Talk:Structural history of the Roman military

Archaeology

Before ca. 1000 BC, nothing is known of Rome's military arrangements. The site of ancient Rome had been inhabited in some form from as early as 30,000 BC.<:ref name="grantP9">Grant, The History of Rome, p. 9</ref> Until around 1800 BC, stone tools and weapons are evident in the area's archaeology,<:ref name="caryP8">Cary & Scullard, A History of Rome, p. 8</ref> and it is doubtful that the inhabitants of the site maintained an organised military force. Instead, individuals armed themselves when necessary with "flint daggers and stone battle-axes".<:ref>Vogt, The Decline of Rome, p. 8</ref> Post-1800 BC, bronze age culture began to spread to the region, as it did throughout much of Western Europe, replacing stone (and possibly copper) weapons with bronze ones.<:ref name="caryP8"/>

This is off-topic here; it may be a start on Archaeology of Rome; although such an article should really include Grant's assertions that the discoveries before the settlement of Rome are human and Neanderthal remains, quite possibly not from the site of Rome itself; end in 1400 BC; and are not from the [Villanovan and Italic] cultures of the settlers of Rome.

A reasonable passage would be something like Archaeological evidence suggests that Rome was first settled about 950 BC; it was first urbanized about 650 BC. There is no archaeological evidence for their military structure. But even this would only be germane in debunking the Varronian dating from 753 BC, as Grant does; and I'm not sure this article needs to do that.. Septentrionalis PMAnderson

FA in need of review

This Featured Article had its last review in 2008 and since then has fallen a bit out of standards. Issues spotted:

• several uncited sentences;
• "clarification needed" tags in the text since 2013;
• Livy, Polybius and Tacitus are primary sources, maybe they should be replaced by secondary sources, ie. modern historians?
• Is that "Strategy Page" reliable? (ref. 28)
• the lead is divided in "Phases" but I see no reference to this "division" in the text. Is this OR?

Needs tune-up; if the issues above are not corrected, the article can be nominated for Featured Article review. RetiredDuke (talk) 11:44, 11 November 2020 (UTC)

The lead could maybe be rewritten to match with the current divisions in the article - or additional sectioning might be used to more clearly highlight the separations: I'll go about trying to do this. Regarding "modern historians": a simple JSTOR search reveals many sources of interest: although I might not have time to edit this article, I can provide relevant ones to interested editors on request. This seems particularly interesting. RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 14:55, 22 January 2021 (UTC)

Erroneous quote of Polybius?

In the quote table within "Professionalisation during the Republican period", Polybius is said to write "...four thousand foot and two hundred horse..."; however, reading Histories 1 16:2 he states "...four thousand foot and three hundred horse...". This is made even more strange by the fact that the quote table follows up with "when any unusual necessity arises, they raise the number of foot to five thousand and of the horse to three hundred". Maybe I'm not searching thoroughly enough, but I can't even find a mention of any such clause either in the original Greek or in LacusCurtius.

What is it really even citing? Where does "1:268-70" make an appearance in Histories?

Apalsnerg (talk) 06:34, 23 January 2021 (UTC)

Seek (hard enough) and ye shall find, Apalsnerg - [1] It's Polybius 3.107 and the next few lines, and it's accurate. But whover copied and pasted it rather scrambled the numbers. The 268 tallies with the pagination of the original paper edition. Quite apart from being wrong, it's also a good argument against the truncation of page numbers (as in 268-70), rather than giving whole page numbers (as in 268-270). Nice find on your part though... this one got right through the first Featured Article assessment process with that mistake intact. But not this time.

I'll leave the correction to you! Haploidavey (talk) 09:37, 23 January 2021 (UTC)

Popular Imagination

I suspect it has simply been an automatic replacement process and not vandalism, but the Pilum made from "Popular imagination" feels misplaced... poplar wood maybe? --84.118.56.83 (talk) 00:28, 28 February 2021 (UTC)

I'm by no means an expert in Roman history but "Traditionally they were armed with a sword known as a gladius and two throwing spears known as pila: one the heavy pilum of popular imagination and one a slender javelin." doesn't seem to be referring to the material, and well "popular imagination" (as evidenced in comics like Asterix) certainly seems the right description. Cheers, RandomCanadian (talk / contribs) 00:42, 28 February 2021 (UTC)

WP:BOLD merger

Hi, I'm WP:BOLDly merging Military establishment of the Roman Kingdom (poorly sourced since creation in 2005) and Military establishment of the Roman Republic (unsourced since creation in 2005) into this article. There is so much WP:OVERLAP that we can regard them as WP:REDUNDANTFORKs but without added value. In January 2010 someone suggested something should be done about it, and then... nothing happened. Both pages seem to have nothing unique that is valuable enough to be preserved and migrated into this article, except for 3 sources that we might be able to reuse if anyone's interested:

• Rubio-Campillo, Xavier; Matías, Pau Valdés; Ble, Eduard (8 August 2015). "Centurions in the Roman Legion: Computer Simulation and Complex Systems". Journal of Interdisciplinary History. 46 (2): 245–263. doi:10.1162/JINH_a_00833 – via Project MUSE.
• Santosuosso, Antonio (16 January 2007). "Greek and Roman Warfare: Battles, Tactics, and Trickery (review)". The Journal of Military History. 71 (1): 208–209. doi:10.1353/jmh.2007.0074 – via Project MUSE.
• Wake, T., "The Roman Army After Marius' Reforms", 28 February 2006.

@Botteville, Monstrelet, and Cynwolfe: pinging original creator, and two users who discussed it in 2010, as all three have been active in the past several days and might like to know. Cheers, Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 17:20, 2 April 2023 (UTC)

PS: This article, Structural history of the Roman military, started out in November 2006 as Branches of the Roman military (renamed after only 2 days), in which Military establishment of the Roman kingdom Military establishment of the Roman republic and Military establishment of the Roman empire (now redirects to Campaign history of the Roman military) served as "Main articles" for several of its sections, but in February 2007 these sections were already removed, and haven't played a role since. As EraNavigator (who hasn't been active since 2015) pointed out in 2010:

As regards the articles Military establishment of the Roman Republic and Military of ancient Rome, I recommend that both be scrapped. The former has a long-winded and unusual title, where Roman Republican army would be much better, and is largely unreferenced. The latter is a (failed) attempt to deal with the broad socio-economic impact of the army. It fails to discuss the issues properly, giving one viewpoint only (mainly that of outdated historian Santosuosso) and has skimpy and tendentious coverage of a range of issues, including highly dubious assertions, such as that the late Roman army contained 700,000 effectives, which almost no up-to-date scholar would support.

It seems that Military of ancient Rome and Structural history of the Roman military managed to evolve over time, with reliable sources, quality and balance, while the "establishment" articles were stranded in time. One of only two sources I found worthy of keeping around, Santosuosso, is even regarded as 'outdated' by EraNavigator, so there really wasn't much. Cheers, Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 17:40, 2 April 2023 (UTC)

Thanks. Many articles on Ancient Rome were written in the early days of Wikipedia but are not good. They should be merged. T8612 (talk) 19:27, 2 April 2023 (UTC)

You're welcome. I found out a lot of related Roman milhist articles and lists are in poor shape, poorly sourced, primary-sourced and/or containing original research. I've made some efforts to improve List of Roman wars and battles for example, and pointed out that Roman-Gallic wars seems an WP:OR title and the text is entirely WP:PRIMARY. We can't just go around uncritically citing Livy or Gibbon as if they are up-to-date WP:RS. Cheers, Nederlandse Leeuw (talk) 00:54, 3 April 2023 (UTC)

Can't find my contributions. Don't know what I can do to help. The article seems long. Maybe it needs a different organization. Maybe material needs to be offloaded on a different basis. Agree, something should be done with abandoned articles. It doesn't seem to me Rome articles were ever that good. Lot's of Hollywood, little merit. An article needs to come under someone's care, who needs to be left alone to do it. If it is consensus you are looking for I give you my blanket consensus to make something(s) well-organized and sources out of it (them). Ciao.Botteville (talk) 04:50, 3 April 2023 (UTC)