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Roman Fort › Antique Origins
Definition and Origins
The Roman army constructed both temporary and permanent forts and fortified military camps ( castrum ) across the frontiers of the empire 's borders and within territories which required a permanent military presence to prevent indigenous uprisings.Although given basic defensive features, forts were never designed to withstand a sustained enemy attack but rather to provide a protected place for accommodation and storage facilities for food, weapons, horses, and administrative records.Over the centuries Roman forts took on a remarkably standardised layout, and the impressive gates and ruins of some of the larger ones can still be seen across Europe today.
LOCATION
Forts were constructed in particular along the frontiers of the Roman empire such as along sections of the River Danube and River Rhine. These prevented incursions from hostile neighbouring groups. Forts were also built during long sieges such as at Numantia in Spain and Masada in Judaea. The majority of forts, though, were built in the interior of provinces in order to deter rebellions and better control the conquered peoples therein. Britain and Dacia are examples of provinces which required a permanent military presence to maintain Roman control. In such hostile territories, forts were linked in a network for mutual support, but there were also isolated forts, especially at naval and supply bases. Roman Britain has remains of over 400 camps, but some of these were either temporary or practice operations for engineers and soldiers to hone their fort-building skills.
DIMENSIONS & DEFENSES
The earliest known semi-permanent forts were constructed in Spain during the 2nd century BCE, but it was during the reign of Augustus (27 BCE – 14 CE) that Roman forts began to assume a standardised form. Forts varied in size with the smallest measuring under a single hectare while the larger ones could be over 50 hectares in area. An example of the larger type fort is at Vetera and Oberaden in Germany, which housed two legions each.
ROMAN FORTS WERE TYPICALLY RECTANGULAR WITH ROUNDED CORNERS & PROTECTED BY PALISADES, RAMPARTS, TOWERS, & DITCHES.
Smaller forts and military camps were more temporary affairs which provided troops with a safe accommodation while on campaign. Small forts were also used by auxiliary units as frontier posts, and small square forts ( quadriburgia ) with 50-metre-long walls and a single gate were built in all Roman territories during the later empire period. Even larger forts were not self-sufficient for a long period of time and so were usually located near to cities or, alternatively, settlements ( canabae ) sprang up around the fort to meet its needs and take advantage of the Roman soldiers there who were some of the select few to receive a regular income in the Roman world. Many of these settlements would evolve into medieval towns in their own right.
While all forts had their own individual features, there were many elements common to most. Standard forts were typically rectangular with rounded corners, and the walls of most were built using timber and, later, stone set above an earth rampart.Around the perimeter was a double row of ditches ( clavicula ), the earth from which was used to form the sloping rampart. The walls had three principal gates and towers set at intervals. From the 3rd century CE, when the use of artillery weapons became more widespread, towers projected outwards from the walls to increase the angle of fire.
Reconstructed gate of the Roman fort Biriciana, Germany
Gates had two arched entrances which could be closed using wooden doors which were perhaps protected from fire by metal plating. They were locked by a cross bar on the inside, had their own two- or three-storey towers, and were protected by a separate line of ditches projecting out from the walls. Despite these defensive precautions the Romans did not design camps to resist sustained attack as in medieval castles, but rather, they aimed to provide enough measures to act as a deterrent for improvised enemy attacks. No doubt, if a fort was attacked by a large force, then the troops would be mobilised to meet the enemy in the field, but the reality was that for most of Rome 's existence its enemies were not capable of the organisation and skills required for successful siege warfare (the Sassanian empire being a notable exception). In the later empire, however, the threat from marauding bands became much greater and forts evolved accordingly with fewer gates, curved towers to protect the gateways, and fan-shaped towers projecting from corners to maximise the field of fire from within and allow the walls and gates better protection. The Saxon Shore forts of Britain display these design features as well as having purpose-built tower battlements to allow the use of catapults.
A temporary camp was built each night when an army was on the march, or for a few days in order to rest and make repairs and resupply, to prepare for a battle, during a siege, or for winter quarters ( hiberna ). A camp probably took a few hours to build and sometimes had to be done under enemy fire. A wooden palisade protected by a ditch was built, again, on a rectangular plan, with tents instead of buildings but still keeping the general layout described below. Ten men from each century were tasked with building the camp, supervised by a military surveyor ( gromaticus ) who selected suitable terrain on high ground near a water source. Soldiers sometimes piled up stones against their leather tents for better protection from the elements, a habit useful for archaeologists to reconstruct temporary Roman camps. A single tent would have housed eight men.
Plan of a Typical Roman Fort
INTERIOR LAYOUT
Inside the walls of permanent forts there were a number of separate buildings, which included barracks for legionaries (eight men to a room) and cavalry (men and their horses shared rooms), accommodation for the commanding officer, his family and slaves ( praetorium ), and sometimes also living quarters for tribunes, granaries ( horrea ) which were built on raised platforms to better protect their contents from damp, workshops ( fabricae ), a hospital ( valetudinarium ), a cistern, and in the case of larger forts, a number of shops ( tabernae ) or a market ( macellum ) and Roman baths. The latter were very often built outside the earlier mostly wooden forts as the furnaces needed to provide the underground heating were a real fire hazard. A wide avenue ran around all of these internal structures so that they were safe from enemy missiles landing over the wall.
The fort complex was dominated by the headquarters building or principia, positioned in the dead centre of the fort. Inside the principia was a basilica with aisles and a tribunal set on a raised platform at one end from where the camp commander would lead assemblies, conduct disciplinary hearings, and perform his local judicial duties. There were also rooms for officer recreation ( scholae ) and for use as offices, the aedes - a shrine where the legion or unit's standards were kept, long rooms used as armouries ( armamentaria ), and an open courtyard. Under the aedes was the strongroom dug into the floor where the fort's cash reserves were kept.
Forts had two internal streets leading to the three principal gates, so forming a T-shape. These were called the via praetoria(which led from the main gate or porta praetoria ) and via principalis, and the principia was located where the two streets met.Gates on the left and right side of the fort were known as the porta principalis sinistra and porta principalis dextra respectively.The rear gate was known as the porta decumana which was connected by a road leading directly to the principia or commander's tent in the case of camps. A good example of a Roman fort built on this standardised plan is the late 2nd century CE Wallsend fort (Segedunum) on Hadrian 's Wall which housed 480 legionaries and 120 cavalry.
Censor › Ancient History
Definition and Origins
A censor was one of two senior magistrates in the city of ancient Rome who supervised public morals, maintained the list of citizens and their tax obligations known as the census, and gave out lucrative public contracts and tax collecting rights. The title is the origin of the modern related terms 'censor' and 'censorship' as censors could mark down and remove people from the citizen list. The office was terminated c. 22 BCE, with its powers going to the emperor or redistributed to other officials.
POSITION & EVOLUTION
The position of censor was, according to Livy, established in 443 BCE. They were elected every four or five years by the comitia centuriata, the assembly of Rome with a wealth qualification for members. They held a term of 18 months. In 339 BCE, after a century of tradition where only those of the aristocratic patrician class could hold the office, the leges Publiliaedecreed that one of the two censors must be of the lower plebian class. In 131 BCE two plebeians held both offices for the first time. Following Sulla 's reforms, in 81 BCE, the importance of the position was reduced and their election became less regular.In the Imperial period, the emperor largely took over the powers which had been in the hands of the censors and no censor was elected after 22 BCE.
Although the political power of the censors as defined by law was actually limited - they were not granted imperium (the right to interpret and execute law or to command in war ) - and they did not have an escort of lictors carrying the symbolic fasces as with other magistrates, their views and actions often carried weight due to the experience of the office holder and the prestige attached to the office itself. Indeed, the title of censor was regarded as the highest in the cursus honorum or Roman public career path. A convention developed whereby only former consuls were eligible for the office. As an example of the powerful figures who held the position, Cato the Elder was censor in 184 BCE, and Marcus Licinius Crassus, probably Rome's richest ever man, was made censor in 65 BCE between his two stints as consul.
THE CENSUS INCLUDED AN INDIVIDUAL'S FULL NAME, AGE, FATHER'S NAME, WHERE THEY LIVED, THEIR JOB & HOW MUCH PROPERTY THEY HAD.
THE CENSUS
The censors were responsible for carrying out, every four or five years, the national census which was a list of all the citizens in Rome and the provincial towns, what their tax obligations were, and what their liability for military service was. Previously this had been the duty of the tribunes. The census included an individual's full name, age, father's name, where they lived, their job, and how much property they had. Women and children were not included except as dependents. The censors organised the names into tribes and centuries according to five different classes based on the equites knight class, levels of property or no property.
The censor could mark (with a nota ) any name on the list which would exclude that person from their tribe and prohibit them from voting, ie: censor them. An individual marked down in such a way became an aerarius and still had to pay taxes even if they could not now vote. One of the reasons a censor might do this is because a citizen had done something immoral in their public or private life and so the office came to be associated with maintaining the moral standards or r Regimen morum within the community.
When the census was complete, one of the censors (chosen by lot) performed a religious ceremony known as the lustratio on the Campus Martius of Rome. Here prayers, animal sacrifices and a purification by fire kept away evil and ensured success for the coming year.
OTHER DUTIES
It was also the censor's job to ensure the membership of the Roman Senate was in order. Besides selecting senators they could also exclude individuals, again for reprehensible behaviour. With Sulla's reforms, the selection process for the Senate was changed and any citizen holding quaestor rank automatically qualified. Another similar function of a censor was to record who of the equites held the public horse, and once again, for anyone they deemed unsuitable, their horse could be confiscated and the individual barred.
Other duties of the censors included leasing public property, including mines, forests, and rivers which could generate revenue; supervision of public works projects such as road building, libraries, and Roman baths ; and forming contracts with the public contractors ( publicani ) who collected provincial and harbour taxes ( portoria ) and any revenue from public property ( vectigal ). There were sometimes problems with this system as censors had tremendous fiscal power to sell contracts to the highest bidder, sometimes even auctioning off the right to collect taxes for entire provinces. This led to conflicts of interest, competition between censors, and a general abuse of office.
Marcus Licinius Crassus
There were also less defined powers such as the granting of citizenship to foreigners. In an example of the latter case, we know that Crassus, while censor, granted citizenship to the Transpadanes in Cisalpine Gaul, an unpopular move and one of the reasons for his removal from office. Cato the Elder, who actually became widely known as 'Cato the Censor,' famously introduced a tax on luxury in order to quell the decline in morality he saw in 2nd-century BCE Republican Rome.
LEGACY
Although the office of censor was suppressed in the imperial period, the taking of the census continued well after. Augustuscarried out three during his long reign, and the last known census in Italy was conducted c. 80 CE, after which statistics for tax and voting rights were no longer relevant as the former came from the provinces where governors became responsible for updating them. Roman Egypt was noted for its regular 14-year census, and several examples of censuses carried out across the empire are preserved on papyri. As the historian Peter Fibiger Bang notes, 'it was far from a negligible instrument of state power and continued to provoke resistance down the ages' (Barchieis, 676). The practice of control through statistics also outlasted the Romans themselves as many modern states continue to conduct a census at regular intervals to gather figures on their ever-changing populations.
LICENSE:
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