If they really were so inferior, why were they paid as much as 4/5 of legionary pay, despite not being Roman citizens? The Romans weren’t stupid! There’s very little, if any, evidence from the archaeology that the auxilia were trained or equipped in an inferior fashion. The auxilia very much play second fiddle to the legions on the column but, I contend, this has nothing to do with reality, and everything to do with propaganda. To me it is a pure recruiting poster: bung up a darned great monument to the legions, showing their triumphant victory, so as to say to the citizens: ‘join the army and kick barbarian butt’. The only evidence we have for the auxilia being inferior, stems from: (a) comments in Vegetius – (written much later than our period, and containing all sorts of concepts, from all sorts of periods, all mixed up, making it frustratingly difficult to interpret), in which he says that young men preferred to join the auxilia in order to escape the harsher discipline and training of the legions (b) from the reliefs of Trajan’s column, which was erected to extol the glory of Trajan and his legions in the wake of the hard-fought, but ultimately successful, campaigns in Dacia.Let us take each of the misconceptions in turn, and see what we make of them. As such, it is very hard to ‘unscramble’ it enough to make sense of it and to decide which parts are relevant to which era. However, we should note that, firstly, Vegetius himself had no military experience whatsoever, and secondly, that his work is a carelessly constructed compilation of material from a vast range of sources and periods, all jumbled together. Vegetius is the only ‘manual’ of the Roman military to have survived ‘intact’. It seems likely to have been written in the reign of the Emperor Theodosius I, who reigned from 379 to 395. The author of this work wrote sometime after the death of Emperor Gratian (383AD). Most of these misconceptions stem from a too-literal reading of ‘ De Re Militari’ (also known as ‘ Epitoma rei militaris’) by Publius Flavius Vegetius Renatus (hereafter referred to as ‘Vegetius’). the auxilia were border troops, manning frontier forts, whilst the legions provided a ‘strategic reserve’, being based well back from the frontier, and only intervening in the event of a major invasion which the auxilia could not repel unaided.auxilia were only support troops, incapable of mounting independent operations themselves, only ever helping the legions.that the main battle-line was the preserve, exclusively, of the legions, being supported on the flanks by the light troops of the auxilia (this would make sense if (ii) above were true – however, as we shall see, it is not).that the legions were heavy infantry, whilst the auxilia provided only light troops.the inferiority of the auxilia, in both training and equipment, when compared to the legions.There are a number of misconceptions regarding the nature and employment of the Auxilia. We will examine the reasons wargamers have for believing that they are so inferior and examine the reality, as far as we know it, of the Auxilia – their nature, the structure of their units, and why wargamers need them.

Phil: The aim of this article is to show that Auxilia are much better troops than most wargamers believe them to be. This article, by Dr Phil Hendry, aims to dispel the myth that the Roman war machine was all about the much-lauded Legionary and that Auxiliary units were bit part players.

2022.09

Rome 2 auxiliary units