Richard Alston

Roman Military Pay from Caesar to Diocletian

In a recent issue of this Journal, M. Alexander Speidel published a new document concerning Roman military pay, a receipt from Vindonissa dating to A.D. 38. This document, he claims, provides the missing link, which allows him to present a table of pay rates for legionaries and auxiliaries from Caesar to Diocletian and prove finally the proposition resurrected by M. P. Speidel that soldiers of the auxiliary cohorts were paid five sixths of the annual pay of legionaries. From a re-examination of the texts and documents traditionally used as evidence for the pay rates of the Roman military, I conclude that, although we can establish the rates of legionary infantry pay from the date of the increase under Caesar until A.D. 197, we have little evidence for legionary pay rates in the third century and, since most of the documents provide us with figures which are unknown proportions of the annual pay of the soldiers concerned, the evidence for auxiliary pay is not sufficient to allow the calculation of exact pay rates for any period. There are, therefore, no grounds for believing either the five-sixths theory as elaborated by M. Alexander Speidel or, indeed, any of the many other theories that have been proposed. Nevertheless, the documentation can be interpreted to establish likely minimum figures for auxiliary pay rates in the first century A.D. This interpretation of the documents suggests that there was, in fact, no difference between the rates of pay of auxiliary and legionary infantry and the cavalry of the legions and alae , a controversial conclusion that has previously been avoided for reasons central to much of Roman imperial military historiography.

Seeing Caesar in ruins: towards a radical aesthetic of ruins

This paper considers two ancient instances of engagement with the ruin: resonant descriptions of Troy in the second-century historian Tacitus and in the Neronian poet Lucan. Both represent the encounter with the ruin as alienating, which provokes interpretations corresponding to those of modern engagements with ruins. These instances undermine the particularity of the modern experience of ruins and instead introduce a dialectic between the ruin and the imperial state. Although one might assume that the ruin as a symbol of times past offers a locus outside Modernity or the (Roman) imperial state from where an oppositional perspective becomes possible, this alienation works instead to reinforce political norms. The ruin operates as an illusion of opposition. Although totalitarian systems operate with monological visions of history and unitary imaginaries, and the ruin would seem to encourage plurality, imperial time operates in more complex ways, which allow different historical periods to be enfolded in and subordinated to the imperial dialectic. Collective memory in the imperial society is critically ambivalent and that ambivalence imbues imperial society with a pervasive sorrow.