Military history

APPENDIX E

THE TITLE “FRETENSIS”

It has been suggested that the 10th Legion carried the title “Fretensis” while serving in Judea. No classical author confirms this. The 10th Legion, famous in its heyday, is the most referred-to legion in all the classical histories, yet never once does the meticulous first-century historian Tacitus or any other writer of the classical period give the legion a title of any kind. Tacitus in particular is cited because he made a habit of giving both the titles and the numbers of legions, unlike some classical writers. And when Cassius Dio listed all the legions in existence in his day, in about A.D. 233, he made a point of giving the official titles, present and past, of every legion. Although the 10th Gemina, a different legion, is mentioned, no title is ascribed to the 10th.

This does not necessarily mean that the 10th did not perhaps carry the name Fretensis as a sort of unofficial nickname, used by its own men but not by officialdom. Official or unofficial, does the Fretensis title stand up to examination?

The word Fretensis is said to come from fretum Siciliense and means “of the Straits of Sicily”—the modern Strait of Messina. For a legion to carry such a title is, to say the least, odd. The titles that other legions bore—and not all imperial legions carried titles as well as numbers—came via four routes. It was the title the legion carried with it in 30 B.C. from the civil war and was retained by Octavian; or it took the Gemina title because of combination with another; or it was granted a title in imperial times either in recognition of its valor or loyalty or both; or, less often, it took its title in recognition of its place of origin.

In terms of both its origin and its ongoing recruiting, the 10th Legion had no known connection with the Strait of Messina. The 10th Legion originated in Spain, and all evidence points to it being recruited there continuously until its recruiting ground was changed to northern Turkey in the second century. The 10th Legion is believed to have served in the Middle East throughout the imperial era, going nowhere near the Strait of Messina.

Yet, a possible explanation can be conjured for the Fretensis title, suggested by a tile found in Palestine in the twentieth century that bore the inscription “LEG X F.” A galley was depicted above the inscription, a boar below. The 10th Legion’s symbol is thought to have been the bull, and that of the 6th Ferrata, which joined it in Judea in the second century, the boar. But assuming for a moment that the 10th’s symbol was the boar, consider the following scenario.

In 38 B.C. Octavian, ruling the western part of the empire from Rome, was locked in conflict with Sextus Pompey, Pompey the Great’s youngest son, who had occupied Sicily with substantial land and naval forces. At this time, all evidence points to the 10th Legion being based in the East, serving Mark Antony, who ruled Rome’s eastern possessions. Octavian launched a series of campaigns against young Pompey, suffering several naval defeats, one in the Strait of Messina from which Octavian only just escaped with his life. Two years later, Octavian’s admiral Marcus Agrippa would finally defeat Pompey in a naval battle off Mylae, on the northeastern coast of Sicily but some distance from the Strait of Messina.

It is possible that the 10th Legion was embarked on vessels of Octavian’s several fleets in 38 B.C., playing a particularly valorous part in this ship-to-ship fighting, and was granted the right to carry the galley symbol in the same way Julius Caesar granted the 5th Legion the elephant symbol after Thapsus. Following this defeat, Octavian swapped twenty thousand of his legionaries for 120 of Antony’s warships to cover his own naval losses, and perhaps in this way the 10th found its way back into Antony’s army, having served him a decade earlier, and where it remained until Actium.

Going against this theory is the following. First, while legions were in later times occasionally granted titles in celebration of their parts in one battle or another, it was in celebration of a victory, not a defeat. Further, before about 25 B.C. no titles were granted to legions that were already identified by a number, that we know of. After Octavian was himself granted the title Augustus by the Senate in 27 B.C., it appears he began the habit of entitling legions by soon giving titles to the seven legions that eventually won the Cantabrian War of 29–19 B.C. for him. As for the 38 B.C. sea battles in the Straits of Messina, Appian, who gives a very detailed account of these campaigns and names several legions involved, including the 1st and the 13th, makes absolutely no reference to the 10th in any context, let alone describes a performance that would earn the legion distinctions. Yet it is Appian who tells us of the 5th Legion’s distinctions as a result of its part in the victory at Thapsus in 46 B.C.

For all this, the 10th Legion may have been known colloquially as the Fretensis. There is simply no evidence to support a suggestion that this was an official title.

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