Decay of the Roman Military System

The Roman military system of this period was nearly in the same condition as the Carthaginian at the time of Hannibal.  The governing classes furnished only the officers; the subjects, plebeians and provincials, formed the army.  The general was, financially and militarily, almost independent of the central government, and, whether in fortune or misfortune, substantially left to himself and to the resources of his province.  Civic and even national spirit had vanished from the army, and the esprit de corps was alone left as a bond of inward union.  The army had ceased to be an instrument of the commonwealth; in a political point of view it had no will of its own, but it was doubtless able to adopt that of the master who wielded it; in a military point of view it sank under the ordinary miserable leaders into a disorganized useless rabble, but under a right general it attained a military perfection which the burgess-army could never reach.  The class of officers especially had deeply degenerated.  The higher ranks, senators and equites, grew more and more unused to arms.  While formerly there had been a zealous competition for the posts of staff officers, now every man of equestrian rank, who chose to serve, was sure of a military tribuneship, and several of these posts had even to be filled with men of humbler rank; and any man of quality at all who still served sought at least to finish his term of service in Sicily or some other province where he was sure not to face the enemy.  Officers of ordinary bravery and efficiency were stared at as prodigies; as to Pompeius especially, his contemporaries practised a military idolatry which in every respect compromised them.  The staff, as a rule, gave the signal for desertion and for mutiny; in spite of the culpable indulgence of the commanders proposals for the cashiering of officers of rank were daily occurrences.  We still possess the picture—­ drawn not without irony by Caesar’s own hand—­of the state of matters at his own headquarters when orders were given to march against Ariovistus, of the cursing and weeping, and preparing of testaments, and presenting even of requests for furlough.  In the soldiery not a trace of the better classes could any longer be discovered.  Legally the general obligation to bear arms still subsisted; but the levy, if resorted to alongside of enlisting, took place in the most irregular manner; numerous persons liable to serve were wholly passed over, while those once levied were retained thirty years and longer beneath the eagles.  The Roman burgess-cavalry now merely vegetated as a sort of mounted noble guard, whose perfumed cavaliers and exquisite high-bred horses only played a part in the festivals of the capital; the so-called burgess-infantry was a troop of mercenaries swept together from the lowest ranks of the burgess-population; the subjects furnished the cavalry and the light troops exclusively, and came to be more and more extensively