The life of an (extra)ordinary Roman soldier | Curators' Tour of Legion: life in the Roman Army

Legion is an exhibition unique in its scope. We follow the journey of one Roman citizen in his quest to become a legionary and belong to one of the world's most infamous fighting forces. Claudius Tarantianus was a Roman soldier in the beginning of the second century. The surviving letters he sent home are as enlightening as they are rare. In Roman history we have a tendency to focus on the aristocracy, but in Legion we illuminate the day-to-day experiences of the soldiers and those around them. The life of a Roman soldier wasn't easy, full of violence and hardship, and death from battle or disease was likely, but the rewards of that service were potentially life-changing. So what did it take to become part of the Roman army? I beg you, father, if it meets with your approval, to send me from their military sandals and a pair of felt socks. I was ordered to take the oath. So you want to join the Roman army, but would you be able to get in? Not everyone could join the Roman army. The first, perhaps simplest requirement, was height. That was five foot ten in Roman feet. It's slightly different to what it is today, it would have been about 172 centimetres. You had to be under the age of 35. However, as long as you met the height requirement, you could be as young as, say, 13 and still join the Roman army. As well as these two requirements, you also needed a good letter of recommendation. Now, this would be a letter from someone recommending you to a position in the Roman army. This is one of the Vindolanda tablets and it's actually a letter of recommendation. It's a letter written by a man named Carus to Flavius Serialis, the commander at Vindolanda, and he's recommending a soldier for a position at Carlisle. The Roman army needed to know that their recruits and future soldiers were up to the task and letters of recommendation were a really great way of ensuring that this would happen. Now, Terentianus, as a Roman citizen, expected to join the elite legions, that's certainly what he wanted, but he fell short with his letter of recommendation. He couldn't get a good enough one. Instead, he got a letter written by a couple of his friends that got him into the auxiliary marines, not exactly what he wanted. Hopeful Roman soldiers would start as recruits, wouldn't become immediate soldiers, they had to go through quite gruelling training. Objects like these would have been used in that training. A wooden target in the shape of an individual, a person, and this wooden sword. You can see, perhaps, on the surface of this target also the damage that might have been caused by practice swords. This skull comes from the fort at Vindolanda and it's probably used as target practice. If you look closely, the holes are square in shape. This matches the bolts used in Roman bolt shooters. This coin shows us the moment of a Roman soldier taking his oath, or the sacramentum, as it's called. We don't know much about the Roman military oath. This is one of the very few depictions we have of it. It shows two soldiers with one recruit kneeling in the middle. The recruit has a piglet and the two soldiers have their swords on it. This piglet may have been sacrificed during the taking of the oath. At this point, you're swearing yourself to the army. Now, even if you're a citizen protected by Roman law, in this moment you're swearing away those rights, which means that were you to desert or somehow fail in your obligations, they would have the right to punish you as they saw fit. This is a really significant moment in every soldier's life and Terentianus writes about it and when he does, he says he was ordered to take the oath. Both Caliban and Diopistus have enlisted in the Augustan fleet of Alexandria. No one has reckoned up the chances of their lives. I went by boat and with their help I enlisted in the fleet, lest I seem to you to wander like a fugitive, lured on by bitter hope. So now you're in the army, but where do you fit in? If you were a Roman citizen, you'd normally want to join the Roman legions. Better pay, better conditions. However, if you were a non-Roman citizen, you still had the option of joining the auxiliary support services. One of these auxiliary units was the Roman marines and this is the one that Terentianus joined. While he was marine, Terentianus hated it. At one point he rails, they paid no more attention to me than a sponge on a stick, the Roman form of toilet paper. He has his equipment nicked by his own officers. While he's in sick bay, he then has his bedding stolen. A miserable time all round. Claudius Terentianus could read and write. This is a rare skill in antiquity. With the ability to read and write, you could read and write orders and this was the key to getting promoted roles in the Roman army. A good promoted role might be the standard bearer. This was a man on double the pay of an ordinary soldier. This tombstone shows a imaginifer. He holds the imago, the image of a bust of the emperor. In his other hand, you can see he has a scroll. He's telling us he can read and write, an important function of promoted men. Standard bearers held the standards of either the regiment or the particular century to which they belonged. You had to lead from the front, so you had to be brave. You had to be able to read and write of course, as all promoted men did, but you also had to be numerate because Roman standard bearers kept the pay and the accounts for their men. The top position for a commoner would be the role of centurion, commander of a century. We have one example of a centurion who managed to become a centurion by vote of the legion from being a standard bearer. He must have been able to show his bravery in the face of battle. It was a position of high responsibility and power. A centurion was paid to start with 15 times the wages of an ordinary soldier who was very valued in the Roman army. One role that would tempt even legionaries was the role of cavalry. The cavalry was one of the most glamorous roles in the Roman army and the chance to show off came with the cavalry sports, a very specialist form of cavalry parade. It included standards like this unique survival, the draco of Koblenz. This draco comes from the fortress of Niederbieber on the Rhineland frontier. It dates to the late second century or early third century AD. It's the only one that's ever been found. The draco would be mounted on a pole, the head's hollow so it would make a whistling sound as the rider rode along. It was attached to a windsock that billowed out like a fearsome tail. Originally gilded, this is a unique example surviving from the Rhineland. The draco standard interestingly was adopted from Rome's enemies, the Sarmatians, very much emblematic of the Roman practice of incorporating the ideas, the symbols of the enemy and making them their own. I ask and beg you father to send to me a battle sword, a pickaxe, a grappling iron, two of the best spears attainable, a cloak of beaver skin and a girdled tunic together with my trousers so that I may have them. I wore out my tunic before I entered the service and my trousers were laid away new. Okay so you found your place in the army, how do you get your equipment? There were three ways to get your equipment. The easiest way that Trentianus found was to request it from home, he was after all from a military family. Otherwise soldiers would have to purchase their equipment from the armourer but at the end of service they could sell it back and recoup their deposit so there was also a very strong second-hand market and we have helmets that have not just one or two owner's names inscribed on them but three, even four, suggesting a very lengthy period of service. This example shows what a legionary might have looked like towards the end of the second century. He has a cuirass, a segmental cuirass, he also has protection extended to the sword arm, a manica or armoured sleeve. It looks very gladiatorial, in fact it probably is borrowed from gladiator equipment. The helmet is still gleaming from the rime and it's got extra strips on the bowl of the helmet and a very wide neck guard. Typical equipment for a legionary is this pilum or armour-piercing javelin. It would be thrown at the enemy, hopefully piercing the shield and reaching the defender behind it. He's shown with a very late period gladius or short sword, this is a particular type known as a ring pommel sword and it's virtually the last era when legionaries carried short swords. The other piece of equipment vital for heavy infantry legionaries was the scutum or long shield. This one in particular is the only surviving example. It comes from the eastern city of Dura-Europos on the Euphrates frontier and it's been preserved by the dry environment of the Syrian desert. The main feature you can see is the wonderful painted decoration. This is painted on leather on top of plywood with a bronze binding. Images include victories, a roman eagle and probably a regimental symbol of a lion. In the corners are four swastikas. In antiquity this was simply a symbol of good luck. Conservators preserved it trying to maintain as much as possible the painted surface so it is slightly more curled than it would have been in real life. Also it must have been a spare part. It lacks the nail holes needed for the boss, the metal plate that would have protected the hand that gripped the shield in the middle. The boss next to it was found in the Tyne. It's from the second century AD and it belongs to a soldier called Jubitatus. The boss protects the hand holding the shield but it could be used as a We're extremely fortunate in this exhibition to have what is the finest preserved and the earliest example of a Roman legionary's body armour or cuirass. This example turned up in excavation on a battlefield in 2014. After four years of conservation it's been returned to absolutely stunning condition. It's so well preserved you can see that some of the buckles have been opened chemical analysis of the soil inside the cuirass suggests that somebody died inside and perhaps these buckles have been opened to plunge in the final lifeblood. This object reminds us of the hazards of being a Roman soldier. The risk of violence combined with disease and illness made life as a Roman soldier a very risky one. In AD 115 Trentianus himself faced a revolt of his own, the Jewish Diaspora Revolt which spreads to Alexandria and he talks about putting down the anarchy and the uproar of the city. He himself was wounded. He sent me word about a woman. With my consent he was buying one for me. As far back as two years ago I would have taken a woman into my house but I did not permit myself nor do I permit myself to take anyone without your approval. If you remain steadfast in refusal the rest of your life I shall do without my woman. If not the woman whom you approve is also the one whom I also want. Now as a Roman soldier if you've survived battle how might your downtime look? Not every soldier would have faced the dangers of battle but almost all soldiers would have known the day-to-day life of living in a Roman fort. Roman forts were like miniature towns built for Roman soldiers to live in. They were permanent structures built in areas where the Romans felt they needed to maintain a presence. Military communities weren't just made up of Roman soldiers. The soldiers themselves had families, wives and children. Roman soldiers weren't officially allowed to marry unless they were officers or held certain positions but we know that they did. They had women who they considered their wives and wrote to their families referring to them as their wives and they had children who they wanted to provide for. Now Trentianus writes home asking for permission to buy a woman. This would be a concubine and so he needs permission to bring a woman into his household. One of the most famous women from a military community in Britain is Regina. This is her tombstone erected by her husband a man named Baritis who was a Roman soldier. Now Regina's story is a little bit more complicated than that she was his wife. She was actually initially his concubine which is to say an enslaved woman. Eventually he freed her and married her. We don't know the context for that and we don't know how much choice she will have had in that decision but it gives us an interesting insight into the dynamic of their relationship. This is an incredibly elaborate tombstone and Regina is shown as a very elegant very Roman woman but one of the more interesting aspects of this tombstone is the inscriptions at the bottom. Inside a square as you'd expect is an inscription written in Latin but beneath it is the added inscription in Aramaic the original language of her husband Baritis. A final lament for his wife that says Regina the freed woman of Baritis alas. Soldiers were recruited from many different areas of the Roman Empire so many of them would have been bilingual and we expect that probably their children will have been bilingual too. Trentianus himself writes in both Latin and ancient Greek a common language spoken in Egypt. Forts were also places where soldiers spent a lot of their free time and they loved playing games. This extraordinary object is a bronze dice tower. Now this was used for rolling dice. You drop the dice at the top of the tower and there are some levels inside the tower that would force the dice to roll. This was fun for when you're just rolling dice but it was actually a very useful device as well because it's an anti-cheating device. Now we know that the Romans loved to play games and they loved to gamble but we also know that quite a lot of cheating went on. We found loaded dice that almost always roll sixes. This device makes sure that doesn't happen. On the front of the dice tower there's an inscription it says pictos pictos postos de leta udite securete which means the picks have been defeated all hostiles are vanquished now use me in safety. One of the most famous Vindolanda tablets depicts a very ordinary moment in people's lives which might surprise you. This is a birthday party invitation and in fact probably the oldest birthday party invitation in the world. It's an invitation from a woman named Claudia Severa to her friend Lepidina to celebrate her birthday on the 11th of September. Though most of the invitation will have been written by a scribe at the end there's a final message that's written by Claudia Severa herself. This makes it the oldest known female handwriting in Britain. On the invite Claudia Severa writes Farewell sister my dearest soul as I hope to prosper and hail. Receive with my recommendation the discharged soldier Terentianus who brings you this letter and let him know what sort of villagers we have lest he get into trouble since he is a man of means and desirous of residing there. If you completed your 25 years of service what awaited you as a reward at the end? We don't know exactly how many soldiers survived to the end of their service but numbers around 50 percent tend to be suggested. Once you completed your 25 years of service you might get something like this a Roman military bronze diploma. This was awarded to auxiliary soldiers non-citizen soldiers after 25 years of service granting them their citizenship. This bronze diploma was awarded to an Egyptian rower who actually did 26 years of service. He's getting his citizenship on the 8th of September of the year and that citizenship extends to his wife Topea and his son Carpinius. Now this reward may not look like much but Roman citizenship was arguably priceless. It wasn't just for Marcus Papirius but for his children and his children's children so it ensured the future of his family a future where they would get the same protections in Roman law as other Roman citizens. If you were a citizen like Terentianus you could expect a lump sum of 10 years salary what we might think of nowadays as a pension to live comfortably, perhaps buy land, retire with your family and have a peaceful life. You've done your time, you've served the army, this is your reward. This coin hoard known as the Dickcott hoard is a hoard of 126 gold coins which amounts to just over what a soldier might expect to get the 10 years of salary. Seeing these coins brought together shows you the level of this reward and why it might be worthwhile for a soldier to risk his life for 25 years. Now for those of you who are eager to learn about the fate of Terentianus I'm happy to tell you that we can say he does survive. We know this not from his own words and his letters but ironically given that he doesn't get a good enough letter of recommendation to join the army he does get a letter of recommendation as a retired veteran to rent a property and it describes him as a man of means. Thank you for joining us on this tour of the Legion exhibition. These objects offer a small insight into the lives and experiences of serving in one of history's most notorious military institutions. We hope this has given you a better understanding of what life was really like in the Roman army. Although the exhibition is now over if you want to learn more the catalogue is available to buy now.