Quote Originally Posted by I Am Herenow View Post
I have a question about pre-Camillan Roman units. Namely, I believe that they were hoplites at that time, but were they identical in tactics and equipment to contemporary Greek hoplites, say? Or were they different in some way - and if so, how?

On a related note, were there any major shake-ups (like the Camillan or Marian reforms) before the Camillan reforms? Or did equipment and tactics remain largely unchanged from the time Rome really became a city and stopped being a collection of villages, to the time of Camillus?

Thanks in advance.

I Am Herenow
Well, after the Battle of Allia in about 387 BC its said that all Roman written records were lost, forcing them to use oral tradition to fill in the gaps prior to Camillus. Still, the information we get on the pre-Camillan, or Servian army, may be decently reliable. The mainstay of the Roman army at that time was the hoplite phalanx. As Ludens says, there were already classes, and so supposedly there were units of the phalanx of higher quality/armor than others. These were wealth classes, not age classes. They probably looked a good bit like Etruscan hoplitai of the same period, concerning whom we actually know quite a lot.

As for their behavior and their similarity to the Greek phalanx, it does seem that they had a greater tradition of champion combat, and its possible that they at times allowed for looser order fights. But so did the Greeks at times, even with hoplite armies. Since we aren't sure exactly how to talk about the Greek phalanx at different time periods, its hard to say whether the Roman army--which is even harder to talk about definitively in the pre-Polybian period--was similar to it.