=The Camp.=—­The Roman soldier carried a heavy burden—­his arms, his utensils, rations for seventeen days, and a stake, in all sixty Roman pounds.  The army moved more rapidly as it was not encumbered with baggage.  Every time that a Roman army halted for camp, a surveyor traced a square enclosure, and along its lines the soldiers dug a deep ditch; the earth which was excavated, thrown inside, formed a bank which they fortified with stakes.  The camp was thus defended by a ditch and a palisade.  In this improvised fortress the soldiers erected their tents, and in the middle was set the Praetorium, the tent of the general.  Sentinels mounted guard throughout the night, and so prevented the army from being surprised.

=The Order of Battle.=—­In the presence of the enemy the soldiers did not form in a solid mass, as did the Greeks.  The legion was divided into small bodies of 120 men, called maniples because they had for standards bundles of hay.[123] The maniples were ranged in quincunx form in three lines, each separated from the neighboring maniple in such a way as to manoeuvre separately.  The soldiers of the maniples of the first line hurled their javelins, grasped their swords, and began the battle.  If they were repulsed, they withdrew to the rear through the vacant spaces.  The second line of the maniples then in turn marched to the combat.  If it was repulsed, it fell back on the third line.  The third line was composed of the best men of the legion and was equipped with lances.  They received the others into their ranks and threw themselves on the enemy.  The army was no longer a single mass incapable of manoeuvring; the general could form his lines according to the nature of the ground.  At Cynoscephalae, where for the first time the two most renowned armies of antiquity met, the Roman legion and the Macedonian phalanx, the ground was bristling with hills; on this rugged ground the 16,000 Macedonion hoplites could not remain in order, their ranks were opened, and the Roman platoons threw themselves into the gaps and demolished the phalanx.

=Discipline.=—­The Roman army obeyed a rude discipline.  The general had the right of life and death over all his men.  The soldier who quitted his post or deserted in battle was condemned to death; the lictors bound him to a post, beat him with rods, and cut off his head; or the soldiers may have killed him with blows of their staves.  When an entire body of troops mutinied, the general separated the guilty into groups of ten and drew by lot one from every group to be executed.  This was called decimation (from decimus, the tenth).  The others were placed on a diet of barley-bread and made to camp outside the lines, always in danger of surprise from the enemy.  The Romans never admitted that their soldiers were conquered or taken prisoners:  after the battle of Cannae the 3,000 soldiers who escaped the carnage were sent by the senate to serve in Sicily without pay and without honors until the enemy should be expelled from Italy; the 8,000 left in the camp were taken by Hannibal who offered to return them for a small ransom, but the senate refused to purchase them.