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Centurions: Discipline, Violence, and Authority in the Roman Army
My paper explores the function of legionary centurions as violent, coercive
disciplinarians in the Roman legions of the late Republic and early-middle Empire. As the
Roman legions’ only career officers, centurions had many important functions. Foremost among
them was preserving discipline, and it was this duty that especially defined them. Their authority
to inflict corporal punishment on both soldier and civilian earned them a reputation for brutality
(saevitia), and many literary accounts vividly highlight this characteristic. In commemorative
monuments, moreover, the most prominent symbol attached to centurions is their whip (vitis),
with which they flogged transgressors. I argue that an analysis of the representations of
centurions’ disciplinary role are crucial to understanding more broadly how ideologies of
military discipline and authority were generated and preserved in the Roman legions.
Punishments for transgressions and disobedience were particularly violent in the Roman
Army, yet often viewed as necessary to its reputation as an efficient machine of war. In
attempting to offer broader explanations for what motivated Romans soldiers to obey or disobey,
however, scholars more recently have attempted to identify other aspects of disciplina and their
origins, including traditional Roman attitudes towards self-discipline, or later ideological
schemes devised to legitimate a commander or emperor’s authority. Indeed, Phang has argued
that every punishment requires a form of legitimation, and cannot rely alone on “pure
domination (the imposition of authority by force), which is inefficient” (2008, p. 111). Harris
goes further: “The army that needs very brutal discipline (and practices such as decimation) is
precisely the army that cannot rely on the courage of its ordinary soldiers” (2006, p. 302). These
observations, however, are largely derived from a categorical division in military theory between
two kinds of military authority: domination or “formal discipline”, which motivates soldiers
through direct, coercive, and often physical means, and manipulation or “self-discipline,” which
motivates through indirect practices that promote pride, cohesion, and obedience.
While acknowledging the importance of understanding cultural origins of Roman military
discipline, I argue that greater attention must be given to identifying the institutional instruments
in the Roman legions that guaranteed it. The centurion was one such instrument. By examining
literary and physical representations of centurions in light of current military and sociological
theories concerning symbols of authority, my paper demonstrates that the centurions’ punitive
power contained not only negative or “repressive”, but also positive or “reproductive” aspects, in
which Roman ideologies of leadership, religion, and imperial power were expressed and
reproduced. The saevitia of centurions was not merely a tool of intimidation, therefore, but an
important manifestation of both their own authority and that of the Empire.
This argues for two points. First, that the conceptual divide between authority based on
domination and manipulation is conceptually misleading when examining the Roman army and
the centurionate in particular. Second, that centurions were an important articulation of Roman
concepts of violence and authority, and as such, they represent an ideal case study for broader
studies of Roman military culture.
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