marian reforms

[MSB]

I'm quite new to this so I'm not sure if there has been a post about this already. but I think the marian reforms should not be linked to a date but more to how big your empire is, because that was the actual reason of the reforms, the people didnt't want to fight any more because it was getting to dangerous on the battlefield. and that's why marius made the reforms and made the roman army a profesional army.

Actually Marius made the reforms beacause before the reforms only landowners could join the army. The ammount of landowners was however in decline due to the new style of Roman farming on Great Estates which involved kicking landowners of their farms and building huge low maintainence farms which grew almost everything. This lack of landowners and increase in unemployment caused there to be a shortage of men to join the army and the few that could could not afford to be outfitted correctly. So Marius removed all land and property requirements, got the senate to pay for all of their weapons and armour, increased their pay (to promote people to join up), removed the "once the war is over you go home" style of army and made the army professional each soilder serving for up to 25 years and (knowing that retired soilders could be dangerous) gave them a nice pention and a plot of land for when they left the army.

And very often there were a few problems with this system. As the soilders got the wages payed by their general and got their pention of their general this made them more loyal to ntheir general that to the senate. This was quite bad for if a general decided "I want to become an emperor today" he could as his troops were almost guarenteed to follow him into battle.

I think they should be tied to the level of farms you build and the ammount of settlements that you en-slave personally.

[Trithemius]

I think they should be tied to the level of farms that you build personally.

They might be? Also remember that there were conditions that enabled the development of the estates (e.g. increased wealth amongst some members of the elite). Booty, and labour in the form of slaves, from the creation of provinces might have represented a trigger to the change in Roman land-utilisation patterns.

[CountArach]

Also don't forget the Bleeding dry of the Equestrian and Patrician classes, making it harder to field the number of legions needed to fight on so many borders.

[MSB]

I read somewhere that the Punic Wars helped the style of farming system mentioned in my other post. Normally farmers would go to war and return after a few weeks - at most a couple of months. However the Punic Wars lasted several years. At the end of them most farmers' farms had run fallow and had collapsed due to lack of maintanence. Due to this rich men could now buy the land of the peasants and as the number of slaves had increased, due to Romans grabbing land of other nations, the land-owners could use slaves (which did not have to be paid) instead of free-men\citizens (which did).

So as I have also said in my above post mabye EB should only enable level 5 farms to be built after a certain ammount of places have been enslaved and then the farms trigger the Marius reforms. Also if they don't happen in Marius' time (that is when he was alive) they should be called. The "Proffesional Roman Reforms" mabye because Marius would not have been there to change the military style.

[Ludens]

I read somewhere that the Punic Wars helped the style of farming system mentioned in my other post. Normally farmers would go to war and return after a few weeks - at most a couple of months. However the Punic Wars lasted several years. At the end of them most farmers' farms had run fallow and had collapsed due to lack of maintanence. Due to this rich men could now buy the land of the peasants and as the number of slaves had increased, due to Romans grabbing land of other nations, the land-owners could use slaves (which did not have to be paid) instead of free-men\citizens (which did).

It wasn't just the Punic wars. Every war after the second Punic war involved campaigns in far away areas, meaning that the small farmers would be away for years. This made it easy for large landholders to scoop up their plots, because the absence of the owner meant that the farm was less profitable (or more unprofitable in a bad year). So the growth of large estates was directly coupled to the expansion of the Roman empire: the larger the empire became, the longer farmers would be away, and the greater the risk was that their farm would fall upon bad times and be sold by their desperate family. Also, the long duration of the campaigns rather blurred the distinction between the temporary militia and the professional soldier. Shortly after the second punic war the Roman militia soldiers were more experienced than their professional Hellenic opponents.

In other words, the profesionallisation of the Roman army was both a response to and a consequence of the expansion of the Roman empire. Changing agricultural practices played a part as well, but where themselves also made possible by the expansion.

[oudysseos]

Hmmmm a lot of talk about Marius. I think that it would be useful to remember that Marius

a. didn't fall out of a clear blue sky and
b. probably didn't intend to change the very nature of the roman army.

In fact the changes that are somewhat carelessly called 'The Marian Reforms' had started to evolve before his time. The Gracchi had greatly lowered the property qualification (from 11000 sesterces to 2000 i think) and the senate had already once or twice ignored property qualifications altogether as an emergency measure.

Marius was (in 109-107 BC) embroiled in a tricky political betrayal of his former mentor Caecilius Metellus. Marius wanted his command of the war in Numidia, and succeeded in getting elected consul by trash talking his boss, but the senate decided not to award Marius the command in Numidia anyways. Marius bypassed the senate by holding a special election of the People and took Metellus' command away from him. But he needed troops. There were none. Since his support was among the lower classes he suspended the property qualification (probably only as an one-off emergency measure), for which as we have seen there were precedents. He went to Numidia with a young man named Sulla as his right hand man. The war was won not by Marius' military genius or the huge impact of his military "reforms" but by Sulla getting one of the Numidian kings allies (and father-in-law) to betray him.

Marius' Reforms might have ended there except for the massive invasion of the Cimbri and Teutoni and the wiping out of 80000 "Pre-Reform" roman troops at Aurasio. These troops had been led by arrogant senatorial noblemen and so the sucessful new man Marius was seen as an outsider to the effete incompetent corrupt famous families. Marius himself of course had married into one of the oldest famous families (the Julii) and his most important lieutenant was from another (the Cornellii) but no matter, he was elected Consul 5 times in a row and defeated the Germans, keeping his troops (as he still needed them) who were becoming professionalised simply by default. After the Germans came the Social War. Later Sulla used the same kind of troops against evil Mithridates but not before using them against Rome and Marius himself (don't you just love the ironies of history?) Sulla had help from a young Pompey and then came Spartacus ........

I could go on and on but the point is, is that without the historical circumstances that made a larger permanent army necessary, Gaius Marius would not have become associated with these "Reforms". I'm not saying that he didn't have an important impact, just that his role was in no way inevitable and that he did not with forethought set out to change the nature of the Roman army for all time. He inherited an evolutionary process, contributed to it and passed it on to others. If he had never lived would Rome's need for a large professional army been any different?

At the end of the day the EB team know what they're doing: dynamic reforms based on cetain conditions.

Sorry for the long post. Just get annoyed at muddle-headed use of buzzwords like 'Marian Reforms'.

[Jarardo]

Very intersting post oudysseos

[Trithemius]

a. didn't fall out of a clear blue sky

With the exception of the occassional meteorite very little does in historical terms!

Nice post btw.

[Jarardo]

Sorry for the long post. Just get annoyed at muddle-headed use of buzzwords like 'Marian Reforms'.

I think most of us around here pretty much eat up stuff like that long post, do another one!