It’s often mislabeled. Sometimes the contents can make us ill, especially if we drink too much.

Status is easy to sell. But despite how often people buy the promise, it rarely delivers.

Hey folks! Another gap week because, as mentioned last week, I am at the annual meeting for the Society for Military History happening in Arlington. That said, we actually did have a major post this week, my 7,500 word primal cry concerning the current war in Iran. I know that won’t be for everyone – some of you read this to get away from current events – which is why I dropped it ‘off schedule’ midweek rather than having it replace this post.

That said, as I often do with weeks where I am at a conference, let me share the abstract of the paper I am delivering, “Unlearning the Marian Reforms:”

The transformation of the Roman army from the conscription-based citizen militia organized by maniples of the middle republic to the long-service professional army organized by cohorts in the early imperial period remains a topic of intense interest for specialists and non-specialists alike.  In recent years, however, the specialist understanding of this transformation has increasingly diverged from a non-specialist generalist vision which remains wedded to the notion of the ‘Marian Reforms.’  The idea of a set of reforms, occurring in the late second or early first century BC, which can be tied particularly or generally to the career of Gaius Marius (cos. 107, 104-100, 86) remains common in popular history and even academic textbooks and so permeates the non-specialist understanding of the Roman army’s transformation.  However, as this paper demonstrates, functionally every part of this narrative has come under attack and nearly all parts of it must now be discarded: there were no ‘Marian Reforms,’ ‘so-called’ or otherwise.

Instead, what has emerged from the scholarship is a prolonged process of change beginning far earlier in the second century and not entirely complete until at least the reign of Tiberius (r. 14-37 AD), in which Gaius Marius’ career forms only a single episode and not necessarily a particularly important one.  This new understanding of change in the Roman army now dominates the specialist scholarship but has not filtered through to general discussions of either Roman or military history.  This paper addresses this gap in understanding, outlining the key elements of the ‘Marian Reforms’ have been undermined and demonstrating that the notion of the ‘Marian Reforms’ as an event in the history of the Roman army is to be abandoned in generalist and textbook treatments, at it has already been in specialist ones.

Now normally this is a case where I have to hem and haw about how conference presentation papers aren’t really ready for publication even on a blog, but this conference paper is in fact a more-or-less direct translation of a blog post we have already had, “The Marian Reforms Weren’t a Thing.” Indeed, whereas my speaking time here (around 20 minutes) limits me to just around 2,800 words, the original post is about three times longer, with significantly more detail than I can fit into a conference paper. So you can in essence, read a longer, even more decompressed form of this argument! So feel free to go and read that if you missed it and to read my Iran War take if you want and didn’t catch it midweek and we’ll be back next week with something different (maybe Carthage themed?).