The Roman Centurion

What did it take to become a Roman centurion? To command, to punish and to lead from the very front of Rome’s armies? In this episode of The Ancients, Tristan Hughes is joined by Dr Ben Kane to uncover the reality behind one of the most iconic ranks of the ancient world. From the brutal discipline of life on campaign to the prestige and pressure of command, discover how centurions became the backbone of the Roman military. How were they chosen? What kept their soldiers in line? And why were they so crucial to Rome’s success on battlefields across the empire? Watch this episode on our NEW YouTube channel: @TheAncientsPodcast https://www.youtube.com/@TheAncientsPodcast MORE: The Roman Legionary Listen on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-ancients/id1520403988?i=1000627618850 Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/1NYMG6kR42oRGiVps0AH8S?si=f1ad4cd1b83848f9 The Roman Auxiliary Listen on Apple https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/the-ancients/id1520403988?i=1000654062585 Listen on Spotify https://open.spotify.com/episode/3cUQGd0cGCWIWo2tHFPS2m?si=cPW8QDVBRQWAEOkmdh-Jiw Presented by Tristan Hughes. Audio editor is Aidan Lonergan. The producer is Joseph Knight. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff. All music courtesy of Epidemic Sounds The Ancients is a History Hit podcast. Sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries, with a new release every week. Sign up at https://www.historyhit.com/subscribe. You can take part in our listener survey here https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on: https://insights.historyhit.com/history-hit-podcast-always-on Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy https://acast.com/privacy for more information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Tristan Hughes?

  Ever wondered why the Romans were defeated in the Teutoburg Forest? What secrets lie buried in prehistoric Ireland? Or what made Alexander truly great? With a subscription to History Hit, you can explore our ancient past alongside the world's leading historians and archaeologists. You'll also unlock hundreds of hours of original documentaries with a brand new release every single week, covering everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com/subscribe.

• 0:46Tristan Hughes?

  Dawn breaks cold over the Rhine frontier. Mist rises from the river as hundreds of Roman soldiers wake in their turf-walled camp. Marcus, top centurion of the elite first cohort, gears up after 20 years of service. His curved chest armour shines with metal discs from battles won. Leg guards protect his shins, and he grips a vine stump to keep his men in line. His helmet's horsehair crest stands out as he marches past his troops lining up, the second-in-command Optio at his side. Today, they have a grueling 20-mile march with full gear, followed by ditch digging until dark,

• 1:29Tristan Hughes?

  and punishments for any soldier he thought was slacking. Tomorrow, a clash with German raiders awaits. He is the legion's backbone, ready to lead and dish out harsh discipline.

• 1:45Tristan Hughes?

  Welcome to The Ancients. I'm Tristan Hughes, your host, and today we're exploring the story of the Roman centurion, one of the most recognisable military ranks of antiquity that was so critical to the Roman army's success. Our guest is Dr Ben Kane, bestselling author and expert on the Roman military.

• 2:09Tristan Hughes?

  Ben, it is such a pleasure to have you back on the show.

• 2:12Speaker 01

  It's lovely to be here Tristan, thank you.

• 2:13Tristan Hughes?

  Oh, and to talk about the Roman centurion, is it fair to say that they are the real backbone to the Roman army and its great success?

• 2:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, 100%. There were 60 centurions for pretty much the whole Roman period in each legion, and they were the men who led soldiers into battle. And if they did badly, if the centurions died, potentially the battle would go against them. But in desperate situations, they would lead from the front. They were 100%.

• 2:39Tristan Hughes?

  They're a linchpin to the whole system.

• 2:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, definitely. So he had to be able to make decisions in the moment and in extreme situations would, you know, lay down his life if he had to. They were disciplinarians, quite extreme at times as well, but they were also would have been men who rewarded their soldiers for their valor, you know, with recommendations for bravery and so on. Yeah, they were the beating heart of the Roman army.

• 3:03Tristan Hughes?

  It seems like there's quite a lot of information that survives about these figures, whether it's from stories from ancient history or archaeology. So we can actually explore those various different strands that you mentioned just then in quite a lot of detail.

• 3:15Speaker 01

  We can, but we also can't. So a lot of the details are interesting and fascinating and give us a little insight, but often have nothing else to back them up. So frequently the detail is scant, which is really, really frustrating. But I sometimes compare Roman history of all kinds, whether it's military or social or religious or political, telling people, it's like a thousand piece jigsaw where you've got maybe the four corners and some of the edge here and there. And in some areas, you've got all the pieces and other areas, you've got gaps between the pieces. And then there are loads of gaps, huge gaps everywhere else. So that's the really frustrating thing with Roman history. Well, indeed, all ancient history.

• 3:56Tristan Hughes?

  Well, we can explore the stories and then evaluate the quality of the evidence.

• 3:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's fine, yeah.

• 4:00Tristan Hughes?

  And in regards to their position in the Roman army, so hierarchically wise, they're not right at the top of the chain command, but they occupy that sweet spot in the centre that makes them so vital?

• 4:13Speaker 01

  Yes, so a century confusingly wasn't a hundred men, it was only eighty.

• 4:17Tristan Hughes?

  Okay.

• 4:17Speaker 01

  Centurion led those with four junior officers and there were six. Well, we've got to also say, when are we talking about? Because Rome's history went on for more than a thousand years. So most people who are tuning in are probably thinking about the Imperial Army during the period of the Roman Empire being at its greatest expanse from Israel and Syria to Britain in the West and the whole of the Mediterranean world. And in that time, a legion had sixty centurions, six to a cohort, so ten cohorts. Each cohort had six centuries of eighty men. So that was sixty centurions and they were the the main middlemen, almost senior commanders.

• 4:56Speaker 01

  Above them, you had six tribunes and then above that you had the legate and he was the man who commanded the army. Although interestingly, he was sometimes only parachuted in at the very last moment, like Julius Caesar did, made a legate, appointed one the day before a battle. So it's likely that he wasn't actually leading the legion at all, that Caesar was telling the legion what to do. But certainly in situations where they're operating independently, a legate would have been the commander, so.

• 5:22Tristan Hughes?

  And you mentioned there how a centurion is in command of eighty men and not a hundred, slightly confusingly. Do we know why that comes about, why they're called centurions when in fact they just control eighty men?

• 5:33Speaker 01

  We do, but again, it's not guaranteed that this is correct. But one of the most prominent theories is that the word comes from the Latin senum, which is actually refers to an amount of land of which is a hundred yugra, which is a subunit of land. And this would have been in deepest antiquity, an officer would have been chosen according to his social status and his wealth. And the ordinary legionaries and their rank was dependent on their social status and wealth as well. So one of the ancient sources tells us that's where the word century came from. But at no point was a century of men, a hundred men, it was always eighty men. Yet it's a hundred runs of cricket and it's a hundred years, you know, if you're thinking about time, so.

• 6:17Tristan Hughes?

  No, I certainly have to raise that question earlier.

• 6:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:19Tristan Hughes?

  So thank you for explaining it. You mentioned already how the nature of our sources, I said like the edges of a piece of a jigsaw, the edges of a jigsaw and we have all these bits missing. But can you elaborate a little bit on the types of sources that we do have surviving to learn about the Roman centurion?

• 6:35Speaker 01

  So they're fragmentary. Usually you've got two types of sources. You've got the earliest sources we have, and then you've got the later ones who are often potentially just copying what the earlier guys wrote. And you can tell that by looking at what they've written. I'm sure you know this yourself. It doesn't replicate a lot of what was written earlier. So you've got sources like Livy and Plutarch and Arian and other sources, but they're literally all quite fragmentary. One of the best ones for the size, unit size and number of legionaries and information about centurions is Polybius.

• 7:07Tristan Hughes?

  Polybius.

• 7:08Speaker 01

  So he refers to literally the Republican army and what it was like. And then you've got someone like Josephus, who was actually present at Vespasian's war in Judea. And there are quite a lot of nice details from that about Roman soldiers, like a centurion who was chasing some Jews who were running away during, I think it was the siege of Jerusalem, and they were fleeing from him, even though he was on his own, but his hobnails slipped on the paving stones because it was like running on wet tiles with football boots and he fell over and then the Jews came back and killed him. But it was an example of this. They were running from the centurion because he was so scary, but then he ended up dead. And another detail from Josephus is the marching order of a legion, which

• 7:50Speaker 01

  is one of the only examples we've got. So you literally, with Roman sources, you take what you can get and you've got to treat some with a grain of salt, particularly if they're hundreds of years after the events are describing. But when you've literally got only those pieces of a jigsaw and maybe some evidence from archaeology or from statuary or steles, you're literally, you know, it's like trying to assemble an Ikea piece of furniture without having the guide.

• 8:17Tristan Hughes?

  And so there's a funerary monument.

• 8:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, sorry. The funerary monuments, which frequently in the background of the big figure, you've got lots of soldiers and so on, and maybe details of military equipment and so on. And people zone in and they're, oh, is that a centurion's helmet? Or is that an enemy helmet? And literally, you can have people, maybe actors who are, you know, passion-led people, but are really rigorous in their detail of how accurate their replica equipment is, they will be using. Images like that from all around the Roman Empire and all the museums that they can get pictures from to make an accurate helmet, you know, like this or whatever.

• 8:52Tristan Hughes?

  Well, certainly, we're not going to avoid the helmet in the room here. We'll certainly delve into these details in a bit. But also I want to pick up, you mentioned kind of those two important literary sources there, Polybius and then Josephus. So there's about, there's a few hundred years between the two, isn't there? So Polybius, second century B C, Josephus, first century A D. And once again, that that reinforces the point earlier that you made that this is a long period of time that we're talking about with the Roman centurion and their their role, their equipment, everything would have evolved over that period too.

• 9:24Speaker 01

  Oh, completely. So I give a talk on everyday life in the Roman army and one of the first slides I've got is a picture of two men at arms from a hundred years' war, who fought the French, interestingly for a hundred and seventeen years, not a hundred years, but and then British infantrymen from World War Two. And I say, six hundred years of history separates these two soldiers and their equipment's completely different. Well, Rome was nominally founded in seven, five, three B C. I mean, probably a bit later, actually, but it didn't fall again nominally until four seventy six A D. And that's nearly twelve hundred years of history. So to suggest that Roman soldiers looked and dressed the same, or their unit size or command structure was the same, it's, it's, it's, you know, it didn't happen. And so

• 10:05Speaker 01

  you know, the earliest Roman soldiers looked and dressed like Greek warriors because of the heavy Greek influence. And then by the late empire, I mean, they looked totally different again with spears as the main weapon, not swords and massive helmets and round shields, not a scutum and so on. But the centurion did last a very, very long time. And indeed, it wasn't until the very late Roman Empire that we have some evidence that it may have changed, but also the titles of the centurions. So within the cohort, the six centurions in a cohort. Listeners may be aware that the Republican legions, for example, when they were, when the Romans were fighting Hannibal, there were three types of legionary. The first rank were called the hastati, the second rank called the principes, the third rank called the triarii, and they were dressed and armed differently.

• 10:49Speaker 01

  And there were centurions of those, often in double century form, which is called a maniple. And the names of those centurions survived for hundreds of years. So even in an imperial legion, the six centurions in a cohort were called the peles prior, as in the first spear, and that would have been the, a centurion of the triarii, the peles posterior, the second centurion of the triarii, and then the principes prior and the principes posterior, and the hastatus prior and the hastatus posterior. So they were, hundreds of years after those forms of soldier disappeared, they were still known as that.

• 11:27Tristan Hughes?

  Real history lesson as you're learning.

• 11:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, I don't use those in my books because it would just, I mean, the, the Roman names ending in US and all the little Latin words that I like to weave in, it's, it just gets too confusing if you're doing that kind of thing.

• 11:39Tristan Hughes?

  But it's interesting, so it sounds like this idea of a centurion in the Roman mindset in a Roman army does seem to stem back quite a long way. I mean, do we have any ideas around the origins of the creation of this position of centurion? Could it once again be influenced by the Greeks and maybe a position like the strategos or something like that?

• 11:56Speaker 01

  Potentially, I mean, I'm not an ancient historian by profession, potentially, but it's not, I mean, the origin that we think is, is a Latin word and the word tribune, which comes from that time as well, that comes from originally tribe. And the word legio comes from the Latin word, which means a levy. Because, as again, as your viewers might realise, during the Republic, it was your civic duty to fight for Rome if there was a war. You literally presented yourself on the plane of Mars outside the walls of Rome and you were put into the army according to your wealth and social status. And the centurion would have been just one of those men who had more potentially combat experience, but they did exist from those early days. Yeah.

• 12:38Tristan Hughes?

  And if we can explore two key periods for a centurion now and to kind of get a sense of what they looked like, what we should think of when someone mentions the Roman centurion. And I guess we should do it alongside those two key literary sources that you mentioned earlier. So Polybius, first of all, so that's the time of the wars against Carthage, isn't it? And then Josephus in the early imperial period a bit later. So if we focus on the time of Polybius, first of all, in the Republic, what do we know about the Roman centurion at that time and how he would have looked?

• 13:13Speaker 01

  Very little, very little. We know that he wore a mail shirt, like two of his types of soldiers, the Brincabes and the Triari. We know that he probably carried a shield like they did, a scutum. Now, the Republican shield was a good bit larger than most of your viewers are used to. It was curved top and bottom. So it was a good six inches, fifteen centimeters taller, top and bottom. So if you're an average height Roman, which is five foot six, one point six five meters, it literally came, comes up to about here. So he carried one of those. When you get on to the subject of helmets, I mean, this is probably one of the most iconic images of Rome in the world today. Most people of

• 13:56Speaker 01

  any knowledge of history will say, that's a centurion's helmet. What's curious is that there are very few images of centurions wearing these. Tombstones of centurions, which are quite numerous, they're not wearing their helmets because the viewers wanted them to see their face. And there are images of centurions wearing other helmets. Now, the earlier ones, they potentially didn't have transverse crested. They may have just had like a top knot of horsehair, or they may even, we've got at least one example of a centurion with a forward to back crest as well.

• 14:28Tristan Hughes?

  Okay.

• 14:29Speaker 01

  Which, again, a lot of your viewers will associate with an optio, the second in command, but that's from later in the, in the period.

• 14:35Tristan Hughes?

  Oh, is that kind of a distinguishing factor between the horizontal and the vertical?

• 14:39Speaker 01

  Yes, but it's not entirely certain that optios had them. They may have had them. But you know, reenactors, that's the way they've gone. So this is what increasingly that's what we think. And then you get textbooks with images like that. And they just, it's funny how these images just get anchored tighter and tighter into people's awareness until it's quite hard to actually say, well, actually, it's not necessarily based on a huge amount of evidence. It may have been something else. People go, no, no, no, I've seen, you know, whatever program or.

• 15:08Tristan Hughes?

  But from the time of Hannibal Barker, I mean, this type of helmet we have in front of us now with that kind of great guard.

• 15:14Speaker 01

  No, that was, that's imperial. So the helmets were a lot, sorry, helmets were a lot simpler. Most soldiers wore a montefortino.

• 15:22Tristan Hughes?

  Right. What is this?

• 15:23Speaker 01

  That is a very simple bronze bowl helmet. Again, your viewers would be familiar with, with a very short neck guard and, and a complete cheek piece, unlike this one, which has a cheek piece, which allows you to hear. In other words, the, and I can tell you from wearing that earlier helmet, when your cheek flaps are down, you can't hear what the man beside you is saying, let alone the centurion 20 meters away. So they would have worn one of those. They may have worn Apolo Corinthian helmets. Again, the history on that's not great. Some people think the Triari wore that, maybe centurions did. It may well have been quite individual as well. If you look at any army in the field today, you look at pictures of soldiers in World War Two, when you're in the field, you do what fits, you do what

• 16:07Speaker 01

  works. And actually, your officers don't mind that much. But centurions did like to stand out. So any of them that had awards for valor, and these would have existed in the Republican period, would have had phalerae, which were literally medals, Roman equivalent of medals, worn in a leather harness on the chest. And you could hold up to nine. So in three rows of three. And they were frequently of silver or gold, but they could even be ceramic or glass. I've seen glass ones in museums in Germany, frequently with images like the Medusa or, or something like that, or a god. And these would have advertised the centurion's bravery and his prominence to the enemy. He would have carried a sword. And during the Republican period that we're talking about, the fighting sword of the legionary

• 16:50Speaker 01

  was the gladius hispaniensis, or the Spanish sword, which was 25 centimeters or 10 inches longer than the sword most people think of as Roman legionaries using, called the Spanish sword, because it was probably nicked from Spanish tribesmen who'd been fighting for the Carthaginians in the first Punic War, and an immensely successful weapon, not just at thrusting or stabbing, but also for slashing.

• 17:14Speaker 01

  There's a quote from just after the Second Punic War, when the Romans invaded Macedon, about the Macedonian Philancists being so scared of the gladius Hispaniensis that it could remove arms, legs and heads with ease.

• 17:28Tristan Hughes?

  Wow.

• 17:28Speaker 01

  I love to try and prove theories. I didn't go and attack someone with a sword, but I'm a vet, so I know what a blade does to flesh. And I started a thread on now defunct, sadly, Roman Army Talk forum, which used to be a website, it's now just on Facebook. And I started a thread about, has anyone ever seen someone killed with a blade? In off-topic. And it went dead for six months. And I loved giving, telling this in schools because the students' eyes are on sticks. The thread went dead for six months or so, and then I got a reply, it'd been answered. I mean, I was straight on the computer. Anyway, there was an old American guy, now old compared to me, because he was in Vietnam. He was in the Vietnam War in the sixties. And back then, when you were out in the jungle, the US Army, apparently, certainly, maybe

• 18:13Speaker 01

  this was early days, they didn't supply the soldiers with machetes. So they used to buy their own in the local towns and they'd just have them, you know, hanging on their belts. And they didn't, they'd come in from close, open country, they'd been in contact with the Vietcong, they'd be, they were all knackered, they were lying around in jungle clearing, you know, literally just zonked. And one of his buddies went nuts, didn't, no one knew it. The guy just got up, took out his machete, walked across the clearing and chopped one of the heads of their other buddies off. And he said it was one chop of a cheap, cheap Chinese steel machete casually swung, and the guy's head just jumped off his shoulders. So his answer was 100%, you know, trained legionaries who would come straight from

• 18:58Speaker 01

  Zama to Macedonia, they would have been chopping their heads off. So to me, that made the source, you know, much more likely to be true because oftentimes I've noticed as a non-academic, I don't know whether you experience this, sometimes academics will say, oh, well, the Romans couldn't have done that, or the Egyptians couldn't have done that, it's way too difficult. And then they find that they did. A good example is Elysia. People used to say that there's no way Julius Caesar built a double circumvallation. You know, he was attacking Elysia, built a wall around it, then the 200,000 Gauls came to attack him, so he didn't run away, he built another wall, sandwiching himself in the middle and still won the battle. And everybody said he couldn't do it, and then they found it in the ground. So, yeah. Went off topic there, but it was fun.

• 19:42Tristan Hughes?

  I'm very happy to be here to do this once in a while, Ben. And it's also great because, yes, the classic idea is the kind of stabbing sword, isn't it?

• 19:49Speaker 01

  And that's realistically probably what it was. When I'm giving the talks that I do, I draw the sword and I hold up the blade and I say, you only need to stick about this much of this into somebody and he's done.

• 20:01Tristan Hughes?

  About fifteen centimetres?

• 20:02Speaker 01

  Yeah, sixteen, you know, what we see in films is totally skewed and totally inaccurate. What we think humans are capable of. I know a thoracic surgeon and, you know, if someone gets stabbed today in the abdomen, they're down and bleeding out and they're not doing anything else unless they're superhuman. So you do expose yourself if you hack with a sword. It is far more efficient just to stab somebody and keep yourself behind the shield. So they probably did that most of the time, but they could hack when they needed to.

• 20:40Speaker 02

  As the saying goes, if these walls could talk. And on the Betwixt the Sheets podcast, we make it our business to discover what happened behind closed doors and even more importantly, in the bedrooms of people all throughout history. Kings, queens, mistresses, servants and everyone in between. We also get up close and personal with medieval aphrodisiacs, lethal Victorian makeup routines and look at the scandalous lives of beloved children's authors. Nothing is off limits. In other words, it's the best bits of history with me, Dr Kate Lister. Listen to Betwixt the Sheets, The History of Sex, Scandal and Society, twice a week, every week, wherever it is that you get your podcasts.

• 21:23Speaker 02

  Brought to you by the award-winning network, History Hit.

• 21:42Tristan Hughes?

  And I know it's a bit of a generalisation, but if we imagine that the centurions are usually the figures with the more battle hardened experience, you know, and if they're using those same weapons as the legionaries, I mean, they're probably even more capable of using them in force in the front ranks. I mean, imagine one of Julius Caesar's centurions standing out, you know, with the same equipment, but something showing them, making them distinct from the rest to show their rank. And yeah, being quite a sight for, for an enemy, you know, to come up against. But shall we turn to the classic image of the centurion today? When they're wearing helmets like this?

• 22:19Speaker 01

  So that's an Imperial Gaelic. That is the standard helmet of the Roman legionary in the first and second centuries AD.

• 22:27Tristan Hughes?

  And can you describe the features of it?

• 22:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, sure. It's got brows here, basically look like eyebrows. It's got a guard to protect the forehead from a blow from a weapon there. You commonly hear this being referred to in all kinds of for as being something that was brought in to protect against the Dacian phalcs, which is a scythe like brutal weapon from the Dacian tribes in Eastern Europe, which was wielded two handed and would split one of these, no problem. But it's not based on very much evidence. So it may have been brought in for that, but possibly not. But it's certainly to strengthen the helmet. I was very worried when, if you touch this, it will fall down. So it's got various circular gilded discs. It's got a really prominent earpiece for your ear. So you can hear what the centurion is saying. It's got a mount

• 23:13Speaker 01

  here for the crest. So even if an ordinary soldier was wearing it, he could mount a crest, which they potentially did on parade and so on.

• 23:21Tristan Hughes?

  Oh yes, look at that.

• 23:22Speaker 01

  And it's got a loop on the back of the neck guard. The neck guard's really big. It's about four inches, about 12 centimeters in depth. And that's to protect you from blows from behind. And it's got a loop for a strap for wearing it around your neck. Because they're really heavy. They were about two kilos, four and a half pounds. So they're actually quite uncomfortable to wear when you're marching. And there are loads of images, most famous of which is Trajan's Column, shows the legionaries marching along with their helmets hanging around their necks. And it's actually quite comfortable place. And when you're doing hadrons, well, you can put your modern water bottle in there so that people don't see it. And your mobile phone. The feathered crest is obviously for the centurion. As I mentioned earlier, we actually

• 24:03Speaker 01

  haven't got a huge number of images of of centurions wearing them, probably only a handful. And we've got other images of them of them wearing front to back crests or even just top knot crests. But they did wear these and they, we don't know whether they were painted the feathers, but they quite likely were. And that would have been quite potentially cohort by cohort, maybe even century by century, but that would have been probably too complicated. But there may have been identifying cohort one to 10.

• 24:30Tristan Hughes?

  Right. So distinctive plumes on them, distinctive feathers.

• 24:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, for sure, for sure. The Romans lived life in vivid technicolor. When you go to Pompeii, you go to a Roman museum and you see bare pieces of stone and so on. It's it, we think of the Romans in black and white, but modern science, using fractured light and other techniques and and pieces of wall and fresco that have been buried underground, sometimes where there's no oxygen, traces of paint can be found on those statues and the steels, for example. And so what has happened in the last 15 to 20 years, which is really exciting, is you get accurate reconstruction, painted images of things like this, or Roman soldiers, or emperors and so on. So yeah, it's highly likely. We know from the Noticia Dignata

• 25:15Speaker 01

  from the fourth century A D, which was the only imagery of Roman shields that we've got with different shield, you know, army units.

• 25:22Tristan Hughes?

  Beautiful source, yeah.

• 25:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, beautiful source, but it's 400 years too late. But you can infer from that, that legions might have had different emblems and therefore so might centurions. And they were very brave men, but they were peacocks too. They were there to be seen. And just like a any officer in their dress uniform, they would have wanted to look good. And if these were painted in various whatever patterns, red and white, I mean, you see a lot of the reenactors now, particularly Caesar, I can't pronounce his surname, sorry, Caesar Vennisky, I think it is, from Legion 21 Rappax, he's kind of led the way in the world on the research of these. And if you see images of him, I mean, he looks, he looks amazing. And he's got blue and white feathers and red and white.

• 26:02Tristan Hughes?

  Yeah, yeah. Because it's interesting, once again, the common idea is that they all have their red plumes and like red is the big colour of.

• 26:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, again, again, you know, that's open to conjecture. We have paintings from Pompeii with soldiers in red. We know the generals wore red cloaks and generals wore red boots and they had a red sash. But we also know Roman legions wore blue, maybe Marines in the Navy did. We also know that ochre was a very common colour, but certainly blues or reds or who knows. Anyone that tells you that they know this centurion or that legion had this colour, they're lying. And the thing is, you find them out there, so.

• 26:39Tristan Hughes?

  Just describing as well to our audience who are listening, who aren't looking at it, but I'll also make sure that we get some lovely pictures of this stunning helmet that you've brought in for us today, Ben. I mean, the feathers, they're black and white feathers that you've chosen for this particular helmet and are they glued in to the top?

• 26:54Speaker 01

  No, as you saw outside the studio, they're not yet. So it was this mount was made for me specially. I know so many reenactress now, when I need something, I don't go and look for it. I just ask some of my reenactors, somebody made this for me. And they sent it to me in pieces because that was, you can't send that in the post, all the feathers will get broken. So I think the feathers, they have to be glued in because they're forever falling out and that wouldn't look good if I was about to go on parade or something. So, yeah.

• 27:19Tristan Hughes?

  And is it also very much conjecture around types of feathers they would have used?

• 27:23Speaker 01

  Yes, because we don't have any surviving examples. I believe the only surviving example of a possible centurion's crest is one in a museum on Hadrian's Wall, which is horsehair. Otherwise, they haven't survived, no, so.

• 27:37Tristan Hughes?

  But horsehair, I guess you can understand the logic behind that, especially, you know, with all the horse barracks and the stables along Hadrian's Wall and places like that.

• 27:45Speaker 01

  But, you know, again, experimental archaeology, when you walk in Hadrian's Wall and you're wearing one of them and it rains, the horsehair falls down like this and you look like you've got a central parting and they do not look good. Whereas that wouldn't happen with feathers.

• 27:57Tristan Hughes?

  Right, yes.

• 27:59Speaker 01

  I love experimental archaeology. I've learned, I've done Hadrian's Wall twice in full Roman gear and the amount I learned is off the scale with just reference to the kit and what it feels like and so on.

• 28:10Tristan Hughes?

  Always bang the drum for experimental archaeology and doing this stuff because, you know, they're at the forefront of learning more about, especially when, what we're talking about now, the kit

• 28:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 28:18Tristan Hughes?

  of a Roman centurion. And if we go down the body from the head, let's say in the Imperial period, you've got this stunning helmet. Further down, can we imagine them wearing similar types of armour to the everyday legionary? A classic banded iron armor, the segmentata pants.

• 28:32Speaker 01

  No, no, interestingly, they did, they didn't wear that. It's called the lorica segmentata. It sounds Latin. It's a modern name. We don't know what the Romans called it. They called male the lorica hamata. And interestingly, when the soldiers gradually moved over to the plated armor, the segmentata, the centurions did not. So from the early Princape, the centurions looked different in uniform, not just when they were wearing their helmet. So male shirt is actually very effective protection against weapons. You wear a padded tunic underneath it, not just straight over the, the ordinary tunic. And together they're like a stab proof vest. If you have someone who's very powerful and they ram a spear into it, they might break through, especially if it's

• 29:13Speaker 01

  not complete ring mail, but it's actually still very, very effective armor. So, and then sometimes it had doubling over the shoulders as well. But again, that would have not necessarily been all the time. Then they would have worn, so they would have had a very simple tunic. They would have had a focale or a neck, neck kerchief. That is because the, the open necks of Roman tunics are really wide. So your straps rub on your bare skin. I know this again from experimentation, if you don't have a neck kerchief. And then, but then wear their, their tunic, padded tunic, male shirt, which goes down to just basically below groin level and then a metal belt. And the metal belt was basically the same as a soldier's, but often more ornate.

• 29:55Speaker 01

  And this was a very distinctive feature of a Roman soldier. And so if you see someone in a motorway service station in this country or wherever you live in the world, and they're in combats and boots and they've just got out of a jeep, you know, they're in the army. If you saw a man in off dress, if you like, in the street, in the town, in anywhere in the empire, with it, wearing a metal belt with its jingly groin guard that goes jingle, jingle, jingle. You heard that noise. We have a Roman poem of a man standing in a shop, hearing that noise in the street and knowing a soldier is walking by.

• 30:26Tristan Hughes?

  Right. It wasn't distinguishing that this is a centurion, right? This is just a soldier, right?

• 30:31Speaker 01

  But again, Roman soldiers liked to individualize their kit and they would sometimes actually use precious metals. Say in the, in the scabbard of their sword. So a centurion may have had a really expensive sword scabbard and may have had a much more expensive, he may have had silver or whatever in his, in his belt and so on. And he then would have potentially worn a chest harness with those falere that I mentioned, the rewards for bravery, and he would have had a pugia or a dagger. He wore his sword on the, on the left or on the right, depending on the time. But often on the left, which is different to the soldiers, soldiers wore it on the right and drew with the right, which was possibly because that's quicker to get out from behind your shield, which is rather big rather than drawing it across your body.

• 31:16Speaker 01

  But for whatever reason, whether that was to do with the rank, we don't know. But centurions wore theirs on a baldric, which is a leather strap from the shoulder to the hip, not attached to the belt like the soldiers did. And then they would have had caligay, studded sandals or potentially boots. Officers tended to wear boots. And I mean, if you're in a muddy country like Britain, you're going to wear boots.

• 31:36Tristan Hughes?

  But they still have the hobnails on underneath.

• 31:37Speaker 01

  They would have still had the hobnails as well. We've got examples of the hobnails being sharpened as well. So imagine that in muddy ground or on someone's head in the middle of a battle. Quick segue into the laces of Roman boots and sandals. This would have applied to centurions as well. I only found this out recently, fortunately, never put it as a mistake in my books because I didn't, it just didn't happen. But all Roman sandals that have been found with or boots that have been found with laces, they were laced at the back.

• 32:05Tristan Hughes?

  Okay.

• 32:05Speaker 01

  Because the laces are really long. When they're undone, they come up to your knee and that's possibly in case I reckon the leather parts. And you've then got enough to make, you know, you don't have to replace it.

• 32:14Tristan Hughes?

  Yeah.

• 32:15Speaker 01

  But when they're new, before they've parted, they come up to your knee. So you loop them around your, the bottom of your leg, loads of times. And then you lace them at the back, presumably so you don't stand on one end in a battle.

• 32:25Tristan Hughes?

  Ah, gosh, funny little things like that.

• 32:27Speaker 01

  Little details like that. So when I'm, when I'm, again, when I'm doing a talk, I, I say to people, what do you think of my, and no one ever guesses it. But we haven't come yet to the, the vine stick, which I knew you would.

• 32:39Tristan Hughes?

  Ben, well, I was gonna say, I have two other bits of equipment which have become so linked to centurions today that I want to talk about. You've preempted the vine stick, but I'm going to save that for the last one.

• 32:49Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 32:49Tristan Hughes?

  Because the other one that has become big, and we talked about this before, it's the whistle, Ben.

• 32:55Speaker 01

  I don't get started on the whistle. This is because of this TV series, Rome.

• 33:00Tristan Hughes?

  HBO Rome, yes, there's that famous scene right at the beginning where one of the centurions is using a whistle in battle. Is there any evidence that centurions could well have carried whistles in battle?

• 33:12Speaker 01

  No.

• 33:12Tristan Hughes?

  Okay. Moving on.

• 33:14Speaker 01

  I I have a Roman whistle. Shame I didn't bring it with me. I have a Roman whistle. The original found in the Legere Fortis, Regensburg in Austria, which has a little lead square on the end for scratching your name on it. So it doesn't get lost. And so it was found in a military context, but there is no documentary evidence at all for whistles. They commanded by the voice at close quarters and by trumpets and bugles at distance. And each century had musicians and each each legion had musicians as well. So there's no evidence. It looks great, but we we can't prove it. And so one of the things that I'm constantly saying to my readers or people I'm talking to is just because we want it to have existed and it makes common sense that it might have existed,

• 33:57Speaker 01

  doesn't mean it did exist. You've got to have some evidence or else it's just a theory. And so often today, in whatever period we're talking about, people want something to be true. And and if enough people talk about it, it almost becomes a fact. But we've got no evidence. So it's possible, but it's also possible they did loads of other things.

• 34:16Tristan Hughes?

  Don't completely kick it out of the water, but yes, exactly. Yeah. But what we can talk about a bit better is the vine stick. And so describe the vine stick to us.

• 34:27Speaker 01

  So the vine stick, it's basically a piece of the trunk of a vine plant which grows grapes. And it was the symbol of a Roman centurion. It's generally about two feet, two and a half feet long. Thicker at one end than the other and curved and polished. So it's quite curving, if you like, and was a symbol of office, but also used as a weapon of punishment.

• 34:50Tristan Hughes?

  So slightly smaller than the average staff, more like a baton, I guess?

• 34:54Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. But so an umbrella, thinking of umbrella, it's probably slightly shorter than an umbrella, but without the curved handle. So this wasn't something that was polished and kept on the mantelpiece. The centurion would have kept it with him pretty much all the time, not in battle, but certainly in camp and when he was training his men. And I mean, it's it's still used today in that up until very recently, British Army officers had what was called a swagger stick. And that's, you know, basically a descendant of the vine stick. So this was something that he could beat his men with whenever he felt like. Like it and you've got to try and take off your modern spectacles, your, your modern, put away your modern values. The world was just a totally different place. When you were being trained by a centurion to be a Roman soldier,

• 35:35Speaker 01

  you swore your oath of allegiance to the emperor, your physical characteristics were recorded because there were no cameras, your scars and so on. You signed X for your name because you probably couldn't write for, to sign up anywhere between sixteen and twenty five years. And then you were handed over to your centurion and he was like, your mum, your dad, your boss at work, the biggest nightclub bouncer you've ever seen and God almighty rolled into one. When he said run, you said yes, sir. When he said jump, you said how high, sir. And when he said charge those men and kill them, you said yes, sir. And you didn't. If you didn't, he beat you with his vine stick. When he was training you, this was the school of hard knocks, you know? If you got injured, you would be kicked to your feet again.

• 36:17Speaker 01

  And if you said you needed to go to see the surgeon, he said, you'd better not be shamming because I will literally beat you unconscious. We know of at least four offences that the centurion could execute his men for. But before he got to that, he would, he would encourage his men with his stick, whether it was just tapping them on the helmet or banging them on the shoulders or literally beating them. And the most extreme example of that, which I'm sure you're, you know, the guy, his nickname in, in Latin was Cato Altaram. So this is a German, a centurion in Germany, I should say, in the first century A D, who was so brutal that his nickname was Cato Altaram, which means bring me another. In other words, he was so fond of breaking his stick on men's backs, he would click his fingers and say,

• 37:01Speaker 01

  Cato Altaram, and his men would just get him another. So nobody would stop him beating a man unconscious. And, and as I mentioned, four offences that we know of at least that he could execute a man for. And they were falling asleep on sentry duty, running away from the enemy in battle, stealing from a comrade or taking your sword off while digging a ditch, which means that you can't fight immediately if the enemy attacks.

• 37:26Tristan Hughes?

  Because that one feels a bit less. I don't want to say important, but compared to the three previous that you mentioned, it was a bit more like.

• 37:33Speaker 01

  Yes and no, but so, so let me put it in into a situation. Roman legion on the march, enemy territory, they come to the end of the day. And again, your listeners and viewers will know they dug out a camp every day. So half the legion acts as a screen, half the legion digs. The guys that are digging, say there's a sudden attack that broke through the screen. They've got to be ready to fight.

• 37:53Tristan Hughes?

  Even if you saw it just a few meters away.

• 37:55Speaker 01

  So the example we have, again, these are the, when we got to reference you at the beginning about the things we know. They're only often just little vignettes that we have, but there's a scene that is described from the second century B C, which is a Roman legion digging out a camp. And the legate or one of his tribunes is riding along the ditch on his horse. And he comes across a sword lying on the side of the ditch. And he says, whose is this sword? And this unfortunate soldier puts his hand up and he's taken out and executed on the spot.

• 38:28Tristan Hughes?

  Wow.

• 38:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 38:29Tristan Hughes?

  Wow.

• 38:29Speaker 01

  So, and, and the, the form of death was not usually like that for the centurion. It was the fustuarium.

• 38:35Tristan Hughes?

  Nice.

• 38:35Speaker 01

  Which is, if it's a contubernium of men, and I've just had a chat with an academic about this. Oh, the contubernium wouldn't have served on the line together. They wouldn't have been on sentry duty together. Okay, so we, we don't have time for that, but let's say it's these eight guys who were on sentry duty together and one fell asleep. While you seven are going to beat him to death with sticks.

• 38:54Tristan Hughes?

  To death.

• 38:55Speaker 01

  In front of the rest of the century. Hang on a sec, I'm in a really bad mood because I was up all night on the wall checking up on you guys. Beat him to death with your fists because that takes longer.

• 39:06Tristan Hughes?

  I was going to ask, like, with the centurions, were they always the ones who would deliver out the punishment? It sounds like there sometimes they would give it actually to the, the poor victim's mates.

• 39:18Speaker 01

  Yes, they do with it from those formal punishments we do, but I have no doubt. I mean, we're, we're talking about a world where infant mortality was potentially 50% by the age of infant child mortality. 50% by the age of five. We're talking about people being used to killing their own chickens, to seeing animals slaughtered outside temples, to seeing crucifixes on the side of the road, to going to gladiator fights. Life was really brutal. And when you were a soldier, you, you know, you basically would get very rough justice, there'd be, nobody would stop the Centurion. So I have no hesitation in saying, if a Centurion felt that a soldier had done something severe enough and they executed him on the spot, I don't think many senior officers would have done very much about it.

• 40:00Tristan Hughes?

  That was the question I was going to ask. Do you feel then that Centurions had a lot of freedom over their particular unit, over their particular soldiers? And it's not like they could petition the Legate higher up if they felt that they were, it was like undeserved?

• 40:15Speaker 01

  No, I don't think so at all. I don't think so at all. The Centurions, interestingly, we didn't mention it, but it's worth mentioning, were ranked one to sixty. So in other words, the sixth Centurion of the tenth cohort was the lowest ranked.

• 40:26Tristan Hughes?

  It's a hierarchy, there's a hierarchy.

• 40:27Speaker 01

  Within each cohort, it goes all the way up. The first Centurions, sorry, the Centurions of the first cohort were the most senior. They were known as the Premier Dines. They were more senior than anybody in, in the Legion. But even if you complained to a more senior Centurion, again, unless you, this Centurion had done something really unjust, I don't think there would have been any comeback at all. They were a judge, jury and executioner, quite likely, in my opinion.

• 40:57Speaker 02

  As the saying goes, if these walls could talk. And on the Betwixt the Sheets podcast, we make it our business to discover what happened behind closed doors, and even more importantly, in the bedrooms of people all throughout history. Kings, queens, mistresses, servants, and everyone in between. We also get up close and personal with medieval aphrodisiacs, lethal Victorian makeup routines, and look at the scandalous lives of beloved children's authors. Nothing is off limits. In other words, it's the best bits of history with me, Dr. Kate Lister. Listen to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society, twice

• 41:38Speaker 02

  a week, every week, wherever it is that you get your podcasts. Brought to you by the award-winning network, History Hit.

• 42:00Tristan Hughes?

  Also, keep on that hierarchy a bit a little more, because centurions, you also have them commanding the auxiliary units, so the non-Roman citizen units. Did that hierarchy extend to them as well? If you were a Roman centurion commanding legionaries, would you see yourself as superior to a centurion commanding a group of auxiliaries?

• 42:18Speaker 01

  A hundred percent. I mean, generally, the only Roman officers in auxiliary cohorts were the men commanding the cohort. The centurions would have been auxiliary centurions, and they were very definitely, yeah. They were very definitely inferior. I mean, Romans were really quite racist. And that's the reason auxiliaries manned Hadrian's Wall, not real legionaries, because, you know, the less valuable soldiers, you put them nearer the danger, as it were. So, not to say there wouldn't have been a working relationship, and many of them might have been friends if they were on campaign together, but there was a definite social difference between auxiliaries and citizen legionaries.

• 42:53Tristan Hughes?

  But you can imagine, can't you, the soldiers who are under the command of that particular centurion, who are being taught, you know, and making sure you avoid those horrific punishments. Can you also imagine that individual soldiers would have gained more potentially loyalty to the centurion that they were serving than actually the person right at the top of the legion?

• 43:16Speaker 01

  Yes, yes. I mean, you can think of someone like Julius Caesar, who led an army for seven years in Gaul, and they won, and they won, and they won, and he gave them amazing rewards. I mean, after Elisa, he gave every legionary in his army a slave. They took 50,000 slaves. Here you go, guys. But certainly, the centurion would have been the man to whom you owed most of your loyalty, because he didn't just beat you and train you. You know, he quite, again, this is just common sense. I can't prove it, but it is, from what we know. We know of centurions referring to their men as "boys", "my boys", you know, like "my lads". So they would, and in desperate situations like Gargovia, where Julius Caesar lost 300 legionaries or 700 legionaries, but 46 centurions.

• 43:58Tristan Hughes?

  This is the battle that he loses, isn't it?

• 43:59Speaker 01

  Yeah, the one that no one talks about in Asterix. Yeah, so. But that massively high percentage of centurions and very little else is known about the battle. But that tells you they were leading from the front. And so you just talk to any serving members of military today have been in combat. You know, you that you have to support your mates. And if your officer is is putting himself in danger to help you, you feel duty bound to do the same. And if you survived, he's going to buy you a round of drinks. He's maybe going to put you up for for an award for valor, whether that's first man over the wall. These are Roman awards or whether it's saving the life of a fellow citizen, things like that. Or a gold bracelet or something like that, or a silver bracelet.

• 44:39Speaker 01

  So and he would quite possibly have been involved in the in the, you know, when they were getting their pay, which is three times a year there to, I don't know, but they would have loved and feared their centurions. And there were bad ones, but there were probably some really amazing ones as well.

• 44:54Tristan Hughes?

  Very charismatic leaders. And so that's how they're expected to act on the battlefield is it's they're in the front ranks. They're leading their men. As also you said earlier, they're peacocking at the same time. They are standing out. They are showing like Alexander the Great's officers, you know, they are with the they're at the front ranks and risking in the lives of the men who they've tortured over.

• 45:13Speaker 01

  Well, Alexander famously used to lead his own charges. I mean, he was nuts and lead his own cavalry charges and and survive and just crazy.

• 45:20Tristan Hughes?

  But did centurions also have the freedom to command their particular kind of their centuries in battle? Maybe they've presumably they've received their main orders from HQ is what they're supposed to do. But if they see, as you know, all those best plans don't often go to plan in the heat of battle. If they could see that the tide was turning or that a new opportunity was rising. Did the centurions also have the freedom in battle to make adjustments?

• 45:50Speaker 01

  Possibly. I can think of an example of an adjustment being made in a Roman battle, but it was a more senior officer than than than a centurion during the Battle of Canos Kefale, which was when the Macedonian phalanx came up against the Roman legions, which were far more maneuverable than the phalanx. Just to try and quickly paraphrase it, the phalanx was coming down a hillside and it wasn't, the two halves of it were not, didn't have a common front rank. There was, one was slightly in front of the other.

• 46:20Tristan Hughes?

  Yeah, think of it like a big wall of spears, but you know, part of that wall of spears is not in the same.

• 46:25Speaker 01

  And there were, there were Roman soldiers advancing to meet the part of the phalanx that was behind the other part. And when they were doing so, one of the senior officers, I think he might have been a Tribune, noticed that the flank of the part of the phalanx that he wasn't attacking, which he was now alongside, didn't have light infantry protecting its side, which it needed. And they were therefore completely exposed and he turned his manibles, only maybe a thousand or two thousand men, and they smashed into the side of the Macedonian phalanx and won the battle. So centurions may have done that, but I'm not, I've never read of an example. Again, I haven't read all Roman histories, but I've read a lot and pretty much every

• 47:09Speaker 01

  book about the Roman army, it's been written in the last thirty or forty years and I can't think of an exact example. I can think of individual examples of centurions, you know, leading from the front. So for example, the battle at Boudicca was defeated at, which may have been near Saint Albans, north of London. A very outnumbered Roman army, the general picked the terrain with a hill at his back, woods at each side, open ground in front. British tribesmen thought, we're just going to slaughter them. And the Roman general had his men form up in what the Romans called the saw, which may have been a multiple repetition of the kineus, which we think was a wedge. In other words, a triangle like this pointing forward. So a century forming a triangle with the centurion.

• 47:54Tristan Hughes?

  He was the, he was the one right at the front of the wedge.

• 47:57Speaker 01

  So they formed a saw and that meant there were centurions at the front of every triangle. So you imagine how dangerous that is with fifty thousand, I mean, the sources say two hundred thousand. So I always say, look, divide it by four, divide it by five. There were only twenty thousand Roman soldiers though. So say forty thousand British tribesmen against twenty thousand Roman soldiers, you think. The British are going to win, but they came up against the the centurions, obviously first, and the rest of the legionaries so tightly that the sources tell us that they they couldn't use their weapons, the British tribesmen couldn't use their spears and the Romans just slaughtered them like fish in a barrel. But the death, we don't have the deaths, the numbers of centurions, but it was probably higher than normal there just because of that.

• 48:37Tristan Hughes?

  Leading your men, and that is literally leading from the front at this point of a wedge.

• 48:41Speaker 01

  Terrifying.

• 48:42Tristan Hughes?

  So much, so yeah, especially for us in the 21st century. And I'm also glad you mentioned Sion and Seffley there, because that was the example I was thinking of in my head. I didn't realise it wasn't a centurion, it was actually someone higher up.

• 48:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was someone more senior, I think it was a tribune.

• 48:53Tristan Hughes?

  Okay, got it. So outside of fighting, if they're not in an open war zone, if they're not on campaign, let's say they're in a more peaceful part of the empire, maybe even Hadrian's Wall, but at a time where there aren't all these raids going across the wall and anything like that. Do we know much about how an everyday life of a centurion, how it would have changed if they weren't in an active war zone?

• 49:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, we do, we've got some nice little snippets from actually Egypt. So often in remote areas of the empire, like Egypt could be, you had centurions who would have been operating more or less as a sole commander and they acted as patrols, but also for the collection of tax, and that would have been throughout the empire, and also as effectively judges. So there's a wonderful piece of pottery, or a piece of papyrus actually, so the Oxyrincus, massive cache, fifty thousand pieces of pottery. Yeah, the papyri and and pieces of pottery, I think there are some as well.

• 49:55Tristan Hughes?

  Estraca?

• 49:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, Estraca, yeah, from Egypt. There are all these different examples we've got that tell us things, and one of them, interesting ones, which I always find it's a little bit amusing, because we we know so little about ancient women, because generally they weren't taught to read and write. We know they were because of the famous images from Pompeii of the woman with the stylus in front of her face and so on, but. This one example of a centurion is where a man's wife has run away to a town twenty or thirty miles away and has set up home with another bloke. And he's written to the local centurion, who's presumably acting like the local justice, asking for help to get his wife back. And we don't know anymore. Now, clearly, probably nothing was done, but it just, there's an example of a centurion

• 50:40Speaker 01

  as a justice, if you like, and also an example of ancient women might not have known how to read and write, but they did what they wanted.

• 50:46Tristan Hughes?

  But yeah, a great example of how a centurion's duties could change between war and peace.

• 50:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, and so being a quartermaster, making sure that there were enough supplies for their century, this is something that we've got from the Vindelandi tablets. And although junior officers would have maybe been doing more of it, the centurion would have been keeping an eye on, they had enough leather for their sandals, they had enough food, they had enough, you know.

• 51:09Tristan Hughes?

  This is the management, this is the logistics side that's so often overlooked.

• 51:12Speaker 01

  And what's quite interesting about some of those letters from Vindelandi is they show that in peacetime, you can have a unit, there was one cohort, I think the Tungrians, and they were down to less than half strength with numbers of men that were all from different vexillations or sick or, you know, just not where they were supposed to be.

• 51:27Tristan Hughes?

  And I guess overseeing, overseeing the pay for their men, you know, that must be very, very important to them.

• 51:33Speaker 01

  Well, again, one of the junior officers that tended to do, the Tesserarius was in charge of the money, but the centurion would have been in charge of that. And men sometimes asked for advances on their pay if they didn't have enough, and so they might have to get permission from that. And, you know, there was, you would have been a sort of like a godlike figure. If the centurion says you can have an advance, you can have an advance. If he says you can't, you can't, you know, that kind of thing.

• 51:55Tristan Hughes?

  If he recommends you for a medal, if he noticed your bravery in battle or something like that, then that's very good.

• 51:59Speaker 01

  Because what I was going to say was they weren't always promoted from the ranks. There were three routes to becoming a centurion, one of which was really quite rare. They were generally men who'd risen from the ranks. And if you joined the legion at, say, eighteen approximately, you could have been younger and lied, and who's going to check? And I saw a gravestone in France of a fifteen year old boy who died in World War One. So, you know, two thousand years ago. So you join the army at eighteen, if you did well. And were, you know, dutiful and so on, you could become an immunist, as in the word immunization. And that meant you didn't have to do certain nasty things like digging ditches and digging latrines. And if you continued to impress, then you might be promoted through the ranks of junior officer,

• 52:42Speaker 01

  which were tesserarius, i.e. the man who has the tesser, which is the piece of pottery in the, sometimes which had the orders for the password and so on for the knight. And then you had the signifer who carried the standard or the signum, and you had the optio, who's the second in command, and then you had centurion. If you worked your way through those, you know, and not everybody did, definitely everybody didn't, because we have examples of an optio, and after his name, it's written with as a candidate for the centurionate, which means he was preferred to be advanced to become a centurion. So you might just be a junior officer all your life, but if you were one of those who did, you could become a centurion, it's thought by your early thirties.

• 53:25Tristan Hughes?

  Right.

• 53:26Speaker 01

  So if you're a centurion six in cohort ten, you then in theory had to climb up the ranks, but you didn't have to go through sixty promotions. You could, you could be leapfrogged. But again, that would take years. You were usually seconded to another legion when you were promoted as a centurion or moved as a centurion or advancing up the centurion ranks.

• 53:48Tristan Hughes?

  Right. So you wouldn't be commanding your, the people who you'd previously served alongside.

• 53:53Speaker 01

  You could be. We have examples from tombstones where they did within a legion, but, but it was normal not to. And that may have been something as common sense is from modern day. You don't want the guy who's been promoted from the ranks telling sixty, eighty guys what to do.

• 54:07Tristan Hughes?

  Yeah.

• 54:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. And also will they do what they're told? Whereas you put him in a new unit, they don't know who he is. And then another route into the centurion rank was basically being leapfrogged in because you were wealthy.

• 54:19Tristan Hughes?

  Wealthy status. Right. Okay.

• 54:20Speaker 01

  Because daddy wants you to be a centurion. And, you know, we've got lovely examples of that, of it happening to various noble families. So equestrians would frequently become centurions. And what's must have been very frustrating for men who were promoted from the ranks is If you became the first speer, the primus pilis, which is the most important rank of centurion you could be. When you had that post done, which was only a year, you then could be elevated into the equestrian level of nobility. Yet these young guys coming in in the thirties, say, who were already equestrians.

• 54:56Tristan Hughes?

  They don't get that benefit.

• 54:57Speaker 01

  They don't get that. Yeah, yeah. So they, what that means is that because after, after centurions retired. They were known as ex-premee peely. They frequently then ended up getting jobs in urban situations, whether that was leading urban cohorts. Or even as political appointees to governors and things, they could, they could move all around. And then we have great examples and tombstones. But those young equestrians who joined in as appointees would have been far, we've got evidence, there are more of them who went higher at the end. Than the guys from the ordinary.

• 55:31Tristan Hughes?

  Wow.

• 55:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, so, which is kind of understandable. And then the third way, which was less common, was you could move straight from the Praetorian Guard. So obviously this is during the empire. You could move straight from the Praetorian Guard to become a centurion, but we haven't got as many examples of those.

• 55:46Tristan Hughes?

  There's no equivalent of an officer training corps back then. The closest thing is the equestrians, the inexperienced, but their rich. Backgrounds allows them to leapfrog.

• 55:56Speaker 01

  Yes, yeah, a bit, a bit like, you know, the, the tribunes, that's what the tribunes were. And, and as I mentioned, that one example of a legate with Julius Caesar. He, he had no military experience potentially, but he was suddenly given command of a legion the day before a battle.

• 56:08Tristan Hughes?

  And so what material benefits could you get if you were a centurion?

• 56:12Speaker 01

  They were paid fifteen times more than a legionary.

• 56:15Tristan Hughes?

  I love it now, that's a lot.

• 56:17Speaker 01

  It was a lot. It was, really was. And the primus pilis was paid considerably more than that. And we have an example of an amount paid, whether it was like a cash payment when they retired of a primus pilis. And there's been quite a bit of controversy about it because it was so big. But academics have compared it with the level of pay that a primus pilis has gotten. Well, actually, it wasn't, it wasn't unreasonable. We're talking hundreds of thousands of cisteracy as a cash payment to a primi, primus pilis when you retire. So they were paid really, really well. And this is at this point worth mentioning that because of all the things we've been talking about their their leadership skills, their bravery, the way that they welded their men into units.

• 56:59Speaker 01

  They stayed in the army for a very long time. So soldiers, I mentioned sixteen to twenty five years. That's dependent on when we're talking about. But say twenty years as an average, you know, you came in at eighteen, you could retire at thirty eight if you were still alive. But centurions didn't leave after twenty years because they were climbing that that tree. And they were also so valuable presumably that they didn't want them to leave, particularly because wars frequently happened. So we've got this incredible example of, again, a tombstone of a centurion called Fortunatus, which means lucky. He was lucky because he was eighty when this tombstone was built and he'd been in the army for fifty years.

• 57:39Speaker 01

  And he had served, it lists, again, any of your viewers or listeners who are familiar with military tombstones, they often list where the legions that they were in and it lists the legions he was in. Now, he may not have been in all those legions, but he was probably in maybe in a vexilation that was serving with those legions because it's it's possible he didn't change legions that often.

• 57:58Tristan Hughes?

  Vexilation, you mean?

• 57:59Speaker 01

  Sorry, vexilation is a subunit of a legion that's sent from A to B to help with something like rebellion or building a road or something. So it may have been that he was just in a vexilation with that legion, but this guy served all over the empire, literally, from Israel and Syria to Britain and Romania and North Africa. And and he was still in the army in his seventies.

• 58:19Tristan Hughes?

  He just kept climbing.

• 58:20Speaker 01

  And just kept climbing, yeah, yeah. They didn't always climb. They sometimes stayed a centurion. They didn't always become a frisbee.

• 58:26Tristan Hughes?

  Well, I was going to ask, are there actually any extreme cases where someone who was once a centurion could have risen and become one of those army generals that ultimately became an emperor?

• 58:38Speaker 01

  I think, yeah, Vespasian's grandfather was a centurion.

• 58:42Tristan Hughes?

  He was a centurion. Okay. So you see the family line kind of rising.

• 58:46Speaker 01

  And we've got Maximinus Thrax in the third century AD.

• 58:50Tristan Hughes?

  The seven foot emperor.

• 58:52Speaker 01

  If you believe that. Maybe he was seven feet tall, but he climbed all the way up to the top and became an emperor. Pertinax in one nine two, the emperor, I think he was an ordinary legionary originally. So, yeah, there was the, you definitely very unlikely, but you could do it.

• 59:08Tristan Hughes?

  But there are those really interesting cases, well, having that kind of centurion background. Ben, I could ask so many more questions, but we're running out of time. Lastly, the legacy of the centurion, how big an impact do you think this role, that important role has had in the development, in the inspiration of armies since?

• 59:28Speaker 01

  The only opinion I feel able to give would be an opinion on the effect on the British army. Because of my knowledge, I'm not obviously from that accent, I'm not British, I'm Irish, but I have a reasonable knowledge of British military history, pretty good knowledge of some areas. And from what I know, during the period of the British Empire, it happened at the same time as the first massive interest in ancient history happened with archaeology and texts being written in the 1800s, in other words. And there was a definite identification by the British hierarchy, maybe the military as well,

• 1:00:07Speaker 01

  of identifying themselves alongside the Romans who had been so successful for so many hundreds of years with their military. So it definitely happened to some extent, but what you've got to quickly add in is that the Roman army was different to the modern one. So we talked briefly about the Contubernium, which was the tent group of eight men. There were 10 tent groups in each century. They weren't a platoon, they weren't a sub platoon, which a lot of people, you know, they like to break down a Roman army like a modern army. It didn't happen like that. The difference in command was huge. You had these 60 centurions and then a massive gap between them and above and a massive gap between them and below. But I don't know, I think.

• 1:00:48Speaker 01

  Just the sort of overwhelming image would be the successful legion in battle, marching forward, nothing can stop them, they all look amazing, they're really well trained, they're highly disciplined, and they're led by these centurions with the helmet. I think that's the, that's the biggest identifying thing. A military historian might be able to give you more.

• 1:01:08Tristan Hughes?

  It was a big question to ask.

• 1:01:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was a big one. Yeah, that's all right.

• 1:01:12Tristan Hughes?

  But Ben, this has been absolutely great. It just goes to me to say thank you so much for taking the time to come back on the show.

• 1:01:17Speaker 01

  Thanks, Tristan.

• 1:01:17Tristan Hughes?

  Cheers.

• 1:01:23Tristan Hughes?

  Well, there you go. There was fan favourite Dr Ben Kane returning to the show to talk all things the Roman centurion. I hope you enjoyed the episode. And don't you worry, we're going to have Ben returning to the show very soon for a follow up episode on another awesome Roman topic. A famous gladiator who led a revolt against Rome. That's to come in the near future. In the meantime, thank you for listening to this episode of The Ancients. Please follow the show on Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. That really helps us and you'll be doing us a big favour. If you'd be kind enough to leave us a rating as well, well, we'd really appreciate that. Don't forget, you can also sign up to History Hit for hundreds of hours of original documentaries

• 1:02:06Tristan Hughes?

  with a new release every week. Sign up at historyhit.com/subscribe. That is all from me. I'll see you in the next episode.

• 1:02:57Tristan Hughes?

  The.