ABSTRACT

In the Republic, military service had been a temporary break for soldiers from their normal life as peasants. Even when campaigns were extended over a number of years during the first century bc, most legionaries were conscripted more or less involuntarily, and assumed and hoped that they would return in time to a civilian existence. But from the time of Augustus onwards, from first enlistment many men spent their entire lives as professional soldiers, seeing in their comrades-in-arms their own social framework and the friends with whom they chose to retire when too old to fight. 1