ABSTRACT
The Roman army was by far the largest international organisation of classical antiquity. In about AD ioo its total strength was probably around 300,000, more or less equally divided between legions and auxiliary units, unevenly spread over a vast area stretching from the Tyne to the Euphrates. As an empire-wide institution, it inevitably attracts the attention of those who look for common or unifying features in this vast and culturally diverse agglomeration of subject peoples and regions. Types of unit, fighting methods, internal organisation, rates of pay and donatives, official religious observances are all areas in which we expect to find some degree of uniformity. The same applies, to a certain extent, to the general character of its activities: fighting, of course, but also building and engineering, garrison and policing duties, supervision of the commissariat, transportation and communications.1 Finally, and not least important, the fact that throughout the empire its official language of operation was Latin, even, for instance, in Egypt, where the business of the civil administration was conducted entirely in Greek.
