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The entire Roman army was destroyed at the Battle of the Allia in a crushing defeat that prompted reforms by Marcus Furius Camillus. [4] Under the new system , men were sorted into classes based on wealth; the hastati were the third poorest, with the rorarii being slightly poorer and the principes slightly wealthier. [ 5 ]
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 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 ...
Pont du Gard (1st century AD), over the Gardon in southern France, is one of the masterpieces of Roman technology.. Ancient Roman technology is the collection of techniques, skills, methods, processes, and engineering practices which supported Roman civilization and made possible the expansion of the economy and military of ancient Rome (753 BC – 476 AD).
Roman military engineering was of a scale and frequency far beyond that of its contemporaries. Indeed, military engineering was in many ways endemic in Roman military culture, as demonstrated by each Roman legionary having as part of his equipment a shovel, alongside his gladius (sword) and pila ( javelins ).
They served as heavy infantry in the early Roman army, and were used at the front of a very large phalanx formation. After a time, engagements with the Samnites and Gauls appear to have taught the Romans the importance of flexibility and the inadequacy of the phalanx on the rough, hilly ground of central Italy. [4] [5]
The Romans would later be able to use this weakness against the phalanx as their more mobile maniples could withstand the pressure of the phalanx longer than more traditional formations, thus earning valuable time for their wings to outflank it, as at Cynoscephalae and Magnesia, or for the phalanx to lose its cohesion due to prolonged movement ...