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The Battle of the Caudine Forks showed the clumsiness of the Roman phalanx against the Samnites. The Romans had originally employed the phalanx themselves [25] but gradually evolved more flexible tactics. The result was the three-line Roman legion of the middle period of the Roman Republic, the Manipular System. Romans used a phalanx for their ...
The rugged terrain of Samnium, where the war was fought, was not conducive to the phalanx formation which the Romans had inherited from the Etruscans and Ancient Greeks. The main battle troops of the Etruscans and Latins of this period comprised Greek-style hoplite phalanxes, inherited from the original Greek phalanx military unit.
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 Romans placed a high value on the written word, as indicated by their obsession with documentation and public inscriptions. The Imperial bureaucracy was so dependent on writing that the Babylonian Talmud (bT Shabbat 11a) declared "if all seas were ink, all reeds were pen, all skies parchment, and all men scribes, they would be unable to set ...
Roman haruspicy was a form of communication with the gods. Rather than strictly predicting future events, this form of Roman divination allowed humans to discern the attitudes of the gods and react in a way that would maintain harmony between the human and divine worlds ( pax deorum ). [ 5 ]
Phalanx (Ancient Greek: Φάλαγξ, romanized: Phálanx, lit. 'spider') is a minor Attic figure in Greek mythology who features in a lesser-known narrative of the myth of Arachne, the girl who enraged the goddess Athena by boasting of being a better weaver than her and was thus transformed into a spider by Athena.
The word was used alone in a general sense or qualified by an adjective to mean a specific type of record. Closely associated with the fasti and used to mark time in them were the divisions of the Roman calendar. The Fasti is also the title of a six-book poem by Ovid based on the Roman religious calendar.
In ancient Roman religion and magic, the fascinus or fascinum was the embodiment of the divine phallus. The word can refer to phallus effigies and amulets, and to the spells used to invoke his divine protection. [1] Pliny called it a medicus invidiae, a "doctor" or remedy for envy (invidia, a "looking upon") or the evil eye.