The Age of Kings: Roman, Etruscan and Latin Officers (ROM0265)

The Age of Kings: Roman, Etruscan and Latin officers of the sixth century BC

Before the legion there was the class. In the sixth century BC the army of Rome was not yet Roman in the sense later centuries would recognise: it was a hoplite force organised by property rating, equipped in the Greek manner as filtered through Etruria, and led by men whose armour said more about their census than their nationality. Rome, Veii and the Latin towns fought one another with the same equipment.

Your wealth decided where you stood

The tradition credits Servius Tullius with dividing the citizen body into classes by property, and whatever the truth of the attribution, the principle is visible in the equipment. The richest men brought the full panoply — helmet, breastplate, greaves, round shield, spear — and stood in the front rank because they could afford to survive there. Below them the equipment thinned out, rank by rank, until it stopped at a sling and no armour at all. Nobody was issued anything: the army was a list of what each man already owned.

Greek equipment, Etruscan accent

The panoply is Greek in origin, but it did not arrive in Rome directly from Greece. It came through Etruria, which had been trading with the Greek world for a century and adapting what it bought: crested helmets of Negau and Etrusco-Corinthian type, embossed breastplates, the large round shield carried on the forearm. Rome was, in this period, a city on the edge of the Etruscan world and dressed accordingly.

Three figures who are hard to tell apart

That is the point of the plate. A Roman officer of the second class, an Etrusco-Tarquinian officer and a Latin centurion differ in detail — crest, shield device, the cut of a corselet — and not in kind. There were no national armies in central Italy at this date; there were cities with similar aristocracies fighting over the same ground with the same kit. The wars between Rome and Veii were wars between two versions of the same culture.

Where the evidence comes from

There are no manuals for this period and almost no narrative that can be trusted in detail. What there is instead is material: grave goods with armour still in them, bronze votive figurines of warriors dedicated at sanctuaries, and painted tombs — above all in Etruria — that show men equipped and in movement. Giuseppe Rava reconstructs helmets, body armour, shields and weapons from that evidence, which is the only kind available.