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Post by kaiphranos on Jun 30, 2023 18:29:51 GMT
(OK, maybe a little hyperbolic.  ) Anyway, I was interested to see Bret Deveraux's latest article on ACOUP regarding the so-called Marian reforms that give us our classic "II/49 Marian Roman" army. Apparently historiography has marched on, and most of the reforms attributed to good ol' Gaius Marius have little actual evidence of his involvement. (And to be fair, maybe we should just consider list II/49 as a transitional form between the Polybian and Early Imperial armies anyway...) |
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Post by stevie on Jun 30, 2023 20:11:02 GMT
Thanks for that link Kaiphranos.
A very interesting read.
Now I don’t have the detailed scholarship to back up or refute this article…
…but I do wonder if we are arguing over how many angels can dance on the
head of a pin here.
The fact is the Roman army did change during the first century BC, so whether
we call it ‘the Marian Reforms’ or ‘the First Century Reforms’ matters little…
…”you can change the name but things still stay the same”.
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Post by davidjconstable on Jul 1, 2023 7:47:23 GMT
The problem with any research is that it can easily be misunderstood. The older the sources, the bigger the problem.
Ancient history is not black and white, it is various shades of grey, and mostly missing.
My alternative interest was WW2 (1939-1945AD).
If you look at histories of units published at the end of the war in 1945 and 1946, a horrible number of picture errors occur.
If you look at "World at war" the film used is an absolute mess, but people assume it is correct.
It was common in the American army in particular in 1944 for every German tank to be a Tiger, no it was not.
In the "Bulge" battle in December 1944 green American troops were identifying Hetzer as Tiger tanks, the two are nothing alike.
Now how in 1000 years time with only some of this information available will people get it correct.
Well they will not.
David Constable
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Post by leberechtreinhold on Jul 1, 2023 14:48:29 GMT
Excellent article.
In general, military history has been changing a lot during the last few decades, as it used to be mostly studied by the military rathen than historians. As such, there were a lot of focus con certain generals, politics and pragmatism instead of social/cultural contexts. Nowadays there's also a lot more translated stuff, which has really helped with non-western armies.
To be honest even after this I still think II/49 is a reasonable approximation (from an abstract perspective) of the army Caesar is commanding on Gaul. Obviously DBA is abstract and has to take into account hundreds of armies in many different centuries, so while we can argue about specifics, I still think the lists are still an impressive body of work that not surprisingly, has been the base of most other historical wargames.
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