The historians' history of the world in twenty-five volumes, volume 06 : $b the early Roman Empire
History
The historians' history of the world in twenty-five volumes, volume 06 : $b the early Roman Empire
World history
Augustus disbanded the unruly multitudes who had crowded into the
service of the great military chieftains of the civil wars. He strained
every nerve to gorge them with the largesses for which alone they
would forego the periodical plunder of unoffending cities, in which
their leaders had been compelled to indulge them. But while they were
reposing upon their estates, or rioting with their profuse gratuities, he
speedily remodelled his military establishment, and equipped a force of
twenty-five legions for the defence of the empire. He fixed a reasonable
scale of pay for every armed man in his service, from the rank and
file of the cohorts to the “lieutenant of the emperor with proconsular
rank.” The proconsular armies were maintained and paid by the machinery
of the proconsular government in the provinces; so that the emperor,
without being ostensibly the paymaster of the legions, did in fact,
through his lieutenants, hold the purse upon which they depended. We
have seen how incompetent we are to state the salary of the provincial
governor; nor can we estimate the pay of the various grades of officers.
We only know that the simple legionary received one denarius daily, a
sum which may equal eightpence half-penny of English money. A part of
this sum was stopped for his arms, implements, and accoutrements; but
he retained perhaps a larger proportion of it than the pocket money
of the British private, and the simple luxuries of the wine shop were
cheap and accessible. Marriage was strongly discouraged, and generally
forbidden in the Roman ranks, and the soldier’s allowance was perhaps
chiefly expended in averting the blows of the centurion’s vine-staff, and
buying occasional exemption from the fatigues of drill and camp duty. If
we are justified in drawing an inference from the proportion observed
in a military largess in the time of Cæsar, we may conjecture that the
centurion received double, and the tribunes four times, the pay of the
legionary.
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