Bret Devereaux

Key sentence that needs more work from Tony McArthur's article on Roman Army "professionalism" before Augustus: "There is nothing to support the assertion that earlier Roman soldiers [pre-Augustus] were 'long-service' professionals, even is some repeatedly re-enlisted." (p. 25)

This is from Feb 2021 J. of Mil. Hist. Here's the thing that needs more work. He points out that soldiers were recruited for a campaign (or a magistrate's term). End of term or campaign and the army disbanded. No "standing army." Fair enough, but....

If a soldier is dismissed from one army, and immediately reenlists in another, because the campaigns are longer and longer and further and further away, are they becoming de facto "long-service" and therefore de facto "professional"?

At least in the sense they can't go back to another career? Is there an analysis of evolution in Republican Roman campaign length, correlated to distance from Italy? #classicstwitter

I confess I have a number of reservations about the article. I think treating professional/non-professional as binary was a mistake (surely there needs to be the question of if the army was professionalIZING in the period as well), as is the sharpness of the pre-Octavian cutoff.

On campaign length, the traditional view has always been that campaigns got longer post-264 as they got further away from Italy, but Rosenstein has chipped at this view a bit in Rome at War (2004) by arguing against short seasonal warfare in Italy.