luciferofastora

Lay it on me, magister, and I’ll commit working time fraud to listen.

That makes a lot more sense, yeah. Thanks for the nitpick and resulting enlightenment!

Huh, this doesn’t entirely line up with my reading of ACOUP’s posts on the dilectus and the "Marian Reforms" (that weren’t a thing).

The Pedant mentions that Polybius describes the second and third steps of the dilectus as assembling explicitly without weapons, then being sent home again to muster again with full equipment. The assumption is that the equipment would be procured or fetched by the soldiers-to-be in the interim.

Scipio does build a “public armaments production center in Carthago Nova in 210, but this may be a one off” (Marian Reforms), and in the view of the Pedant, recruitment of volunteers was an occasional occurrence to sidestep the Senate if they refused to let a commander levy armies the “proper” way but didn’t turn into a regular way to raise troops until the Imperial era.

Maybe I’m reading those articles wrong or missing some complexities. You do list details I’m missing, so I assume I don’t know the whole picture.

On the history of this:

In the Republic, Roman soldiers had to provide their own equipment. They were counted and drafted by wealth classes, then expected to bring or buy their own weapons and armour in line with the regulations.

On one hand, this allowed the state to push expenses (and the overhead for collecting taxes to fund them) on the citizens instead. On the other, that meant that citizens were motivated primarily by duty to their city, as well as social expectations (nobody wants to look bad in front of their peers, particularly if you might depend on their assistance at some point), rather than a pure expectation of profit.

They did get a decent salary, so it’s not like that was a net loss, but having to shoulder the initial cost (and armour wasn’t exactly cheap, particularly if you wanted to rely on it for survival) meant not every family could afford to send their kids to war for money. For families that had previously served, the arms of the fathers could obviously be passed to the children if they were still in good shape, which would reduce the burden - if they could afford to shoulder it once, it would be lighter down the line.

There is also an intermediate option, where poorer or younger soldiers could serve not as legionaries, but as lighter velites, whose equipment would be much cheaper. They’d move out in front of the main body to screen the army and harass the enemy with javelins, then retreat before the main engagement happened. The loot from that service might enable them to buy heavier equipment and subsequently serve as heavy infantry.

The evidence isn’t entirely clear, but it seems that this shifted at some point, possibly along the shift from a draft army to professional volunteer soldiers, which was formalised primarily by Augustus. By the end of the first century CE, it appears as if state-operated arms production was the main source of soldiers’ equipment. This would enable poorer classes to voluntarily serve for money (and maybe a shot at some land of their own, at least until Roman expansion started to falter), as the meme describes, which places it somewhere in the Imperial era. As memes go, this one is fairly accurate.