ABSTRACT

There was perhaps no more traditional and important identity to the Roman than that exemplifi ed by the stereotypical Roman soldier, and one of the environments in which this identity was best expressed was the pitched battle. In this volume concerned with rituals and ritualized behaviour – repetitive, stereotypical actions – in the Roman world, this particular chapter focuses on the pitched battle, and the behaviours of Roman soldiers in these battles. Of course, a pitched battle has rules, and its participants often performed a host of ritualized behaviours in the build-up to the fi ghting itself. 1 A signifi cant number of Romans and non-Romans of low and high status participated in war and warfare – and so pitched battle – and their service in the professional Roman military would have indoctrinated them into some ‘traditionally Roman’ examples of these behaviours including the taking of auspices, the strict adherence to a disciplined and tightly arrayed battle line, the wearing of uniforms which were largely that – uniform – and either the maintaining of silence in the march into battle 2 or the shouting of a war cry. 3

When we use the term ‘Roman imperial identity’ in this chapter, we follow the defi nition used in the introduction to this volume, that is, as ‘a sense of belonging to and identifi cation with the imperium Romanum ’. The approach adopted in this chapter is bottom-up, so very much the perspective of imperial Rome’s subjects – here Roman soldiers – and how they engaged with that dominant culture while also, in no small measure, being a part of it. Thus, this chapter complements McIntyre’s (in this volume) top-down approach. We will focus on one smaller community (the Roman military) within the larger Roman community, and examine how one particular ritualized behaviour (a repetitive, stereotypical behaviour) expressed in battle – the war cry – changed over time. In addition, we will consider what it tells us about Roman imperial identity, as manifested in the Roman soldier.