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Some Military Inscriptions from Cyrenaica

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 August 2013

R. G. Goodchild  and
J. M. Reynolds
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Extract

In his historical study of Roman Cyrenaica, published in 1942, Professor Pietro Romanelli brought together the rather scanty information then available regarding the military garrisons of the Roman province. The loss of the page of the Notitia Dignitatum listing the units under command of the Dux Libyarum makes us dependent almost entirely on epigraphic evidence; and whilst Cyrenaica has been proved rich in ancient inscriptions, only few of them refer to military matters. In the following paper are published some recently-discovered texts which help, if in somewhat limited fashion, to fill this void.

Type
Research Article
Information
Papers of the British School at Rome , Volume 30 , November 1962 , pp. 37 - 46
Copyright
Copyright © British School at Rome 1962

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References

1 La Cirenaica Romano (Verbania, 1942), ch. XIII p. 191 fGoogle Scholar.

2 When he wrote he did not know that a second text referring to a cohors Hispanorum had been foun at Cyrene to add to the one already known (AE, 1915, 111); it will be published in our forthcoming I(nscriptions of) R(oman) C(yrenaica). Examination of the two confirms the view of K. Kraft, Zur Rekrutierung der Alen und Kohorten am Rhein und Donau (Bern, 1951), p. 178Google Scholar, no. 1510, that the date of this cohort's assignment to Cyrene cannot be much later than the middle of the first century A.D.–letter forms and formulae both point to the same conclusion; Romanelli's attractive thesis, which was also that of Wagner, W., Die Dislocation der römischen Auxiliarformationen in der Provinzen Noricum, Pannonien, Moesien und Dakien von Augustus bis Gallienus (Berlin, 1938), p. 152 f.Google Scholar, that it was during the Jewish revolt of A.D. 115, must be abandoned, If, as suggested by these writers, it is identical with the cohors II Hispanorum Scutata Cyrenaica of CIL, XVI, 110, and if this is identical with the cohors II Hispanorum stationed in Illyricum perhaps as early as A.D. 29 (see Wagner, loc. cit., and CIL, XVI, 2, n. 1) and certainly by A.D. 54, it was probably part of the Augustan garrison of Cyrenaica. It may have been replaced in the later years of Augustus, perhaps by the cohors Lusitanorum which seems to be attested there between A.D. 4 and 14 (see Romanelli, loc. cit.; this text too will appear in IRC); or withdrawn without replacement, since a reduction in the garrison is a reasonable hypothesis after the effective conquest of the Marmaridae by Sulpicius Quirinius.

3 On ephemeral titles of this type, see Bersanetti, G., Athenaeum, XVIII (1940), p. 105 fGoogle Scholar.

4 SEG, IX, 9.

5 We have to thank Mr. Abdulhamid Abdussaid of the Department of Antiquities for making the plan (fig. 1), and Mr. G. D. B. Jones who redrew it for publication.

6 See SEG, IX, I, § 4. It is unlikely that there is any connexion with the civil strategia of Roman Egypt.

7 Carcopino, J., Révue des Études Anciennes, XLVI (1944), p. 94 fCrossRefGoogle Scholar.