UC Santa Barbara

Attempts to understand Tacitus’ treatment of Roman soldiers have tended to focus on his aristocratic bias towards the lower-class citizen soldiers. These studies used evidence from throughout Tacitus’ corpus which show the historian describing the unruly, ruthless, and often violent actions of soldiers. As an aristocrat, Tacitus was describing the actions of a group of people whom he apparently despised. These studies on Tacitus’ treatment of soldiers, therefore, neglected the potential for discussing the military values of common soldiers. The assumption that Tacitus was a biased aristocrat who looked down on the figure of the soldier fails to consider the scenes throughout the historian’s corpus that speak toward the military values of soldiers. Military values can tell us a great deal about the soldiers who embody them. They also, as is the case with Tacitus, inform us about the relationship between soldiers, their values, and the military commanders who lead them. Military values of common soldiers were part of a larger system of military, and therefore political, infrastructure that had lasting impacts on Roman life under the Principate, and this dissertation attempts to provide a nuanced understanding of how Tacitus wrote about those military values and why it was important for him to do so. This dissertation also approaches the issue from the material evidence left behind during the Principate. The funerary epitaphs and imperial monuments from the 1st-2nd centuries AD provide an alternative perspective on the importance of the military values of common soldiers both for the soldiers themselves and the aristocracy who lead them. The Tacitean evidence combined with the material evidence considered in this dissertation point readers of Tacitus in a different direction than the predominant trend in scholarship on Tacitus’ treatment of common soldiers. Tacitus crafted his narratives about common soldiers to include their military values, because he recognized the importance of understanding these military values for whoever was leading the soldiers. Under the Principate, this was ultimately the princeps himself, but included the aristocratic generals serving the princeps in the provinces. The military values of legionary soldiers, then, play a role in how Tacitus writes the history of military leadership, both its successes and its failures.