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The Roman army (Latin: exercitus Romanus) served ancient Rome and the Roman people, enduring through the Roman Kingdom (753–509 BC), the Roman Republic (509–27 BC), and the Roman Empire (27 BC–AD 476/AD 1453), including the Western Roman Empire (collapsed AD 476/480) and the Eastern Roman Empire (collapsed AD 1453).
Page from the Notitia Dignitatum, a medieval copy of a Late Roman register of military commands. The evidence for the strength of late army units is very fragmented and equivocal. [137] The table below gives some recent estimates of unit strength, by unit type and grade:
Ala – a military formation composed of conscripts from the Italian military allies. Alaris – A cavalryman serving in an ala. Auxilia – were introduced as non-citizen troops attached to the citizen legions by Augustus after his reorganisation of the Imperial Roman army from 30 BC. Architecti – An engineer or artillery constructor.
Older works such as the Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopædia Britannica (1911) state that the Roman military of the late Empire was "marked by that predominance of the horseman which characterised the earlier centuries of the Middle Ages," [1] but many more recent authors believe that the infantry remained predominant. [124]
At the time of the Pyrrhic War, the Roman army in the field consisted of four armies, [7] each of which contained two legions of Roman citizens and two units of allies. Each legion consisted of 4,200–5,000 infantry [ 8 ] and 300 cavalry, [ 8 ] while the allied units had an equal number of infantry but three times as many cavalry (900 cavalry ...
Roman military tactics evolved from the type of a small tribal host-seeking local hegemony to massive operations encompassing a world empire. This advance was affected by changing trends in Roman political, social, and economic life, and that of the larger Mediterranean world, but it was also under-girded by a distinctive "Roman way" of war.
The Imperial Roman Army was the military land force of the Roman Empire from 27 BC to 476 AD, [1] and the final incarnation in the long history of the Roman army.This period is sometimes split into the Principate (27 BC – 284 AD) and the Dominate (284–476) periods.
Roman military equipment (cf. Roman military personal equipment), particularly armor, was of better quality and far more ubiquitous, especially in the late Republican and Early Imperial era, than that of most of their opponents. Soldiers equipped with shields, helmets and highly effective body armor had a major advantage over warriors protected ...