Quote Originally Posted by Watchman
I doubt if the rotation was dependent on the centurion still being around. The somewhat thankless job of those fellows was, after all, to be the guy who yells "Charge!" and goes first so the mass of hesitant trained monkeys behind him will hopefully follow his lead instead of sitting on their thumbs looking anxious. Obviously, this meant they had rather disproportionally high casualty rates, and given how central rotating the front-rank formations was for Roman tactics I very much doubt if so casualty-prone officers played a critical part in the system.
LOL ...trained monkeys...