[Footnote 3:  Smith’s Dictionary of Antiquities, article “Castra.”]

From what has come down to us of Roman military life, it appears to have been full of excitement, toil, danger, and hardship.  The pecuniary rewards of the soldier were small; he was paid in glory.  No profession brought so much honor as the military; and it was from the undivided attention of a great people to this profession, that it was carried to all the perfection which could be attained before the great invention of gunpowder changed the art of war.  It was not the number of men employed in the Roman armies which particularly arrests attention, but the genius of organization which controlled and the spirit which animated them.  The Romans loved war, but so reduced it to a science that it required comparatively small armies to conquer the world.  Sulla defeated Mithridates with only thirty thousand men, while his adversary marshalled against him over one hundred thousand.  Caesar had only ten legions to effect the conquest of Gaul, and none of these were of Italian origin.  At the great decisive battle of Pharsalia, when most of the available forces of the empire were employed on one side or the other, Pompey commanded a legionary army of forty-five thousand men, and his cavalry amounted to seven thousand more, but among them were included the flower of the Roman nobility; the auxiliary force has not been computed, although it was probably numerous.  In the same battle Caesar had under him only twenty-two thousand legionaries and one thousand cavalry.  But every man in both armies was prepared to conquer or die.  The forces were posted on the open plain, and the battle was really a hand-to-hand encounter, in which the soldiers, after hurling their lances, fought with their swords chiefly; and when the cavalry of Pompey rushed upon the legionaries of Caesar, no blows were wasted on the mailed panoply of the mounted Romans, but were aimed at the face alone, as that only was unprotected.  The battle was decided by the coolness, bravery, and discipline of Caesar’s veterans, inspired by the genius of the greatest general of antiquity.  Less than one hundred thousand men, in all probability, were engaged in one of the most memorable conflicts which the world has seen.

Thus it was by blended art and heroism that the Roman legions prevailed over the armies of the ancient world.  But this military power was not gained in a say; it took nearly two hundred years, after the expulsion of the kings, to regain supremacy over the neighboring people, and another century to conquer Italy.  The Romans did not contend with regular armies until they were brought in conflict with the king of Epirus and the phalanx of the Greeks, “which improved their military tactics, and introduced between the combatants those mutual regards of civilized nations which teach men to honor their adversaries, to spare the vanquished, and to lay aside wrath when the struggle is ended.”