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4 - Disciplina and Punishment

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 July 2009

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Summary

INTRODUCTION

The modern or popular image of the Roman army stresses its brutal punishments, such as decimation, in which one out of ten soldiers, selected by lot, were beaten to death by their fellows. In another famous instance, Titus Manlius Torquatus, consul in 340 bc, executed his son, also named Titus Manlius Torquatus, for engaging in combat against his orders. These punishments and other such incidents became an important part of Roman elite cultural tradition, but they beg the question of how Roman military punishment functioned in social terms during the late Republic and Empire. Even punishment requires legitimation, as opposed to pure domination (the imposition of authority by force), which is inefficient.

Roman military punishment required legitimacy in the eyes of the aristocracy, who favored severity, and required legitimacy in the eyes of the soldiers, who had the ultimate recourse of mutiny. In contrast with a fully legal-rational social organization, a traditional system often grants the dominated some customary form of resistance. That the obedience of soldiers should be categorical and absolute was an elite ideal rather than reality.

In the sources discussed here, three divergent modes or strategies of punishment appear. One tradition emphasizes absolute obedience and extreme severity, invoking incidents from the remote past and religious and moral tradition. Though clementia (mercy) was an imperial virtue, the authors of exempla praise lack of clementia toward the army and depict severity as restoring the mos maiorum (ancestral ways).

Type
Chapter
Information
Roman Military Service
Ideologies of Discipline in the Late Republic and Early Principate
, pp. 111 - 152
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2008

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