Peeps at Many Lands: Ancient Rome (Yesterday's Classics) Read Online Free PDF

to our companies. A maniple is made up of two platoons—centuries, they are called, though they only muster 120 men between them. The legion is commanded by a legate, who has under him six tribunes, whose subalterns are the centurions.
    Now see how the men are arranged. They stand in three lines, eight file deep, which go by the names of the Hastati, the Principes, and the Triarii. The last are veteran soldiers, older and perhaps not so agile as the ranks in front, but steady men who can be relied on to stop a rush when the barbarians have broken through by sheer weight. When you hear a Roman commander say, "Ventum est ad Triarios" (It has come to the Triarii), you know that the legion has its back to the wall, and you will see some fighting that is worth talking about. The three lines are not ranged exactly behind one another, but in a kind of chess-board fashion—between each two maniples of the front line there is a space, and in the second line a maniple is stationed so as to cover each of these spaces, while the maniples of the third line, again, are placed like those of the first. Each soldier in the ranks stands in a six-foot square of space, so that he has plenty of room to use his weapons freely.
    As we pass along the line, you had better take a good look at the standards, for Marius has been making a change there, too. It was Romulus who gave the Roman army its first standard, and it was as simple as the army by which it was carried. For it was only a bundle of hay on the end of a pole, and because a bundle of hay was called a "manipulus," each company which marched under the manipulus was called a maniple. In the early Republican days each legion had five different kinds of standard—the eagle, the wolf, the minotaur, the horse, and the bear—but Marius has done away with all this confusion, and now there is just the one kind of standard for the legions. At the top of a pole, grasping an ornamental capital, a silver or golden eagle flaps his broad wings, while a silver thunderbolt is clutched in his talons. Henceforward the world will learn to know and dread the eagles, from farthest Britain to the Caucasus.
    The new standards are regarded with the greatest reverence. In camp, the eagle rests in a special shrine. On the march it is carried by a picked soldier of the legion, the "aquilifer," but the senior centurion of the legion is responsible for its safety, and the legion which should lose its eagle would count itself, and be counted by others, for ever disgraced.
    And now we shall have the chance of seeing, close at hand, the equipment of a legionary soldier. In an encounter with the Cimbri a day or two ago, Sextius Baculus, a private soldier, saved the life of a centurion and another private with the greatest gallantry. Now the wreath of oak-leaves, called the civic crown, which is the highest reward a general can give for such an action, is very seldom given to a private; on this occasion, however, perhaps to give a fillip to his soldiers' valour in view of the coming battle, Marius has decided to bestow it upon the brave legionary before the assembled army. The grim, heavy-faced, rough old general halts with his staff, and at the summons of a staff-officer, handed on by his centurion, Sextius Baculus steps forward from the ranks. We had better take a good look at him, for in person, equipment, and spirit this is the type of the men who made Rome queen of the world.
    He is by no means a big man; you will see far bigger in the ranks of the Cimbri; but he is burly, square-shouldered, and deep-chested, standing solid on his feet, and with bare, muscular arms. The clean-shaven face is as hard and grim as if it were cut out of old oak, and altogether you would prefer to have this sunburnt son of Rome on your side rather than against you. His equipment is as plain and workmanlike as it can well be, for the Roman army is meant not for show, but for business. His head is covered with a perfectly plain round helmet,