Blog: Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in the Roman Army

Michael Taylor reflects on the Roman army as a multi-ethnic force, where the principles of diversity, equity, and inclusion underpinned its effectiveness in the field. Recoiling against Trump’s recent erasure of the contribution of women and minorities in the nation’s service, he examines Roman traditions celebrating the contribution of non-citizen Italian officers and their contingents.

One of the many depressing stories recently has been racists within the Trump v.2 administration aggressively purging profiles of African American and Native American soldiers from Department of Defense websites. Among those profiles recently purged include baseball legend Jackie Robinson and civil rights martyr Medgar Evans, both of whom served in the U.S. Army as young men, the Marine Corps service of The Golden Girls actress Bea Arthur, as well as profiles of various non-white Medal of Honor winners, including the 54th Massachusetts' Sgt. William Carney (the first Black man awarded the MoH) and Vietnam hero Maj. Gen. Calvin Rogers. Pages about the famous Navajo code-talkers and the Japanese-American 442nd Regimental Combat Team have also been deleted. Some profiles have since been restored due to public outrage (including, it seems, Sgt. Carney), but the fact they were scrubbed at all remains an obscenity.

Thinking of these deleted profiles and the vile reactionary rage they elicit, it occurs to me that similar profiles are embedded into the literary narratives of Roman Republican-era warfare, which often describe the heroics of non-citizen Italian soldiers and units in service of the res publica. Our first profile is that of the Oscan cavalry officer Oblacus Volsinius, or Oblax as Plutarch calls him, who commanded a troop of cavalry from the Frentani, part of the consular army that confronted Pyrrhus’s invasion of Southern Italy near Heraclea in 280 BC (Plut. Pyr. 16.8-10; Dion. Hal. 19.12.5). Once the Roman army had forded the Siris River, Oblacus rode forward, seeking to personally kill Pyrrhus. He succeeded in killing the king’s horse out from underneath him but was himself slain by Pyrrhus’ bodyguard. Nonetheless, the shock of the incident briefly caused Pyrrhus’ troops to waiver, thinking that their king had been killed, forcing him to remove his helmet and ride along his line providing proof of life.

Next we hear of Marcus Anicius, who was the local praetor of the Latin city of Praeneste, who led a cohort of troops from his town in the defense of Casilinum, a strong point besieged by Hannibal in 217 BC (Livy 23.19.16–20.20). The defenders held out for months despite suffering over 50% casualties. Finally starved into surrender, the survivors were allowed to leave the town for a ransom of seven ounces of gold per man. But their heroic stand bogged Hannibal down and bought Rome valuable time, albeit squandered the next year with the defeat at Cannae. The Roman senate, as a point of gratitude, offered Marcus Anicius and his soldiers Roman citizenship, which they respectfully declined. Anicius, who had previously served as a municipal scribe in Praeneste, later erected a statue of himself wearing both a toga and a cuirass, fulfilling a vow he had made for the survival of his men.

In 212 BC, we have the profile of Vibius Accaus, who commanded a cohort of Paeligni fighting in the consular army under Fulvius Flaccus against the Carthaginian general Hasdrubal in Southern Italy (Livy 25.6–14). As the Roman assault on the Carthaginian camp floundered, the consul ordered a retreat. However, Accaus seized his unit’s standard and hurled it over the enemy palisade, uttering a curse upon his men if they allowed the enemy to touch it. Seeing the brave charge of the Paeligni and not wishing to be outdone, a centurion in the adjacent citizen legion hurled his own standard and urged his maniple forward, triggering a cascade, so that soon nearly the entire army was plunging in after the Paelgini. With the Carthaginian camp captured after brutal close-quarters fighting, Accaus was decorated by the consul (Livy 25.14.6–13).

Accaus was not the last standard-hurling Paeliginian officer. In 168 BC, the Paelignian cohort commander Salvius held a forward position, facing off against Perseus’ Macedonian army (Plut. Aem. 20.1–2). While not explicitly stated, it is likely that the Paeligni were part of the extraordinarii, a brigade of picked Italian units, roughly 20% of the Italian wings, who were assigned special functions, such as forming the vanguard of the marching column (Polybius 6.26.6-8). Salvius and his Paelignian cohort, along with a cohort of Marrucini, a neighboring people from the Abruzzi highlands, bore the brunt of the Macedonian charge when fighting unexpectedly erupted, as a skirmish over an escaped horse metastasized into a pitched battle. Facing the determined advance of the Macedonian agema, one of the elite regiments of the pike phalanx, Salvius in desperation hurled his standard into the enemy ranks, and his soldiers plunged into the hedge of pikes after it. Of the one hundred or so Roman dead in the battle, most were Paeligni; it is unclear if Salvius himself survived (Livy 44.42.8; Plut. Aem. 21.7).

Our sources for these officers all wrote after the Social War (91–88 BC), at which point all of the communities represented by the above profiles had been enfranchised as full Roman citizens. The profiles likely originated in local traditions and lore that subsequently merged into the annalistic tradition during the Late Republic. Livy, standing at the culmination of this historical genre, was himself from a recently enfranchised Cisalpine family, and therefore personally interested in the Italic contributions to Rome’s rise. But these profiles are sprinkled through Roman military literature for the same reason profiles of Sgt. Carney and the Navajo code-talkers were until recently celebrated on Pentagon websites. The Italian contribution to Rome’s victories had been decisive to Rome’s military dominance. Italian troops from diverse communities, speaking variously Etruscan, Umbrian, Oscan, Faliscan, Messapian, Picene, and Greek, provided over half the troops to the Roman army--and these soldiers were not low-grade cannon fodder, but high status cavalry and heavy infantry who fought with similar equipment and tactics as the citizen legionaries. The Roman army of the Middle Republic was a nexus of DEI, an ethnically diverse, tactically inclusive system generously lubricated by equitable distributions of loot. It was an excellent model for how principles of DEI are not simply moral pieties, but in fact pragmatic imperatives. The terrible carnage of the Social War resulted from Rome foolishly backtracking on the “grand bargain” that had undergirded its Italian confederacy, including by the later second century BC increasingly inequitable treatment of Italian soldiers, who were subject to harsh forms of discipline that new laws shielded citizen troops from. The raw scale of Italian military power unleashed during the Social War required a full concession of political equality.

The current “anti-DEI” initiatives of Trump’s Pentagon most closely approach the attitude we find in Rome’s archenemy, Carthage. Like Rome, Carthage was heavily dependent on troops drawn from the city’s subjects, including the Libyan peoples of North Africa. These famously rebelled in 240 BC after decades of heavy taxation and conscription, nearly destroying the city. Deep ethnic tensions remained. During the Second Punic War, one of the best Libyan officers in the Carthaginian army was a cavalry commander named Mottones. Coming with advice to the Carthaginian commander in Sicily, Mottones found himself the subject of a racist outburst from his superior: “How could it be that Mottones, a degenerate African, might advise a Carthaginian general!” (Livy 25.40.12). The haughty Carthaginian general, Hasdrubal, later relieved Mottones of his command, assigning the post to his own son instead. Mottones, much aggrieved, defected to Rome. He was awarded citizenship by a popular vote, taking the name Marcus Valerius Muttines, the first Roman citizen of African origins named by our sources (Mottones was surely not the first African-born Roman citizen, given that presumably some prisoners enslaved during the First Punic War had been manumitted and enfranchised, and they were the first of many Afro-Romans, such as Terence, Apuleius, Septimius Severus, and Augustine, to name a few). Carthage, meanwhile, lost the war. Racism is, and ever was, for losers.