Dressing for battle: Arms and armour in the Roman Empire

The ancient Romans continue to excite the imagination, as the crowds that flock to the rugged beauty of Hadrian’s Wall or to the grim grandeur of the Colosseum attest. Such archaeological sites are a reminder that Rome’s greatness was built on the most overt and rapacious military imperialism imaginable. A new exhibition at the British Museum, Legion: life in the Roman army, examines the war machine that sustained such a darkly charismatic empire, through objects found throughout the Roman world. The focus of the show is on soldiers, their families, and the many other people who belonged to military communities in the first two centuries of the Roman Empire and the common era – but no examination of the Roman army could be complete without looking at the weapons of war that helped to make it such a formidable fighting force. After all, arms and armour are integral to the look of a Roman soldier in the popular imagination, even if the reality of that look away from the battlefield was little more than a sword and dagger on fancy belts.

The Roman career soldier dates to the time of the first emperor, the social reactionary Augustus (r. 27 BC-AD 14), who ruled over 60 million people, barely 20 per cent of whom were citizens. The founder of the dual legion and auxiliary system, he seemingly thought citizen and non-citizen troops should be distinguishable by their equipment. This xenophobic snobbery, which colours the writing of the Roman senator and historian Tacitus, also seems prevalent in ancient artwork, particularly that of the metropolitan artists at Rome, who would have had little opportunity to see frontline regiments. However, there are reasons to believe that how a Roman soldier was kitted out was much more due to form and function, as well as finances – the social differences in Roman arms and armour were possibly less clear-cut than the artists’ chisels made them out to be.

Rome’s frozen filmstrips

Remarkably, Trajan’s Column is not Rome’s only column haunted by imperial soldiers: the equally massive Column of Marcus Aurelius (also known as the Aurelian Column) is another monument of the Roman army in a similar continuously spiralling frozen filmstrip with a cast of thousands. Trajan’s Column is from about 60 years earlier than its sibling, and has been the focus of a greater degree of study. It received its first local-authority protection order as far back as AD 1162, in the days when the death penalty could be conferred for vandalism. This lengthy scrutiny culminated in the French emperor Napoleon III commissioning a full monument cast in 1861, enabling a number of museums (including London’s Victoria & Albert) to display facsimiles. In contrast, casts of the Column of Marcus Aurelius were only taken at a relatively late stage, in the 1930s.