The ‘Face of Roman Skirmishing’

Abstract

One of the more fruitful trends in Roman military history has been interest in the ‘face of battle’. But as of yet, none of the modern scholarship in this field has satisfactorily evaluated the evidence for how Roman soldiers engaged in combat outside of the pitched battle. This paper seeks to add to the small corpus of Roman ‘face of battle’ studies with an assessment of the nature of skirmishing and combat outside the realm of the line infantry clash. Following John Keegan’s ‘face of battle’ approach, I will seek to show that Roman techniques and training were specifically designed to support Roman values of courage and discipline while skirmishers learned to cope with the experience of stress and fear during combat.

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