistment, probably about 1,500 of them, and those men would go into the legion’s senior cohorts after the retirees departed. So about 4,000 new legionaries would have been enrolled here at Córdoba to fill the vacancies and meet the legion’s requirement of a total of 5,345 enlisted men and NCOs. With its 72 officers, the full-strength legion would number 5,417 men.
Once the cohorts had been formed, a senior centurion of the 10th would have stepped up onto the rostra in front of his new Spanish tiros, as recruits were called. The centurion may not himself have been Spanish; by this time centurions transferred from one legion to another as they went up the promotional ladder, changing legions as much as a dozen times in their careers. Probably in his forties, he would have been garbed in dress uniform—blood red legionary tunic; shinguards; shining segmented metal armor that covered his chest, shoulders, and back; a helmet complete with a transverse crest of eagle feathers that signified his rank; and with his bravery decorations on display across his chest. On his right hip he would have worn a dagger, on his left a sword, both in scabbards richly decorated with gold and jet inlay. Apart from the segmented armor, which had replaced the cuirass of iron mail ringlets worn by his first-century B.C. predecessors, he would have looked little different from Centurion Gaius Crastinus of the first enlistment of the 10th Legion.
The centurion would have addressed the silent, apprehensive recruits. He would have told them that they were joining Rome’s most famous legion, Julius Caesar’s “old faithfuls,” and that they had a lot to live up to, reeling off the 10th Legion’s long list of battle honors since the day in 61 B.C. when it had been personally founded by Caesar. The centurion would have told them about the legions’ “buddy system,” whose existence we know of from Tacitus. The Roman army encouraged every legionary to team up with a comrade from his squad, a comrade who would literally stand at his back when the fighting got tough, who would witness his will, and who would bury him if necessary when the time came. It’s easy to imagine that the day would come when these rookies would need their legion buddy like a baby needs its mother.
Before long, the centurions of the 10th were leading their new recruits out of Córdoba. Unless taking part in an amphibious assault of the type for which Caesar had been famed, the legions invariably traveled by foot wherever they had to go. Over the next several weeks, the 10th Legion’s tirostramped all the way across Spain, through France, northern Italy, the Balkans, Greece, and Turkey to reach the unit’s station in Syria, using the straight, paved Roman highways built primarily to permit the rapid transit of the legions, and commandeering supplies en route in the name of the emperor.
Early in A.D. 64, the 10th Legion underwent its latest discharge and reenlistment at Cyrrhus. The youngsters who’d marched all the way from Spain paraded at Cyrrhus with the men of the last enlistment who were staying on. Now the recruits were in red woolen tunics and shining armored cuirasses. Not a single toga was to be seen—it was a formal, ceremonial garment akin to our tuxedo today and rarely worn. The tunic was the everyday garb of Romans of all walks of life, and was made of two pieces of cloth sewed together, with openings for the head and arms, and short sleeves. It fell to just above the knees at the front and a little lower at the back, with the military tunic being a fraction shorter than that worn by civilians. In cold weather it was not unusual for several tunics to be worn on top of each other. Augustus habitually wore up to four tunics at a time in winter months.
Just as a Scotsman is asked if he wears anything beneath his kilt, so the question is still asked by scholars about what the legionary wore beneath his tunic. There is no documentary evidence, but most Romans are believed to have worn a loincloth, although it is suggested that climate and ethnic background could have meant that at least some legionaries, such as those based in the East, went without undergarments in the heat of summer.
No matter what the weather, and irrespective of the fact that auxiliaries serving in the Roman army, both cavalry and infantry, wore trousers of some sort, legionaries didn’t begin wearing full-length trousers until the fourth century. Trousers were considered foreign and vulgar by educated Romans. Comfort did begin to win out over fashion toward the end of the first century, when legionaries commenced the habit of wearing short breeches under their tunics.
Over the tunic the soldier of A.D. 63 wore an armored cuirass of segmented metal plates that covered chest, shoulders, and back and wasn’t unlike today’s bulletproof vest. Heavy but effective, the lorica segmentata, introduced in about A.D. 30, relegated the mail-covered leather jacket of Caesar’s day to use by auxiliary units only over time.
Each man wore a helmet, kept in place by a leather strap that tied under the chin. With a protruding neckguard, it looked a little like a modern fireman’s helmet, except that it had the added protection of flexible cheek flaps. The helmet was adorned with a removable parade plume of yellow horsehair—2nd-century Roman governor, general, and author Arrian describes the plumes worn by his troops as yellow, and archaeological evidence suggests yellow plumes were universal. Not worn in battle since early in the first century, the plume would be kept with the rest of the soldier’s kit when the legion was on active duty.
At the throats of the new recruits would have been tied the legionary neck scarf, so fashionable that auxiliaries wore them as well, even though they didn’t have to protect their necks from the chafing effects of heavy armor. And on their feet, hobnailed army sandals, the caligulae from which the emperor Caligula’s nickname derived when he was a child living with his parents, Germanicus and Agrippina, among the troops on the Rhine. His actual name was Gaius.
On his right hip each man wore a double-edged, sharp-pointed twenty-inch mild steel sword, the gladius. In 150 B.C. Polybius called the Roman legionary’s sword the “Spanish sword.” Spanish swordmakers were reputedly the best in the Roman world. Even if by the time of the A.D. 63 recruitment legionary swords were sometimes produced in other parts of the empire to the same design, there is no doubt that a legion recruited in Spain would have sourced its sidearms there. The swords of most of the Roman soldier’s adversaries had rounded ends, making them effective in just the slashing mode. The legionary’s sword, the Spanish sword with its sharp point, could be used to both jab and slash, putting the legionary at a distinct advantage in the confines of close-quarters combat.
On the new legionary’s left hip hung a dagger—the arrangement of a legionary’s sword and dagger were opposite to that of his centurions. To complete his outfit, every man also carried heavy arms—a javelin in his right hand and a rectangular shield in his left bearing the proud bull emblem of the 10th Legion, made to an effective design that hadn’t changed in hundreds of years.
Almost certainly, Field Marshal Corbulo would have come up from Antioch for the swearing in of the 10th’s new enlistment. He would have welcomed the new recruits with an earthy speech, and, as tradition required, presented the standard-bearers of the maniples and cohorts with their new standards. Men leaving the legion took their old standards with them, and would march behind them in their Evocati units. Only the legion’s eagle standard remained; it never left the legion. The field marshal would then have led the new men in swearing the oath of allegiance to emperor, legion, and officers.
The retiring veterans of the legion were probably already on their way to their new homes. As it happened, the 10th Legion was the only one of Rome’s now twenty-five legions that underwent its discharge this particular year, and the Palatium apparently decided it wanted to settle more veterans along the Rhine in A.D. 64, almost certainly in the wake of the recent activities of hostile German tribes east of the Rhine. So the men of the 10th who retired that year were given land on the west bank of the Rhine, and had to travel all the way to Germany to take up their grants.
We know this because, five years later, as a new civil war engulfed the empire in the wake of the demise of the emperor Nero, the reliable Tacitus describes retired veterans of the 10th Legion marching from the Rhine in their Evocati militia cohorts as part of an army of the aspiring emperor Vitellius, led by General Aulus Caecina. They were combined with other Evocati militiamen of the 4th Macedonica and 16th Legions who were also living along the Rhine in their retirement, and veterans of three of the four legions based in Britain. Those 10th Legion veterans defeated the army of the emperor Otho in the Battle of Bedriacum at the town also known as Betriacum near Cremona in northern Italy in A.D. 69, and five months later were defeated themselves at the Battle of Cremona by troops loyal to General Vespasian.
The surviving 10th Legion vets from Vitellius’s defeated army would have been pardoned and permitted to go home to their farms along the Rhine after the war, in A.D. 70. But before these events took place, their comrades still serving with the 10th Legion had a problem of their own to contend with in the Middle East, one of the bloodiest campaigns in the legion’s history to date: the Jewish Revolt.