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If the Roman legion was the ancient equivalent of a modern division, then the smaller cohort, of which there were ten per legion, was akin to a battalion. By the 1st century BC, cohorts – each consisting of 480 legionaries – were the primary combat elements of their parent legion.
A cohort was itself divided into six centuries of 80 men apiece, and overseen by six centurions. The ten cohorts could be arrayed in separate lines, with varying numbers of cohorts per line. The legionaries of a cohort all bore the same gear, including short swords, javelins, and shields.
‘Cohort’ came into English from the French cohorte, and ultimately from Latin cohors. The bedrock Latin etymological meaning is ‘enclosure’ or ‘farmyard’. Cohors subsequently came to be used for people in that space. A possible explanation for the military link is that a Roman army’s camp was divided into parcels, and the soldiers in each such yard, or cohors, were called the same on account of their being encamped therein.
Legions, and thus their component cohorts, were composed of Roman citizens, but many non-legion cohorts were formed of non-citizen troops, known as auxiliaries, such as Cohors II Hispanorum (Second Cohort of Spaniards), which was based in Sion, Switzerland, in the late 1st century AD.
The use of ‘cohort’ survived the fall of the Roman Empire, figuratively at least. In time, ‘cohort’ came to mean a group of soldiers broadly, as seen in Lord Byron’s 1815 poem ‘The Destruction of Sennacherib’: ‘The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,/And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold.’
Also, in his 1827 Life of Napoleon Buonaparte, Emperor of the French, Sir Walter Scott would write that the Frenchman’s ‘Legion of Honour was to consist of 15 cohorts’.
