Marian reforms
Other changes were supposed to have included the introduction of the cohort; the institution of a single form of heavy infantry with uniform equipment; the universal adoption of the eagle standard; and the abolition of the citizen cavalry.
[3] It was commonly believed that Marius changed the soldiers' socio-economic background by allowing citizens without property to join the Roman army, a process called "proletarianisation".
The first documented instance of the proletarii being called up was some time in the fourth century; they first received arms at state expense in 281 BC, probably related to the start of the Pyrrhic War.
However, it is also possible that other far-reaching actions, especially in opening army recruitment, were undertaken during Marius' repeated consulships from 104 to 100 BC during which Rome faced the serious threat of Germanic invasion.
[23] Marius was credited with setting the precedent for recruiting the poor by the historian Valerius Maximus writing in the early 1st century AD.
[32] It was believed that Marius' decision to enlist volunteers from the capite censi changed the socio-economic background of the army by allowing the poor to take it over.
These professional soldiers, disconnected from a society in which they had no property stake, over time became clients of their generals who then used them to seize power in Rome and plunge the republic into civil wars that eventually brought about its collapse.
[39] Nor did the legions meaningfully professionalise: as, in general, both soldiers and commanders served only for short periods intending, respectively, to secure plunder or political advancement from military victory.
[41] Beyond changes to army recruitment, there are two other reforms attributed to Marius specifically in the ancient sources: a redesign for a javelin, and the designation of the aquila (eagle) as the universal legionary standard.
[45] Roman pila without Marius' peg often bent or broke on impact, but this was more likely a by-product of their long, narrow shanks than an intentional feature.
[48] Pliny's claim, however, is incorrect; sources show late republican and early imperial legions with other animal symbols such as bulls and wolves.
[50] It is also sometimes claimed that Marius – because the poor citizens enrolled could not afford to purchase their own weapons and armour – arranged for the state to supply them with arms, displacing the traditional system of self-purchase.
[55] Some modern historians have read this action as a permanent reduction in the size of Roman baggage trains, increasing the speed of army movement.
The cohort itself emerged as an administrative unit conscripted from Rome's Italian allies and is first attested in a description by Polybius, a usually reliable historian,[63] of a battle which occurred in 206 BC.
[67] Modern historians have also attributed to Marius the development of the client armies, tying the loyalty of the veterans to generals securing land grants on discharge.
[34] This picture, however, is largely an exaggeration stemming from the lex agraria (c. 100 BC) distributing lands to Marius' veterans and poor Romans.
[68] No such client army can be seen in Marius' own land laws, which required cooperation from civil society – the senate, people, and other magistrates – and was not imposed by military decree.
[71] Only during the civil wars during the later last century BC did demands for land become more prevalent, though not always explicitly to agrarian ends, due to the soldiers' increased bargaining power.
[75] Modern historiography has regularly cast Marius as abolishing the propertied militia and replacing it with landless soldiers motivated largely by pay.
[29] One of the other main sources is Valerius Maximus; he wrote, in a longer passage on the customs of the Roman army, that Marius disregarded its traditional recruitment practices due to his status as a novus homo, an aetiology which historians have dismissed as "puerile, naïve, and fanciful".
[82] Valerius Maximus' narrative is largely in the interest of creating exempla (moral parables) of traditions broken rather than conveying historical events.
[83] Other sources, largely far later and dating from the Antonine period (2nd century AD), also associate Marius with allowing the capite censi to join in 107 BC: Plutarch, Florus, and Aulus Gellius.
[89] The first time a modern historian posited and attributed to Marius a revolutionary and comprehensive reform was in an 1846 book by the German scholar Ludwig Lange.
[92] However, he viewed it only as a step in the full professionalisation of the Roman army and believed that the putative reforms reflected real military needs.
[95] From there, this view moved into reference works like the Realencyclopädie,[96] and then into Anglophone scholarship via the highly cited 1928 overview The Roman Legions by Henry Michael Denne Parker.
[97] The view inherited from the 19th century sources was challenged in two articles published in 1949 and 1951 by Emilio Gabba, an Italian historian, which held that instead of being a revolutionary change, Marius' decision to enrol the poor was the logical culmination of progressive reductions of the property qualifications in the face of chronic shortages of recruits.
Gabba's posited property level qualifications and Brunt's attacks on Polybius' credibility broke one of the main assumptions of the 19th century German scholars, namely that the Polybian army persisted largely unchanged until Marius' time.
[103] J W Rich then showed in a 1983 article in Historia that there was no general manpower shortage in Italy and that Marius' use of voluntary enlistment was in fact precedented, undermining the main proposed rationale for recruiting the proletarii.
[104] Further work on the demography of second-century Italy, especially by Nathan Rosenstein in the early 2000s, showed more definitively from the basis of archaeology there had been no population decline in the decades before Marius' first consulship, as had previously been believed.
