A Wargamer's Guide to the Early Roman Empire

Introduction

The most popular of all Ancient wargames armies to collect is without doubt that of early Imperial Rome, or more specifically, the Roman army of the first century

AD

. This book covers the period known as The Principate (27

BC

to

AD

284). Before this, Rome was a republic, and the period after (284 to 476) is known as The Dominate. These armies are also perennial favourites, but it’s the army of the first to third centuries

AD

that most players choose.

An Imperial Roman army of The Principate is one of the most versatile forces a wargamer may choose to collect: not only will you find a whole host of very different historical enemies to fight against (from Britons to Parthians and many more), you can also plausibly fight against other Roman armies of the same era, as happened on an all-too-frequent basis. They’re generally not difficult armies to command – training and discipline being rather high in most Roman forces – and they offer a plentiful number of unusual troop types alongside the familiar legionary and auxiliary infantry units that form the core of the army.

This book helps you to collect and field armies for wargames, and play through an enjoyable, historically plausible battle on your tabletop with model armies for Rome and her many and varied opponents. It is a wargamer’s guide, rather than a linear military history of the period – plenty of excellent military histories of the period, and of the Roman army in particular, have been written so I do not dwell upon the kind of information easily available in such books. This is a book about gaming. As Duncan MacFarlane, formerly editor of Wargames Illustrated, explained so colourfully in the editorial of issue 99 of his magazine:

history is the manure our particular rose grows in – it’s vital to our hobby, but it’s not the end product.

Precisely!

A point to note throughout the text of this book is my use of the word ‘barbarian’. In places, I use it as a shorthand reference for any or all of Rome’s enemies – so much less a waste of ink than listing them all time and again. Barbarus was a word used by the Romans to describe any non-Roman or Greek peoples, or, by the time of Augustus, simply any foreigners. Many of the cultures sheltering under this inevitably umbrella term were anything but ‘barbaric’, and several wargame rule sets use ‘barbarians’ only to refer to Celtic or Germanic tribes – but within the pages of this book, the word is used in the spirit of Roman barbarous. It’s also worth remembering that much of what we know of these cultures comes from the words of her Roman enemies, with any baggage that may carry.

Finally, this Introduction provides a list of emperors who served throughout the period examined in this book; putting this list here, in the front of the book, means that you may flick back and find it quickly, when trying to work out who was in charge at the various dates cited throughout the text. For a small insight into the warlike nature of the empire, without even factoring in its foreign enemies, check out the years

AD

69 (The Year of Four Emperors),

AD

193 (The Year of Five Emperors), and

AD

238 (The Year of Six Emperors) for starters.

Chapter One

The Roman Empire 27

BC

–

AD

284

The Roman army of the Imperial era undertook a huge range of operations in very nearly every environment Europe and the Middle East could throw at it, from the forests of modern Germany and Scotland to the deserts of Persia. Beginning as a machine of conquest, it adapted over time to become a force of consolidation and occupation, and latterly a rapid reaction force attempting to stem a tide of invasions from a variety of directions.

Among his many accomplishments, Augustus seems to have had a keen idea of how large the empire could realistically be, and a firm understanding of its limits. The empire did not expand enormously after Augustus’s time: maps generally show its maximum extent, at the end of the reign of Trajan (

AD

117), as including Mesopotamia and territories in Dacia, but tend not to show that these lands were quickly given up by succeeding emperors. Hadrian gave up Trajan’s acquisitions in Mesopotamia soon after taking power, for example, and might well have given up the rather-turbulent Dacia had it not been for that province’s mineral wealth. After the initial burst of territorial acquisition, the Roman army quickly became a reactive force whose main purpose was holding acquired territory and preventing incursions from the outside.

In the early part of the Empire, wars of conquest and expansion were more or less continuous. Augustus alone extended the borders of the empire from the Adriatic coast and the Balkans to the Danube, creating the new provinces of Raetia, Noricum, Pannonia and Moesia along the way in what seem to have been fairly textbook campaigns of annexation. This was a deliberate strategy to put as much Roman-held territory as possible in place to the northeast of the traditional Roman heartland as possible.

Augustus tried a similar river-based policy in the north, attempting to push the Rhine border of the empire permanently east to the Elbe. Tribes to the east of the Rhine had been subject to Roman raids and harassment since before the Imperial period, but their lands had not yet been fully incorporated into the empire. Augustus’ plan to correct that was a bold one, but it came spectacularly unstuck at the Teutoburg Forest in Germany in

AD

9.

The background to the Teutoburg Forest catastrophe involved a major rebellion in the Balkans and north into Pannonia, broadly modern Hungary, known as the Bellum Batonianum. Beginning in 6

AD

in the province of Illyricum in the western Balkans, this conflict was one of the most serious to affect the early Empire; Suetonius described it as the most serious since the wars against Carthage in the Republican period. It lasted for four years, and sucked in troops to the extent that in 9

AD

, when Quinctilius Varus set out to campaign across the Rhine in Germany, he had access to only three legions; by contrast, eight were committed to the revolt in the Balkans. As a result, where previously Roman generals had crossed the Rhine at the head of up to 100,000 men, Varus had only 15–20,000. As if a shortage of manpower were not enough, Varus had to contend with treachery. Arminius, a German chieftain who had spent much of his life as a hostage in Rome and had acquired a Roman military education along the way, gained Varus’s confidence while plotting to lead him into a trap.

Believing Arminius’s story of a large-scale rebellion brewing in the German interior, the apparently-vain and seemingly-rather-stupid Varus advanced into hostile territory, failing even to smell a rat when Arminius excused himself from the Roman force to go and round up supposedly friendly tribesmen who might assist in the invasion. The Roman army, strung out along a narrow forest track in appalling weather, was ambushed repeatedly by German troops and annihilated in a series of large-scale ambushes masterminded by Arminius. Only a handful of troops survived as slaves to the victors. Varus fell on his sword in the wreckage.

Rome’s response to perhaps its greatest single military defeat since Cannae was swift and brutal, with the general and imperial favourite Germanicus campaigning successfully and destructively up to 16

AD

, when he won the decisive Battle of the River Weser. German losses may have been greater even than Roman ones in the Teutoburg Forest. Nevertheless, there was little stomach amongst subsequent emperors to consolidate these gains. Despite subsequent campaigns in the late 30s and 40s, the Rhine would remain the limit of the empire’s northeastern expansion until its final breakup.

The recent discovery of a battlefield near Kalefeld in Saxony, dating from around 230–250

AD

indicates that even during a period of economic and social crisis the Roman army was capable of operating well beyond its normal geographical limits, but the Kalefeld battlefield is likely to be evidence of a punitive raid rather than part of an attempt to extend the boundaries of empire.

One area in which the Roman Empire did expand dramatically, and perhaps surprisingly given the logistical difficulties involved, was in Britain. Emperor Claudius, unpopular in Rome and needing a victory to shore up his position in the dangerous atmosphere of the Imperial court, revived Julius Caesar’s plan to invade the islands in

AD

43, nearly a century after Caesar’s partly successful but ultimately inconclusive invasion. In fact, Augustus had prepared several invasions during his reign, but called them all off due to shifting political circumstances. In

AD

43, however, Britain was in a state of political turmoil, with constant warfare between petty kings, and ripe for invasion.

On the pretext of reinstating a deposed king of the Atrebates, a powerful tribe in southern Britain, Claudius sent four legions across the Channel under Aulus Plautius. After initial resistance by the British tribes in the southeast, featuring a probable battle at the River Medway, Roman forces won through and successfully annexed a substantial part of southern Britain. Claudius is said to have personally taken the surrender of eleven tribes. Gradually, over the course of a number of years, the Romans consolidated their hold over their new acquisition.

The backlash was nearly twenty years in coming. In 61

AD

, as the then governor of Britain, Suetonius, campaigned in Anglesey (and wiped out the last stronghold of the druids as he was about it), rebellion broke out in the eastern part of the kingdom. Boudicca, queen of the Iceni, led her tribe and the allied Trinovantes in revolt against the excesses of Roman officialdom. Following the death of her husband, a nominal Roman ally, Boudicca had apparently been shamefully treated, with her land confiscated and her daughters raped. According to sources, she was herself flogged. Her subsequent revolt led to the possible destruction of a Roman legion and certainly to the sack of London, the base of Roman power in Britain.

Suetonius, having broken off campaigning in the west, hurried back and confronted Boudicca’s forces somewhere on the Roman road now known as Watling Street. Despite greatly inferior numbers, Suetonius won a huge victory. Boudicca committed suicide and the rebellion came to an end.

In subsequent decades, the Romans extended their control over much of the rest of the island, though their area of control stopped at the Scottish lowlands. The famed general Agricola campaigned successfully against the Picts of the Highlands, winning the battle of Mons Graupius in 84

AD

, but the Romans never formalized their control over the north of Scotland. Hadrian’s Wall, which belonged to a later phase in Roman imperial history, marked the extent of Roman